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Writer's pictureDavid Kirkland

Pay Me Forward! A Promise to You from forwardED, LLC

Updated: Jan 29, 2022

The blueprint of our success is service. And service is not what we can do for you; it is how much more we can do together.


When I founded forwardED, I was moved by the promise of service: how much more can we accomplish together than apart? This question sits at the center of everything we do at forwardED because "I am because you are," "I am that," and "You are my other me."


The incredible connection we share makes your problems my problems. However, working beside you, I refuse to sit in the pause of problems, paralyzed by the lonely feeling of defeat.


Together , we can rise and seek solutions and answers where they can be found. We can seek movement because our press forward is always greater than what pulls us down. Progress is always ahead of us.


forwardED gets it name from a conversation I had with my grandmother before she passed. She raised me and taught me the value of service and sacrifice. Sensing the incredible debt I owed her, I asked how could I pay her back. She said, "My life is lived. You don't have to pay me back; pay me forward."


She was reminding me that there are lives still yet to be lived, and we share in the obligation to build a foundation upon which those lives might be lived better because we have lived. We pay it forward by living to advance equity and justice, by remaking all of our systems so that they are fueled by revolutionary love. We pay it forward by seeing our children not only for who they are but for everything they can be.


forwardED is about paying it forward, which is a commitment to the work of building radical futures. We at forwardED know that the future is never beyond our reach. We hold it daily in our hands. It does not happen to us; we happen to it. We make it, change it, and decorate it, which means that we can always make it better for our children.


Buckminster Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." forwardED is that new model—a blueprint for service where we together can build new realities that make injustice, inequity, or anything else that threatens our children obsolete.



David E. Kirkland, PhD

Founder and CEO, forwardED, LLC



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