Profile by taylor houston

Empowering a Generation

By: Taylor Houston

After stealing a U-Haul pack-

ing blanket, fashioning a backpack out of wood planks, and hitchhiking for three days-at age sixteen-Robert Freeman became homeless. After his parents split and moved to different parts of the country, he ran away from his mother’s house in Texas and returned to where he grew up in San Jose in order to finish his high school career. A kind teacher recognized that he was homeless and took him in while he finished his education, under the condition that Mr. Free-

that fund the creation of hundreds of schools in developing countries, and collecting toys for children, Mr. Freeman has more than paid back Ms. Montag’s favor by doing something great and selfless on a international scale. His vision for his organization is that he will empower teenagers to produce change and recognize what they can do with themselves that can truly change the world. In the six years that ODFL has been running, they have built forty-one projects man would someday repay by raising hundreds of thouher for her kindness once he sands of dollars, helping eight had the means and ability to countries, and donating half a do so. He is doing this now by ton of Legos. helping to inspire and shape

young people and show them orn into a military how to become better people. household, Robert Freeman’s parents divorced his junior

r. Freeman is repay- year of high school. His father ing that promise to Ms. Mon- refused to take him in after tag with his creation of his the split, so Mr. Freeman was organization, One Dollar for forced to go with his mothLife. He is changing the world er to Texas. Upon arriving in for the better using his “One Dollar For Life” philosophy— if everyone gives a little, just one dollar each, together we can do a lot. Through drives

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Texas, he decided to hitchhike back to San Jose because he didn’t want to interrupt his career at the high school he was enrolled in for the first two years and was already extremely well integrated into.

He ended up sleeping on his chemistry teacher’s couch for the remainder of his years there once she noticed he was “a smart kid, missing class and falling asleep in class and never bathed and always wearing the same clothes”.

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nce Mr. Freeman graduated from high school, he went to a number of colleges to minor in Economics and major in Computer Science over the span of ten years. “I went to De Anza..New York..Tokyo… St. Louis…Berkeley.

I got my masters degree at Stanford eventually when i was thirty-five” he said, counting the number on his

fingers. He had to join the military to pay his way through his college education, so he spent five or six years with the Marines and spent time building ships and traveling the world in these ships.

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rom his time with the Marines, Mr. Freeman developed a fascination with technology and the future that would eventually land him in the Silicon Valley began.

He began to understand that computer technology was the

future and became fascinated with computer science. Once he graduated from college with a major in computer science and a minor in economics, he started a job in the area and “eventually became the vice-president of International Marketing at PsyBased, one of the largest marketing companies in the world.” and stayed with that job for many years.

On a sabbatical from

his job years later, he remembered his promise to Ms. Montag, and decided to try substitute teaching in the area as a means of repaying her.

He “drew a circle of a ten mile radius around his house, and taught at every single school in the area”. During this job, he realized he enjoyed teaching more than he expected, and he quit his job at the computer company and decided to teach full-time at Los

Altos High School, because that was his favorite school out of the ten at which he taught. He believes there is “an energy” at LAHS that invited him, and he signed up to teach Economics there. A twist came his way, however, when the administration decided there weren’t enough Economics courses to employ Mr. Freeman full-time, and so they gave him several History courses to teach as well. However, he was thrown for quite a loop because he hadn’t taken a History course since freshman year of high school, but in typical Robert Freeman fashion, he not only excelled at teaching this subject while “go[ing] to the library each weekend to read up on what i was about to teach the following week”, he ended up writing his own One-Hour History Checkbooks, or, as the students fondly refer to them as, his Modern European History AP textbook.

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n a rainy afternoon six years ago, a few students were hiding out in Mr. Freeman’s room during lunch and discussing their view on

the dismal world. After a few minutes of their dreary talk, Mr. Freeman interrupted them and asked what they were going to do to make the world a better place. The kids retorted that there was nothing they, as teenagers, could possibly do to change the world. Mr. Freeman replied that “if each of you did a little bit, it could be big... if each of your generation

did just a little bit, it could be huge”, and “that was the moment ODFL was born”.

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r. Freeman, the kids in his room, and the few other adults Mr. Freeman thought would be helpful in the creation of this group came together and produced the idea of asking all of the high schoolers to give one dollar towards helping other children.There are a staggering 16 million high school students in the U.S, and Mr. Freeman says “We asked everybody at LAHS, in the

spring of 2007, to give one dollar, there are 1700 kids in the school, and we raised 1800 dollars, and we found out, kids will actually give if they have a cause. And so we decided, we’re going to build a school in Africa.

We’ll just figure out how to get it done, and so it worked!

Then we went to Gunn...and then Saint Francis, and then two more high schools in Bakersfield.

And from those five high schools, we raised 9000 dollars, and with that, we built a school in Kenya… and that was the beginning

of ODFL”.

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f course, Mr. Freeman has met some resistance to his building of this non-profit organization.

When asked about these, he emphatically commented with what sounded almost like a catchphrase for the foundation: “There was an obstacle about people who don’t believe in something big, in transformation. Theres 16 million high school students, if we can get everyone to donate just one dollar, we can build 1000

schools every year in a developing country. No new laws of physics have to be invented, no cures for cancer. Spread the word, pass the box-one dollar-we can build a thousand schools every year. It’s honestly a change the world idea”.

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he other main problem ODFL has encountered is opposition to sending money to other countries because of the poverty we have directly in our country. Mr. Freeman believes this response is one people use as an excuse to not help. He strikes back by saying that “the truth is, anybody in this country, even the poorest people in this country, lives like a king, compared to the places where we’re building.

If you have a lock on the front door of your house, you’re rich. If you have running water in your house where you can turn on a tap and out comes water you can drink, you’re rich...If you can put 3 numbers into your phone, 911, and then 5 minutes a policemen or a fireman will be there, you’re rich, because none of that exists in the places where we’re building”.

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hat does the future hold for ODFL? Mr. Freeman says that he wants to expand ODFL to all of the schools in the nation: elementary, mid-

dle, high school, and college.

He wants to have every young person understand that they “have the power to change the world”. This year they are going to colleges with their drives and already have several dozen schools lined up to participate.

“Everybody wants to help

somebody else, don’t they?

That’s how you become a bigger person. Have you ever known a bigger person who takes things for themselves? No, the people you know and you respect are those who are generous. And so, kids want to be bigger people, they want a better world. I want to be a bigger person.

I’m sixty years

old. I’ve built 41 projects in 8 different countries in six years. I still want to be a bigger person. Don’t you want to be a bigger person? Everybody does. And ODFL is a way to do that and make the world a better place.”