Our Founding Story

I was invited as the keynote speaker for a weeklong church conference or camp meeting in Liberia, West Africa in December 2022. My host built an open-air arena on a red dirt soccer field, with about three hundred or more people sitting on plastic chairs or wooden classroom chairs, and some standing every night.

We transformed the Wednesday night service into a prayer and anointing service after the sermon. The attendees kept coming for prayers, and the crowd kept growing. They were primarily children, teens, adolescents, and youths. I got in the prayer queue because the time was approaching ten o’clock, and we had been praying for almost two hours. Most of the requests from these children, teens, and adolescents centered around tuition assistance and the inability of their parents to support their educational aspirations.

That night, as I stood under the sweltering humidity of the Liberian sky, a dream was born. Why don’t I create a non-profit organization that would give free tuition assistance to out-of-school children and youth from developing nations. Thus, Clothespins was established in 2023.

Our first fundraiser campaign in 2024 discouraged me as the funds trickled in. Our team leader in Liberia, Trokon Wayne, called me for an update. I told him I was discouraged because of the amount raised. I was hoping for $100,000, But we raised $3,391. He said “Just get started, even if it is one person.” We were able to sponsor six students. We allocated six hundred dollars per student, which covered all fees, books, and uniforms.

It is estimated that “244 million children and youth between the ages of 6 and 18 worldwide were out of school in 2021. Clothespins, Inc. wants to solve that problem by providing tuition assistance to students in developing nations, empowering them with educational skills, mentorship, and entrepreneurial acumen to uplift their communities and build a better future for themselves and their countries.