08/21/2026
From Shawn: “Next up on Origin Trip #56 to Tanzania: meeting with the students of the Empowered Girls & Enlightened Boys after-school programs we sponsor, along with our farmer partners in the village of Mababu. Currently, these programs boast 1,200 club members across 3 area schools. But in total, more than 11,000 students have graduated from these programs to date!
If you’ve followed us for long, or read the book my daughter, Lawren, & I wrote, Meaningful Work, then you know how important the work of Visioning is to our company. A Vision is a plan for the future, a path forward for an individual, or even an organization, like ours. And I credit Ari Weinzweig (co-founder of Zingerman's Deli) for his mentorship and friendship in helping us kick this off here in Tanzania over a decade ago. He is a noted author and expert on the topic of Visioning and we’re grateful for his guidance.
One of the challenging things for many people, especially those in under-resourced circumstances, is visualizing oneself at some point in the future while writing the narrative story of that moment as if it's happening in the present tense. This is a really difficult task (try for yourself & see, it takes some serious concentration)! This time, I met with a small group of the top ten students in the clubs and we focused on Visioning. Spur of the moment, I decided to try something different. Suffice it to say, it exceeded my hopes. We started with Agizo. He is sixteen and his vision, which he has worked on over the last couple of years, is to be an orthopedic surgeon! He is a straight-A student and his teachers say that he is brilliant. He's quiet and reserved but he agreed to try this experiment. I asked him to put his chair in the center of our circle. He said that he has been working on his vision for ten years into the future because that’s when he thinks he will complete his medical school education. I asked him to close his eyes and pick the place and time ten years into the future and he said that it was August 2036 and he vividly described working at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, operating on patients. I’ll save the details for another time, but impactful doesn’t even begin to cover it!
Afterwards, another student raised her hand and asked if we work on visioning with students in the United States and what that experience was like. While this is something we do as part of Chocolate University, we are not able to do this at the scale we would like. Her questions demonstrated that this is so powerful that students here in Tanzania are now challenging us to bring greater focus to this tool in the U.S. It left me feeling inspired to do more in our community with US students.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering: what does all of this have to do with chocolate? Everything! And nothing. These students aren’t growing our cocoa beans, but they are mentored by our farmer partners and this community’s practice of caring for one another is something we try to live out in our company, and we hope you can taste even just a little bit of that in our bars.”
Interested in learning more about the Empowered Girls & Enlightened Boys in Tanzania? → chocolateuniversity.org/kyela-tanzania-programs/
