Meet Shawn Wall | Executive Director & Philanthropist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Shawn Wall and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Shawn, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Being from Colorado, I took advantage of an exhilarating sport called rock climbing while growing up, which inherently has a lot of risks due to the nature of the sport. Risks are something that you learn to assess, accept and progress with. You will not become a better climber unless you’re willing to accept and take risks. I feel the same applies in most areas of life. I would not be where I am now in life, both personally and professionally, if I hadn’t taken some significant risks.

The first risk was to study abroad in New Zealand.
Growing up in Denver, I thought that I always wanted to live here. It’s my city. It’s home, and it’s gorgeous with our mountain views. I never imagined that I would live anywhere else. This changed for the first time when I went to New Zealand for a semester of school in 2014. It was my first time traveling alone and seeing the world. All in all, it was a life-changing experience and showed me what benefits international education can offer.

The second risk was taking a nontraditional career route.
After graduation from Colorado State in 2015, I did not enter the workforce and decided to instead get some real-world experience before heading to “the real world”. This partially came as an effect from studying abroad as I had caught a bit of the travel bug and wanted to get out there again. I took an English Teaching Certificate course and headed to Asia with plans of backpacking around, picking a place to teach English for one year maximum, and then returning home and getting my career started. Of course, that didn’t happen.

The third risk was following the great Robin Williams’ advice.
I had to go see about a girl. Instead of staying in Asia to teach I decided to follow my heart and headed off to Europe to spend some more time with a girl I met while traveling. This was by far one of the biggest and best risks I have ever taken. Six years later we are now married and have traveled to many countries and lived in many places while exploring the world together.

The final major risk was the decision to create a Denver-based nonprofit organization while living abroad.
I had been abroad for a long time, I still am abroad, and I miss home. I want to be there to help create positive change, yet it is hard to do so from afar. When I was living in Australia, I finally put together all the pieces to the puzzle that I had been working on these past eight years since first going abroad and figured out how best to utilize my passions for education, travel, youth, and giving back to my local community. During the pandemic working remotely became normalized and it was easier for me to begin a remote-based nonprofit in the Denver area from halfway across the world. I had to deal with a few weird time differences but overall, everything has worked smoothly. Before this, I had no prior nonprofit knowledge other than growing up with parents who have worked their entire lives in the industry. I was familiar with how things worked, already had a passion for working with youth, and knew I wanted to pass on the experience of studying abroad and travel to students back home that normally wouldn’t get a chance to experience this, but I didn’t know much about the business side of things besides interning in the business school development office during university. Now only one and a half years later I have educated myself on nonprofit business and management, put together a trusted board made up of Denver locals who are my connection to home and link to the community, ran multiple successful fundraisers thanks to community support and we are able to launch three of our educational programs at the end of March.

As you can see, I am not one to shy away from risks. These four listed above have helped develop me into the man I am today with their impact on both my life and career. I believe taking risks is necessary in order to change your life, improve your business and carve a better future.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We are Blessed to Be a Blessing (B2baB). Our focus is on creating equal access to international education and cross-cultural experiences for low-income and underrepresented students. We are beginning our mission right here at home in Denver but would love to expand across the state and the US in the future. As mentioned, taking the risk to study abroad was what set me off into the life I now have. It is my goal to gift this life-changing opportunity to the younger generations of my community.

International education has numerous benefits for students academically, professionally, and personally. In a world with an economy as globally interconnected as ours, a knowledge of international peoples, their cultures, and an overall global outlook is essential to being competitive in the workforce and creating a better future for yourself, your community, and the world. Sadly, there is an opportunity gap present in our secondary education system and this educational experience is not easily accessible to all students. We have found a few major contributing factors to this issue; systematic oppression, generational wealth gaps, high program costs, a lack of time, and a lack of overall general knowledge of study abroad, international travel, and their benefits. To counteract these factors, we plan to award study abroad scholarships in the near future and currently are beginning to introduce our various educational courses for local students.

This Spring we are launching our educational programs. Two are introductory online programs: Travel Abroad 101 and Study Abroad 101. These introduction courses are devoted to generally educating high school students about their respective topics. With this knowledge, students can enter college with a preset idea of already studying abroad and work with an advisor to plan the best time to fit it into their college career. In addition to educating about study abroad, these courses also provide travel knowledge that may not be as accessible to our students. Most travel knowledge is learned from experience and many low-income students do not have travel experience with their families. We find quite often that students have never been out of the country and many times not even out of the state. It is essential for them to learn this knowledge somewhere if they wish to capitalize on the benefits presented by internationalizing their education. Although students may not be fully ready to go abroad after taking the introductory courses, they will have a good general knowledge and feel more confident in taking steps to go abroad whether for academics or pleasure.

In order to fully prepare and allow students the opportunity to go abroad, we launched our flagship Global Access Passport Program (GAPP) this past week. Through this program, students learn more in-depth about both traveling internationally and studying abroad. There is an additional focus on travel budgeting during the planning process and while abroad, review and help with the passport application process, and hands-on experience planning for an international journey or a study abroad. After this program students feel more confident planning and taking an international trip and have the ability to do so thanks to a complimentary passport provided with program completion. With our initial launch, we partnered with another local organization, Colorado Uplift, and their Advanced Leadership Program. We were able to provide knowledge and passports to a group of local students and seven of them will go on to use their new passports almost immediately as they will soon travel to Tijuana, Mexico to build houses and support a community in need through Uplift’s annual mission trip.

Getting to this point has not been easy with having a board and constituents in Colorado and an Executive Director across the globe. Working across time differences can be complicated and in this line of work, a physical presence in the area is preferred. Raising funds can be difficult for a startup nonprofit since is nearly impossible to acquire grant funding before implementing programs. Thankfully, due to B2baB’s committed board and various connections within the Denver community, we have been able to work around these difficulties and challenges. With help from supporters from our community, across the US and the globe, we have been blessed with enough resources to launch our programs and even have some additional funding for the creation of our scholarship fund. In addition to help form our community and hard work from our board, creating essential partnerships has been very beneficial to our success. With most board members coming from DPS we are proud to be working alongside them in order to bring this knowledge and opportunity to its student. The GAPP program would not have been possible without our partnership with Colorado Uplift. At B2baB, we believe it is essential for organizations with similar constituents and missions to work together. We will continue to pursue critical partnerships and collectively create the best opportunities, programs, and resources possible.

By providing the knowledge and means to study abroad and travel to students we negate some of the major prohibiting factors from studying abroad for most low-income and underrepresented students, but the high costs still remain. Studying abroad, like most forms of U.S secondary education is quite expensive, although depending on where you go you can find yourself paying less than for a semester living at home. In order to pay for this experience, one needs money. Thankfully there are loads of scholarship opportunities out there for students to study abroad and once we have our programs established our next major goal is getting the scholarship fund created in order to help students financially as well. In order to do so, we will need to increase community awareness and bring in more people and businesses to help support our mission.

If you would like to learn more about B2baB, our programs, and supporting our mission feel free to check out our website https://www.blessedscholars.org or reach out through social media or email. We are working to increase our community knowledge and support and would love to hear from you.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
As I haven’t been home for a long time some of my favorite spots have changed or no longer exist, although when I am home I make sure to get my favorite burrito from Bocaza Mexican Grill and stop by Odell Brewery in RiNo for my favorite Colorado beers. If I have a friend visiting, I will definitely show them these places as well as tour them around the city and Parkhill (my home neighborhood). I believe though that if you are visiting Colorado your time is much better spent outdoors. I would suggest visiting state and national parks, rock climbing with me, going camping, going rafting, hiking a fourteener, sandboarding down the sand dunes, and oh so much more. The possibilities are endless in our beautiful Rocky Mountain state.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I would like to give a big shoutout to my wife who has supported me fully while I’ve been working on this huge undertaking, my family who have supported me both professionally and personally, and last but certainly not least the Board of Directors at Blessed to Be a Blessing. Without my team onsite in Denver we would not have been able to have achieved what we have in this short time. Thank you all for being you and supporting me in turning a dream into reality!

Website: https://www.blessedscholars.org

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