For U.S. Army Major Todd Schmidt, it all comes back to a quote attributed to Joan of Arc: “All battles are first won or lost in the mind.” Preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in 2004, then-Captain Schmidt knew he would encounter poverty and illiteracy on a scale unknown to most Americans, and he figured he would want to do something to help for humanitarian reasons. When he got there, he found that helping made strategic sense as well.
Schmidt is the founder of
Operation Dreamseed, a nonprofit organization that started as an effort to distribute school supplies to kids in Afghanistan. Schmidt said he talked to his mother, an Indiana schoolteacher, before his deployment about organizing such an effort. Once deployed, he saw that the need was clear.
“No chalkboards, no desks, no chalk, no tablets of paper, nothing,” he says, recalling the first schoolhouse he saw in Afghanistan. “They’re literally sitting in rows on the floor, no glass panes in the windows, drafty schoolhouse that’s been gutted. We knew there was a real need here, and if we started providing basic school supplies, we’d be making an impact.”
Schmidt says he saw a way to meet that need by tapping into the generosity of the thousands of Americans who send care packages to the troops. “We were receiving these care packages,” he says, “and everybody that sent us something, we’d send them a note back saying, we truly appreciate your patriotic support for us and what we’re doing over here. You don’t know us, but you took your time and your energy to contribute this great gift. But if you really, truly are committed to helping us, we’d appreciate if you send school supplies.”
Schmidt says that American soldiers “really do have everything we need over there . . . we have Burger King, we have Pizza Hut, we have Subway, Green Beans coffee . . . they do everything they can to make sure that soldiers have a little taste of home. Even soldiers that are in some of the more remote forward operating bases . . . we still have much more than the locals have.”
Schmidt says that shortly after he started asking for school supplies in his thank-you notes, they started arriving in large quantities. “Before we knew it, we had filled a metal shipping container with school supplies,” he says. “We’d take them out on missions and distribute them to the schools.”
Operation Dreamseed grew from there, and at a fundraiser in New York City last month, Schmidt announced that the nonprofit is now sending school supplies to Iraq, Kosovo, Nicaragua, and Colombia, and has broadened its work in Afghanistan to include bigger projects.
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