Nonprofits for Dummies on a janitor's lunch break

"One day they had a team, a schedule, a reason to show up," Ian Waite says. "Then they didn't." He grew up watching people he cared about lose themselves when high school ended, and not slowly. He felt he had to do something about it, he says, so he started Bigger Than Sports.

He did not know what he was doing. "I read Nonprofits for Dummies on my lunch break and worked as a janitor over the summer just to save enough money to give everything to this when school started back up."

“Serve one another humbly in love.”

Ian Waite

One year in, Bigger Than Sports was nationally recognized with The Billie Jean King Youth Leadership Award at the ESPY's. He is grateful for every bit of it. National recognition, though, "doesn't pay for mentors." Funding, he says, is one of the hardest parts of being a young person building something real. "There's no budget history to point to, no years of financials to show. You just have to keep proving it over and over again."

The line he offers is Galatians 5:13.

He studies at Lynn University's Watson Institute School of Social Entrepreneurship and is going into his senior year. "My goal is to walk across that stage and go straight into this full time, no corporate detour, no survival job, no gap year, just this," he says.

"It gets lonely doing this at my age," he says. The program keeps running for students whose lives, he says, he has watched change in front of him. "I've seen what this does for people and that's what I'm committed to protecting."