Sometimes the seeds of success are planted by watching someone else overcome adversity with determination, grit, and a refusal to allow hardship to take your dreams away. For me, that person was my mother, Dr. Connie Walker. Growing up in Atlanta, I watched her, a single parent working two jobs, striving to set an example for my sister and me. I’ll never forget sitting in a hallway during her grad school night school classes, long before there were online classes to make the journey easier. I was tired after the hour-long drive, but there my mother was, in class, getting an education to advance her career and lift my sister and I out of poverty.
I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but she was showing us what resilience looked like. Later, I would need to harness her strength to return to high school after dropping out myself, determined to achieve what felt like an impossible goal: earning a PhD.
When my mother and father separated, I was left without a consistent male role model, and in middle school I joined a gang for about a year because I was craving connection and acceptance among peers who were navigating similar circumstances. By high school, a pattern of disconnection with my schoolwork had started, not because I did not have the academic ability, but because I was carrying the emotional weight of growing up in poverty.
I can recall the exact day I made my decision. I pushed my chair back from the desk, stood up and walked out of Frank McClarin High School, thinking I had fallen too far behind and was done with education.
As I walked away, a man who was experiencing homelessness called out to me and my friends. I was the only one who turned around. He pointed back at the school and told me never to give up on my education, or I’d end up like him. He said that one day I was going to be a leader. “A leader,” I thought. This man did not know me, but that moment became a catalyst. The idea swirled around in my brain. It was as if he was watering the seed my mother had planted through her example and her words stating that “education could become something that helped me overcome.”
Eventually, my mother found a way to get me back into school as a fifth-year senior. That path led me into Ms. West’s classroom at the same school I had dropped out of, after she contacted the principal and administrators who had been trying to help me, met with them and the school counselors, and advocated for me to be allowed to return and finish.
Courtesy of Terence Lester
In me, Ms. West didn’t just see a struggling student, she saw potential and offered me a safe space in her classroom, often telling me I was brilliant and had what it took to finish school and become a leader. Her encouragement, combined with my mother’s determination not to let me give up on myself, became the push I needed to graduate.
Growing up with poverty and other barriers and challenges that make academic success harder doesn’t just threaten your dreams; it can strip your confidence in who you are and who you can ultimately become. Ms. West and others like her helped me borrow their courage long before I had it in myself. I knew one day I wanted to achieve a PhD but had no direction. Those dreams actually started forming while I was working in the back of a warehouse after high school, writing poetry and spoken word to heal, imagining myself as a public speaker, and believing that one day I could write books. That environment, coupled with attending church and meeting people who helped me believe there was more for my life.
Those people included Mr. Eason, a deacon at the church I attended, who became a mentor and father figure to me when I was 20 years old. He helped me realize my life had more value than my circumstances and encouraged the natural gifts he saw in me when I had opportunities to speak in church or share my story. Before Mr. Eason passed away two years ago, the last text he sent me was that he was proud of me and that I was one of his greatest investments. Those words meant everything because he poured into me and consistently told me that I would one day overcome and be a leader.
Mr. Eason took the time to walk with me. He encouraged me to go back to school, supported my education with financial resources and helped me find not just direction but purpose. He and others like him, including my mother, who eventually got her doctoral degree as well, helped me understand that a PhD was possible. Eventually, I graduated college with my first degree in leadership. Through that experience, I began to realize that my voice, my writing and my story could become tools to impact the world.
In 2013, I co-founded Love Beyond Walls with my wife Cecilia, a nonprofit in Atlanta that serves those who are faced with poverty and homelessness. I founded Love Beyond Walls because I know what poverty does to families and how it breaks down the fabric of relationships, causes isolation and stigmatizes people in ways that are dehumanizing. I got the idea to start it because, at that time, I was thinking about the stigma surrounding those who are unhoused and the walls that keep people separated, and how love is greater than all the isms that divide us, which is why we named the organization, Love Beyond Walls.
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I know how hard it is to escape the weight of poverty crushing you altogether, especially with a lack of support, but I also know the power of restoration and redemption, like when my late father, Tyrone Lester, and I became close friends and he became one of my number one supporters before he passed away. My biological father got to see my work, support me with encouragement and that meant everything to me. It reminded me that, when I started Love Beyond Walls, it was all about building relationships. People often go through these struggles in isolation, and I wanted to create a community for them.
Courtesy of Terence Lester
Whether helping unhoused people obtain or recover ID cards, reunite with their families, find temporary housing, or access food, showers and clothing resources for job interviews, it was because I understood their needs from the relationships I built with the community. I started building those relationships long before I was leading an organization. In our early 20s, my wife and I went out into the streets of Atlanta with small groups to meet people and offer them basic needs: food, clothing and hygiene items. But more than that, we were learning people’s stories. After years of doing this, you come to know people beyond a single moment of outreach. You know their stories in a way that builds real relationships.
In 2019, I launched the Dignity Museum, the first museum in the U.S. that represents the experience of homelessness in a way that builds empathy. It uses immersive storytelling enabled by technology to show people that homelessness is not monolithic, and it also uses research to help people understand the humanity behind the experience and the barriers people face when trying to escape homelessness. Since then, we have also launched a second museum, a podcast museum called Dignity Mobile that features the Imagine Dignity Podcast. All of this was about making sure people who are often invisible and misunderstood have a community they can belong to.
Recently, we also started a program called Zion’s Closet in Title I schools to transform classrooms into resource centers for students who are unhoused to have access to things that boost educational confidence, anything from washing machines and dryers to keep their uniforms clean and computers for their parents to fill out job applications.
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It was important for me to share my story when I wrote my book, From Dropout to Doctorate: Breaking the Chains of Educational Injustice. I write about how community became the very thing I needed to rise above the challenges I faced, and how each of us has the power to become that same community for someone else. My journey has always taught me that dreams are built, supported and realized in community. It was the people who saw me and invested in me who helped me overcome my circumstances, and that’s exactly what I want Love Beyond Walls to be for others. It’s about creating a space where people can find strength in community and know they’re not alone.
I hope people realize that people don’t become in life what you want them to become; they become what you encourage them to become. I would not have a PhD without my whole community. Why? Because community is everything. Community is a source of life, and it’s where people find hope, connection and the strength to chase their dreams without feeling isolated. And maybe you could become the hope and community that someone needs to overcome.
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From Dropout to Doctorate by Dr. Terence Lester is available now, wherever books are sold.
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