Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here from Philly Tech Entrepreneurs, talking with another one of our community members today. Today’s guest is Lily Chekhov. Lily is the founder of Tools for Schools, a non-profit she started in 2013 that has been helping raise money for backpacks and school supplies for underprivileged children. Over the past 11 years, she has raised almost $200k and packed over 15,000 backpacks. Lily is also a graduate of the University of Delaware with a degree in entrepreneurship and, after graduating, moved to Sydney, Australia for a year to live and work remotely on a US-based tech startup. These days, she is continuing to work on Tools for Schools Stateside, and we welcome her today. Lily, how are you doing?
Lily: I’m good, thank you so much for having me. Very happy to be here.
Dave: Thanks so much for being here. I know that we’ve already been acquainted talking about things like digital nomading, and I’ve been trying to kind of push you in that direction, but today we’re going to be steering the conversation differently to talk about Tools for Schools. You’re a young lady, so it’s really impressive to think that you’ve started your own non-profit in 2013 when you must have been pretty young. You’re already young, so even younger, 11 years, like 10 or 11 years younger, actually. So, tell me a little bit about how this idea came from and how it evolved into becoming the organization it is today.
Lily: Yeah, definitely. So, I started Tools for School when I was 12 years old. I was about to have a bat mitzvah, and part of that is doing some sort of social action project. My appointment was in September, so I was school supply shopping with my mom. I’m one of four siblings, so, as you can imagine, getting school supplies for four kids was tremendously expensive, and that was kind of where I started to ask my mom questions about how other families afford this, which is where the idea for Tools for School was born. That year, I raised about a thousand dollars, and we packed 100 backpacks. It was initially intended to just be that year, and after delivering those backpacks to local organizations, they were like, “Where can we find you guys next year?” which we were not at all expecting, and that kind of just fueled my fire to work on the organization and continue to allow it to grow. Then, later on, 2015 was when I started a team forward and started gathering like local high school students to help me work on and grow the organization. We absolutely worked our way to where we are today. Around 2015, we started doing corporate sponsorships, which has really propelled our growth significantly more than just a typical donation.
Dave: That’s so cool. I’m half Jewish, but I was deprived of a Bar Mitzvah, and now I’m thinking, man, I could have been running a non-profit myself if my parents had just sent me to Hebrew school, but it wasn’t meant to be. In the early days, you said the first time around you kind of raised a thousand dollars. We know at this point it’s gone up into the six-figure mark. What is it like raising money? I guess not many people have the non-profit experience that is so specific. I imagine you weren’t just knocking on doors in the neighborhood kind of saying, “What does everybody have available?” How does it work, who do you reach out to, and what’s the process like?
Lily: It’s funny thinking about where we started to where we are now. When we started the organization, every summer, we would walk up and down the beach, and we would sell soft pretzels. We would hand them out to people and be like, “You could have a free soft pretzel if you give us a donation of a dollar or more.” Then, as we grew, we realized that wasn’t going to be enough, but in terms of the corporate sponsorships, we definitely used age to our advantage. I think that organizations and business owners want to help young people who are striving to be entrepreneurial, especially we do operate under the slogan “kids helping kids,” so we are still an organization that’s largely supported by high school students. So being that that’s the persona that we have, we are more easily able to get in with like local community members. We pitch Tools for School to them, answer any questions that they have, and explain the benefits of what their sponsorship will look like. One thing that a lot of organizations love doing is we offer the option to adopt a school or organization near here or in Philly. So what that means is that they can donate, let’s say for example, that a school needs 300 backpacks for their 300 students. If they donate the three thousand dollars, they’ve adopted that school and can make sure that those 300 backpacks will go to the school of their choice.
Dave: That’s great. It really resonates with, you know, you mentioned kids helping kids, and a lot of people see maybe being younger or being on a budget or these things just not as a disadvantage but actually kind of saying, “What actually is sort of unique about us, and how can we use that as an advantage to maybe spread our message?” I imagine that you’ve been doing this for 11 years. During that time, you’ve also graduated high school, you’ve gone to college, you’ve gotten a degree, you’ve gone to Australia. A lot of other things kind of going on in life. You mentioned working with local high schoolers to help the organization. I imagine some of those individuals also kind of went in different directions just as they sort of grew up. So, how have you managed to maintain all this at the same time as the work that you’ve been doing elsewhere? And are you doing it primarily all yourself these days, or is there a little bit of a team in place to help on the execution side?
Lily: Definitely a big team in place. I certainly could not be doing this all alone. Actually, when I went off to college in 2018, I passed the majority of the organization down to my younger sister, who’s now in college herself, so we are back to being more of a balancing act. But when I first started college, she was largely running the organization with another Cherry Hill student who’s the president of the organization. So, I still have a helping hand. I assist them as needed, but currently, my sister Montana and the president Max do a very large chunk of the work because, obviously, it is hard to manage along with a lot of jobs.
Dave: Yeah, exactly. I totally understand it. We’re obviously doing some things over at Philly Tech Entrepreneurs, this new community we’re trying to sort of grow, but it’s not my primary focus. I mean, it’d be great if I could be primarily focused on everything I was doing, but you kind of have to divide and conquer. It’s interesting, you have a degree in entrepreneurship, so in addition to the, we’ll call it, the street learning of really kind of having the organization and growing it, you have the academic side as well. Would you be able to highlight some of the differences in terms of the learnings, the experience of running your own non-profit and starting it and growing it, but it being something without the formal structure of academia and classes versus what you learned at the University of Delaware, and how they complemented each other, things like that?
Lily: Yeah. I think they’ve complemented each other in terms of one thing that my degree really, or my professors I should say, really honed in on was building a network and maintaining that network, you know, growing the relationships that you build. Always asking questions and kind of leaning into conversations with a natural curiosity. So, the networking skills that I learned in college have really helped in terms of building relationships, whether that’s with the company that provides us our backpacks or a corporate sponsor or just a general donor. So, I would say that’s kind of how they complement each other. And then where they differ is just the idea of sitting in a classroom versus actually being out in the world and learning and failing and trying new things. So in my education, within the entrepreneurship program, they always promoted learning and trying and failing, but just it was naturally and more of an academic setting. So I guess Tools for School has ultimately given me the opportunity to practice those learnings in real life.
Dave: Yeah, it’s awesome to have the business, the project to be able to apply the learnings to at the same time. Very few people have that. We tend to kind of go linearly, you know, you get the education and maybe do the business and stuff like that, but there’s always something lost in that transition. So, I think that’s really cool. What are some of the things you’re planning for Tools for Schools, you know, for the upcoming next couple of years of work?
Lily: As a non-profit, I will say the number one goal is always fundraising, so we are always looking to add on new corporate sponsors and then also maintain and grow our relationships with our current sponsors. Our biggest event of the year actually just happened in August, but it’s a recurring event every August, and we are hoping to definitely create more smaller fundraising events throughout the year, especially this year. So I will definitely keep you updated on that, but for now, our website is toolsforschool.org, so anyone can find us there and always happy to answer questions. Love chatting to new people, whether it’s Tools for School related or not.
Dave: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I definitely hope that we can give you some additional exposure. We also are doing quite a number of events as well. Who knows, maybe we could work together on something down the line. The question I forgot to ask, and then we’ll give you a break here, you know, the backpacks. I mean, you mentioned they go to underprivileged children. Are they strictly like in the Philly area, is this across the US, sort of who are the recipients of the backpacks?
Lily: Yeah, so it’s all South Jersey and Philadelphia based right now. Would love to expand as we grow, but the need here is absolutely, it’s crazy, and I mean in a way that we just want to support as many people here as we possibly can. So yeah, right now, we are focused on South Jersey, so Camden, Cherry Hill, even other surrounding areas, and then the Philadelphia area as well.
Dave: Great. Yeah, love that. I mean, there are people that need help everywhere, and I would never criticize someone for their choice of where they went to help people, but I do find that sometimes people kind of neglect looking in their own backyard, and they’re kind of looking, oh, like in this other place. But you know, if there are people right near you that you have this also community connection with, you know, why not start with them? Lily, you mentioned people want to get in touch with you. They can go to, I believe, toolsforschools.org, is that right?
Lily: Yeah, toolsforschool.org, singular.
Dave: Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much for being in our episode today, and we look forward to hearing more about what you do with the nonprofit in the future.
Lily: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.