Let’s Go: What the Torch-Bearer Award Means to Us

On Saturday, October 10, the Alex, Max, and Myles stood in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and received the Torch-Bearer Award from the Sri Chinmoy Oneness-Home Peace Run. We have been thinking about that moment ever since.

When we started the Yenko Foundation, none of us imagined this. Yenko means “Let’s go” in Twi, and the name was our way of saying we wanted to stop talking about helping and start doing it. The award feels like an acknowledgment that we did.

Where It Started

For Max, it began in Ghana. He first visited around sixth grade, and at the time it felt almost like a vacation. But he kept going back, and by his sophomore year he was spending one to three months there every year. He started noticing kids his own age selling things in markets, working in shops and helping their families get by instead of sitting in a classroom.

In Max’s family, education is everything. His great-aunt Ida made sure all twelve of her brothers and sisters made it to college. Seeing teenagers who couldn’t go to school because of what it costs, he decided he couldn’t just watch.

He asked family friends how he could help, and one of them, Mohammed, explained what everyday life costs in Accra: food, clothing, housing and then tuition on top of it. For many families, it simply wasn’t possible. That conversation led to a plan. Max raised about $17,000 from family, friends and his school, enough to put ten children through school.

Working Together

Yenko was never a one-person effort. Alex has been there from the beginning and runs our Instagram, which is how we share the children’s progress with the people who make it possible. Myles has been part of the foundation from the start too. Max would be the first to say he is not the one to run social media, and that is part of why this works. We each do what we are good at.

We are also grateful to our parents, to Mohammed, to the school community in Accra, and to every family member, friend and stranger who donated. The sponsorships came from all of them.

What the Award Means

The Peace Run created the Torch-Bearer Award to honor people who have worked selflessly to better the lives of others. Its past recipients include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Billie Jean King and Carl Lewis. We are three teenagers who started a foundation, so being named alongside them felt surreal.

The Peace Run says that most of the people it honors are ordinary people working to lift up their communities. That is the part that moved us most. It tells us that the work doesn’t have to be big to matter, and that you don’t have to wait until you are older to begin.

What Comes Next

We are only getting started. Right now we support children at one school, and we would like to reach more of them. We hope to work with orphanages and public schools, and to buy supplies so the schools themselves improve alongside the students. We want Yenko to grow with us and eventually be strong enough to stand on its own, so that it doesn’t fade when we head off to college.

The award is a reminder of why we started. We are thankful to the Peace Run for honoring us, and to everyone who has supported Yenko so far. Our next step is the same as it was in the beginning.

Yenko. Let’s go.