Matt Meyer ‘90 (D), a Wilmington Friends School alum, has just declared his candidacy for New Castle County Executive and will run against Tom Gordon. He believes that New Castle County needs a new kind of leadership – one that he can provide. Meyer has said, ”If we don’t improve our schools, turn our attention to creating new opportunities, retraining and preparing those who are seeking the jobs of the future, we will continue to watch our county fall further behind.” During his time at Friends, Meyer was the Editor-in-Chief of Whittier. He has fond memories from the time and was willing to be interviewed about his experiences in Whittier and as a Friends student.

Whittier: What inspired you to become editor-in-chief for the Whittier your senior year?

Meyer: I’ve always believed that if you do something, you do it the best you can. With the Whittier, I felt that, at the time, the best way I could contribute was as Editor-in-Chief. The Whittier is certainly the premier high school newspaper in Delaware. I think that journalism in the Whittier, not all of it, but a good amount of it, rivals what you see professional journalists do. I used what I learned and wrote for Brown in the Brown Daily Herald my first year there.

Whittier: Did your time serving as Editor-in-Chief have any influence on your choices later in life?

Meyer: There are a number of ways to answer that, one is leadership. I would encourage anyone at Friends, in whatever role you play, in whatever organizations you join, find a way to play some leadership role. The challenges of leadership are different from the challenges of just being a member. My recollection was that the primary things I took away from being Editor-in-Chief of Whittier were the joys and struggles of leadership. As Editor-in-Chief, you are managing a lot of people. The Whittier is a volunteer organization and you are trying to get people to write articles on a deadline and you’re asking yourself how to get people to write on deadline, how do you motivate people, what do you do when people aren’t performing, how do you look at something that is already pretty good, and work to make it better? Those are the things I’ve carried throughout my life.

Whittier: What is your fondest memory from your time working on Whittier?

Meyer: I had a classmate, Omar Khan, who is now a medical doctor, and he loved cars. I’ve never had much interest in cars, however, his articles read like they were coming from a professional automobile trader magazine. The artistry with which he wrote really made me enjoy his articles. Another aspect of Whittier that I enjoyed was pushing the envelope. John Lewis, who is a great congressman from Georgia, likes to say, “Get in good trouble.” You should always get in trouble, but get in good trouble. Whittier gives you an avenue to get in good trouble, push the envelope, and question how the school, the community, state and the country are moving.

Whittier: What have you taken away from your Friends School experience that has benefited you later in life?

It’s been, extremely valuable to me learning how Quakers challenge things. The Quaker ethos is something where you don’t accept what you’re told; you incorporate everyone’s ideas into decision-making. In a lot of the places I’ve been in, when working for the State Department in Iraq, embedded with the military or when I was working in private business, those ideals that I learned growing up here in the Friends community are not ideals that are ordinarily in a place like that. I learned that those ideals really could and should be part of a constructive society.

Whittier: Do you have any advice for current students?

Meyer: I’ve been a teacher in public schools and a couple high needs schools since graduating from Friends, and I’ve learned a lot from those experiences. One thing that really differentiates Friends is that as a student you’re not just learning Math, English, Science, and Social Studies. You’re also learning ethics, values, citizenship, and leadership. Students who go through a Friend’s education come out in a privileged position. A lot of you don’t realize it, I didn’t realize it at the time, but you have skills of leadership and awareness of the world that a lot of your peers here in Wilmington, New Castle County, the state and country, don’t have. So utilize that to make the world a better place. It’s my advice to understand and internalize those lessons of leadership and of Quakerism, of Society of Friends, and incorporate them in your life.

After Friends, Meyer went on to Brown University and later received his law degree from the University of Michigan. His focuses are on creating new opportunities for those unable to pursue a future on their own.

After college, he travelled to Nairobi, Kenya where he found impoverished neighborhoods with no clear path towards prosperity. He helped found Ecosandals, a company that sells sandals across the world. These sandals provide income for families who have no money and few options. The sandals are completely made out of recycled materials in order to be eco-friendly. The Ecosandals website says, “Many know Korogocho and the surrounding neighborhoods, Mathare, Dandora, Huruma and Baba Dogo, as rough places to go. Lots of crime. Lots of disease. Lots of insecurity and corruption. We know these neighborhoods to be home. There is beauty here if you look for it. Through Ecosandals, we bring our beauty to you. The beauty of our people, of our diverse communities and cultures, communicated in the language of fashion forward footwear.” This organization has helped improve the economic situation of the people living in what is considered to be one of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. At Friends, students learn the importance of stewardship and thinking about the world as a community. Students are taught to recognize global issues and brainstorm innovative solutions to world problems. Matt Meyer is an example of a man who has taken to heart the Quaker testimonies taught at Friends, stewardship, peace, integrity, community, equality, and simplicity, and use them to make a difference in the lives of people living in poverty.

Meyer’s accomplishments don’t end there. He helped to create VituMob, an app that enables people in Kenya, and other countries in Africa, to buy American products online. It helps ensure safe delivery to the buyer’s location. The app is on its way to make $1 million in revenue in its first year. VituMob is hoping to expand as a shipping service all over the sub-saharan region.

Matt’s work is not limited to Kenya. He traveled to Mosul, Iraq with the State Department of the United States and worked to bring peace to a violent region. He used his financial skills learned from working on Wall Street to advise Iraqi bankers. Alongside his college friend, Mark Schapiro, he traveled through Iraq. Meyer was never injured, but he did witness some attacks on American soldiers. In the second half of the interview, Meyer discussed his work and the paths he took to achieve his goals.

Whittier: What was the biggest obstacle you faced when trying to achieve your goal?

Meyer: I spent a lot of time in rooms with people where I was the only one like me. When I went to Friends, I could look around the room and, based on my background, based on where I live, I was very similar to most of the people around me. When I went to Iraq and when I was in Kenya that has not been the case. In order to work with people, any people, you have to have some base level understanding of where they are coming from, what they want, why they are sitting at a table with you. One of my greatest challenges was just trying to understand that. In Iraq in particular, achieving understanding was very challenging. I was living on a military base, and I had little visibility into the day-to-day lives of the Iraqis. I convened a forum of bankers and business people, and I remember after a couple of meetings, I said to a colleague of mine that I didn’t even understand what their houses looked like. I didn’t know if they lived in these huge mansions, or if they lived in little sheds. Going through that process of trying to understand who exactly they were and what drove them, was necessary because in order to collaborate with someone you really have to understand that about them, and they had to understand that about me as well.

Whittier: Did your Friends School education have any influence on what projects you chose to do and how you did them?

Meyer: It certainly did. The Friends community always has leaders who are not afraid to get in good trouble. George Fox was never afraid to get in good trouble and I learned from that. I learned that you have ideals, and you stick to those ideals, and you do everything to make those ideals come to fruition. A lot of the world doesn’t work that way, and a lot of people are willing to sacrifice their ideals for money or power, or whatever it is they want. One thing that you learn at Friends are your ideals and how to live your life according to those ideals, whatever your religion, whatever your community or project is. From George Fox to William Penn and on up, they had these ideals that they stick to. However, that’s certainly not exclusive to the Quakers, and it’s not a hundred percent true of every Quaker, nor a hundred percent true of myself. Most high schools give you a guide of what academic excellence is, but Friends also gives you a guide of what ethical excellence looks like. I went to a meeting for worship for the first time in a few years a couple of Sundays ago, and just the act of sitting in silence for half an hour to forty-five minutes made me wonder: Do you know how many people do that in America? The ability to respect silence, to understand and incorporate silence and thought into your life can improve the quality of your living.

Whittier: Did your projects such as Ecosandals and time spent in Mosul yield the results you expected or have they ended in ways you didn’t foresee?

Meyer: The latter. They always ended in ways that I didn’t originally foresee, in some ways better, in some ways worse. In Mosul, a team of us designed a very ambitious project to use economic tools, farming tools, to attract people away from violence in the most violent parts of Iraq. There were areas of Iraq where violence decreased dramatically and we believe that is a direct result of our work, but there were people who got hurt because of mistakes that we made. War is a crazy thing. If you think about the mistakes you make in school, if you mess up on a test or whatever, there’s a consequence, but when you’re at war and you make just a mistake of turning left instead of right, or saying go to that village instead of that other village, or that we’re going to give out chickens to farmers instead of cows, minor things like that can cause major disruption and change the direction of events. The upside is that we did things like this agricultural project where we gave farmers tools to dramatically increase their yields, and that produced wealth in rural Iraqi villages where violence or terror was very high. There is some evidence that the increasing of wealth contributed to decreases in violence. With Ecosandals we, for five years, toiled along, trying to get this sandal project off the ground when suddenly something called the internet came along and we put the sandals on the world wide web, and we were the first organization in East Africa, a place where there are a hundred and fifty million people, to be selling things online. Suddenly, within a few weeks we were on CNN, we were on BBC, and that was beyond my wildest dreams of what I expected to happen. You learn you got to roll with it in life. Certainly at my age, where I am, I think there’s a divide. There are people who are happy and there are people who are having a rougher time. I think about my classmates, both from high school and college, and those who are happier are often those who can roll with it. The successful are those who understand that whether you got As in high school or nearly flunked out, you’re going to have extraordinary successes in life, and you’re going to have some really rough times. Those that can take the punches and keep moving on are the ones who succeed and can wake up with a smile on their face. You learn from mistakes that you make, and you look forward.

Meyer’s work in Kenya with Ecosandals and VituMob has changed the lives of many impoverished families. His financial assistance in Mosul, Iraq helped bring peace to a violent region. This is the kind of legacy that Wilmington Friends strives to achieve with its students. Meyer, like many Friends alums, was taught at an early age the values of having strong ethics, leadership skills, and responsibility. He has taken the tools that Wilmington Friends taught him to use, and created a better future for many people across the world. He now is looking to improve the community by running for New Castle County Executive in Delaware.

To check out more of Matt Meyer’s campaign, visit Matt Meyer’s campaign website.