Some birthdays stay with you.
My sixty-second in 2022 was celebrated in Beirut, with a quiet dinner alone after a deeply moving afternoon spent with a Syrian refugee family. Exactly one year later, in Damascus, a city I’d longed to visit and still under the control of Assad, my guide Fadi surprised me with a birthday party. It was an unexpected celebration in a city I’d only known through headlines, and not good ones. The past two Aprils have been quieter, at home in Sausalito, with time to reflect rather than move.
But wherever I’ve been, April has come to carry a dual meaning: another year of life—and a reminder that it’s National Volunteer Month in the United States and in many other countries around the world.
One marks time. The other asks what we’re doing with it.
For much of my early life, I thought I had a clear answer. I followed a well-defined path—university, business school, a career in finance on Wall Street and years spent working around the world. It was structured, successful, and (in many ways) as a first-generation immigrant, expected.
The Caravan to Class foundation
But it’s these later years that have been the most meaningful in my life—shaped not by career milestones, but by purpose. By the work of my foundation, Caravan to Class, empowering young women across West Africa. My travels to visit every country in the world after traumatic loss. The capstone to that journey is my book, Belonging to the World, a healing journey that changed not just how I see the world but how I engage with it.
Caravan to Class began, as many meaningful things do, by chance—a fiftieth birthday trip to Timbuktu in 2010. What started as a personal adventure evolved into building and supporting schools in remote villages. But the defining turning point came in 2018, after the loss of my wife, Jackie. In her honour, we launched the Bourse Jackie program, providing scholarships, leadership training and English-language education to young women across West Africa.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this work was doing more than creating opportunity for others—it was giving direction to my own life.
Visiting every country in the world
After Jackie’s passing, I set out to visit every country in the world. At first, the journey may have been an escape. But over time, it became something else entirely. The people I met—often with far less materially, yet with extraordinary resilience and generosity—reshaped my understanding of what it means to live well.
And slowly, a realization took hold: seeing the world isn’t the same as engaging with it. I needed to do more than visit these countries. I needed to engage. To travel with purpose.
That shift—from observer to participant—is what I now think of as a global form of volunteering.
In Ghana, I watched the young women we send from all over French-speaking West Africa, as part of our Bourse Jackie program, gain confidence as they learned English—transforming not just their skill sets but their sense of possibility. And we’ve helped create a network of future female leaders who are already reshaping their communities.
Elsewhere, the lessons were different, but no less profound. After travelling to Bangladesh, the Rohingya refugee crisis became real only when I stood inside the Kutupalong Refugee Camp near Cox Bazar to hear the stories not just of a prideful refugee community but one that is stateless as well.
In Lebanon, I shared a meal with a family who had lost more than I could comprehend, yet offered generosity without hesitation, making me lunch despite it being Ramadan. In Syria and Sudan, I witnessed resilience in its rawest form—people rebuilding, enduring and hoping against unimaginable odds. I came to understand that just listening and bearing witness was giving people who had been through so much the dignity they needed.
In those moments, I wasn’t “volunteering” in the traditional sense. But I was doing something just as essential: I was paying attention with sincerity. Allowing those experiences to change me—and then letting that change inform how I’d act.
Purpose is meant to be passed forward
Finally, I’ve come to see that purpose is not something we hold onto—it’s something we pass forward.
I was reminded of that through a young traveller named Cameron, whom I met during a trip to Yemen. At 24, he carried a quiet but unmistakable sense of responsibility for the world around him. Not long after we parted ways, I saw a message from him: He’d launched a small campaign to support a school he had visited in Makoko, Nigeria, raising funds for books, uniforms and backpacks.
When I later arrived in Makoko—by canoe, through narrow canals lined with homes on stilts—I saw the results of that decision. Children in freshly pressed uniforms. Classrooms with supplies that hadn’t been there before. Nothing about it was large-scale or institutional. It was something simpler and more powerful: one person deciding to act.
It stayed with me—not just what Cameron did, but how naturally he did it. No hesitation. No overthinking. Just a belief that he could help, and so he did.
In him, I saw something I’d come to much later in life. And it made me wonder whether the next generation understands something we often forget—that you don’t need to have everything figured out to begin. That service doesn’t wait for the perfect moment.
Because service doesn’t always begin with action. It begins with awareness. But it must lead somewhere.
Volunteering in our world with intention
National Volunteer Month is often framed around giving time—hours logged, projects completed. But my journey has taught me that volunteering is also a mindset. A way of moving through the world with intention. A decision to turn awareness into action, wherever we are.
For me, that action has taken shape through Caravan to Class—through education, opportunity and a long-term commitment to empowering young women. My book, Belonging to the World, is an extension of that same idea, with all proceeds supporting the foundation’s work.
But the underlying principle is universal. We don’t need to cross continents to live with purpose. We only need to ask a simple question: How can I be useful?
April offers a reminder to ask that question more consciously. And there is no better time to begin than now.
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image 1 geralt: all other images: Barry Hoffner
