Read the first blog post from PoP Fellow Hoolie Tejwani, as he joins our team on the ground in Laos

I’m in a rural village 9,000 miles from home, accessible only by muddy, unsealed roads. The electricity is sporadic and there is one phone for every hundred people. Yet, I feel connected.

In this village, I feel connected to the PoP movement—the 40,000 passionate voices that have enabled a $25 bank deposit to grow into over 160,000 instruction hours delivered to Lao children by the end of the this year.

I feel connected to our all-female in-country staff members, who are passionately committed to empowering their community and themselves in the process.

I feel connected to the village elders and teachers I am sitting with, who are extending their hands in dedicated partnership to better the lives of their children.

School is out for the summer, but the PoP Laos team is hard at work. We’re finalizing our build plans for four new schools, laying out our 2011 strategy, and constantly scouting for new villages to partner with.

We’re building out our staff, which started with one committed Lao volunteer, to evaluate our schools and deliver our supplemental programming. This growing team of women is learning new skills and gaining the confidence to become powerful ambassadors of change in their country.

We are here, surveying this village, as part of the effort to track and quantify our impact on-the-ground, so that we hold ourselves accountable to our stated mission. This is one of many ways PoP is incorporating leading business practices into our operations to ensure we grow into a world-class organization.

And like a business, we have our shareholders. They are each of you, the Global Generation, connected by the dividends of our investment – the profound social good that we are creating together.