‘Aid for the World’ Founder Shares Keys to Helping Others
March 4, 2010 • By Caitlin Hawes,
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HARRISONBURG, Va. — Twenty-four years ago, Carl Keyes, who was to become the founder and director of Aid for the World, flew to Ghana with nothing but $13 in his wallet and a credit card that did not work.
“I wanted to go help someone poorer than me,” he said. He began to contact other people who wanted to help.
Next thing he knew, he had impacted more than 200 medical clinics, as well as training centers, dormitories, wells and numerous other projects. Today his organization has grown to include 31 countries and 11 states.
Aid for the World is a private, international, humanitarian aid organization that aims to help needs around the world through local and international collaboration. The organization operates mainly in Africa, with its main African base in Zambia. It also operates in the Americas, South East Asia and Ukraine.
“There’s no sacrifice here. I get paid every day,” Keyes said. “This is the most important, rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”
Keyes spoke at the Court Square Theater in downtown Harrisonburg on Wednesday about his aid efforts and encouraged his audience to reach into their communities. The JMU College of Business, Rockingham County Democratic Committee, Seven Generation and JMU College Democrats sponsored his visit.
“I want to inspire someone to excel and move towards their dream and get it,” he said. If any JMU student creates a dream, Keyes believes the JMU community would enforce it. He wants people to live with purpose and have reason to do things.
Recently, Keyes has turned his focus from the international community to more local ones in the United States: He believes that growth in America will have a positive effect on the rest of the world.
In 2005, after Katrina hit New Orleans, he met Mary Slade, a JMU College of Education professor who was leading a JMU student aid trip. She then led the first group of students to his program in Welch, W.Va., the eighth poorest county in the country.
According to Slade, Welch has incredible poverty, loss of jobs, low graduation rates, drug issues, health issues, and plumbing so basic that all sewage is simply flushed into the river.
“It’s an aggregate effort,” Slade said. Students created community gardens, did house repair, cleaned, and did any odd jobs that arose, such as repairing after mudslides or distributing $5,000 worth of turkeys for Thanksgiving. Some locals walked seven miles just to line up for a turkey, Slade said. In the future, she hopes to participate in Keyes’ future Nashville trip.
“I don’t have a plan of how I want to live one day, but I got a good idea,” said Layla Tannous, a senior communications major, who participated in the 2005 Welch trip.
Slade has led many trips to Welch since then, but this year a group will go with her in May instead of during spring break.
Why he started
About 20 years ago, Carl Keyes operated a successful construction company, which had built several tall buildings in Ocean City, N.J. He, his wife and two young children, lived comfortably with a good, solid income.
But they were not satisfied.
Keyes gave his equipment, trucks and other parts back to the Italian man who had first shown him how to work with cement. Then Keyes and his family went to New York City and drove around until they found “the worst New York city ghetto” that they could. In Brooklyn, they moved into the first floor of what turned out to be a crack house. Over the years, Keyes endured gang fights, drug deals, his house being put on fire, and being beaten with an iron pipe and left for dead.
But nine years later, he had 32 buildings, 52 buses and hundreds of staff all working toward community outreach.
“If you put three minds together, you could create anything,” Keyes said.
He said the secret to his organization’s success was through networking and getting people to work together. People should take what resources they have and do what they can with them, he said.
Keyes’ projects reach in all directions: a fishing cooperative, where Aid for the World provides the boats and equipment in exchange for 10 percent of the proceeds; the 9/11 rescue and recovery efforts after the tragedy; even the installation of a bathroom for a blind man who did not have one and who washed himself with his kitchen sink.
“We’ll never run out of people who need something,” he said.
In Africa, where there are countless other aid operations, Keyes’ organization installs wells, tests them for arsenic and installs systems for reverse osmosis and filtration to make the water safe. Keyes said many other organizations do not test for arsenic and local populations suffer from poisoning.
Another initiative takes coffee from Burundi to Greece, then by the kilo to Kiev, Ukraine, where a cooperative coffee factory makes money for farm equipment. This operation leads to the growth of surplus crops in Ukraine and the excess goes to the poor. In this way, Keyes said, the poorest country in Africa feeds the poorest people in the Ukraine. He showed that people could take what they had to satisfy a need. Recently, Keyes sent a million pairs of new shoes to Burundi for his close friend President Pierre Nkurunziza to distribute while campaigning for re-election. Keyes believes Nkurunziza genuinely cares about his country, unlike many of Africa’s corrupt leaders, he said.
Keyes emphasized three key concepts to his work: humility, common sense and never quitting till the job is done.
“We have always given credit to the local people we have gone to help,” he said, emphasizing humility. His organization does not put its name on its projects and he said he even prefers to go by Carl, rather than any distinguished title.
Regarding common sense, he said it involves simple solutions to global problems and deciding what did and did not work. For example, he could lower the temperature of one city 12 degrees by simple projects such as coloring the roofs white rather than black.
“Execution is critical in today’s society,” he said. “If a business succeeds, more people will work there.”
According to Keyes, a person does not need to look abroad for places to help; anyone could start in their own community. Keyes described how 70-year-old senior citizens were too old to travel, so instead they cooked food and took it to their neighbors. A close-knit community organization formed.
Keyes hopes to bring communities together and foster meaningful conversations and relationships, such as those he described Wednesday.
“It’s cool to have someone who’s been there and done that,” said Grady Hart, a freshman international affairs major and a member of JMU’s Amnesty International club. “This is something I’ve been interested in doing one day.”
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