By Jack York, Founder of TaleGate

Life is full of magical strange coincidences and moments, but you must keep your eyes open to look for them.  I’m honored to tell you about my such moment.

It took place in Perth Australia at the Global Ageing Conference, circa 2015.  I was selected to present at the conference and placed on a panel to speak about innovation. Onto that same panel strutted a joyful Cameroonian man, decked out in the finest attire from his magical country, and his name was Francis Njuakom. He filled up the room as he walked in, and after meeting him and hearing his story my life has never been the same. That chance meeting has changed me forever and has led to improving the quality of life of well over 130,000 Cameroonian elders, women, and children.

Miracles do happen. The story of Francis’s life is its own miracle. He was raised in a small village in Northwest Cameroon. Basically, living in a hut—no electricity, no water, no bathrooms. His father had three wives, each with more than 10 children. Francis’s father died when he was a young man, and the small bit of property that had been accumulated was given to a distantly related uncle, someone who had never assisted Francis and his siblings simply because women were not allowed to own any property or succeed their husband’s property.  Francis’s mother was forced to leave her home—meaning she was thrown out of the landed property and home.

Francis, bucking all the cultural norms at the time, put his own life at risk by standing up against these oppressive norms. What he watched his mother go through motivated him to establish CDVTA, an organization established in 1998 that has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of women and other disadvantaged people living in Cameroon. After hearing Francis deliver his almost Martin Luther King-ish presentation at the Global Ageing Conference, I sheepishly followed with my own presentation.

I’m one of the founders of iN2L (now LifeLoop) and I’m fiercely proud of the work we have done over the last 25 years. But hearing Francis talk about having his life threatened to protect women and elders in Cameroon is a tough act to follow. I spent maybe 10 minutes with Francis, complimenting him on his work, and hoped we would stay in touch. The conference was a delight as is always the case (I’ve been to five!) and I headed back to the U.S. feeling richer for having met Francis and so many others around the world.

After getting back home to Colorado, iN2L sent CDVTA a donation of $500 with no expectations, just a token sum to help him continue his work. (If you are a non-profit, please lean in and read these next few sentences.) I didn’t have any contact with Francis over the next few weeks—didn’t expect to—but suddenly, like a lightning bolt you don’t see coming, Francis sent me pages of itemized line items about what he did with the $500 donation. Alongside that, nine videos like this. With that $500 donation, he set up the “Jack York Northwest Cameroonian Elderly Women Goat Fund!”  Are you kidding me???

Instead of sending me a form letter “thank you for your donation” that a donor gets, he did this.  And it was a lesson. If he had just sent me a traditional letter, none of the remarkable things that have happened since then would have happened. Who among your own set of donors might be willing to step up to the plate if you get creative like this? All the videos Francis sent, and the detailed work he put into my donation, intrigued me to no end.

I immediately set up a call and bluntly asked him if that were what he would do for $500, what would he do for $25,000? And right off the top of his head he said, “Build a senior center for our elders!”  The entire country of Cameroon, with a population of more than 27 million, did not have a single structure that was 100% dedicated to older adults. We had to change this! So we leaned into all our senior living friends and started “selling” goats—the first of which was bought by Larry Minnix.

We began our fundraising that way. For $300, you would get a goat named after you and Francis would take a picture of the goat with a Cameroonian family. I invited Francis to come to the U.S., as he had never been here before. We crisscrossed the country for three weeks, visiting multiple LeadingAge members. We drove from New Orleans to Las Vegas and smelled the roses along the way. Front Porch stepped up after meeting Francis and had their annual fundraiser built up around CDVTA. They raised well over $25,000 to fund a substantial farming project in the village of Abuh. We completed our tour, raised the funds, and Francis and his team built the senior center.

Francis invited me to my first trip to Cameroon in the spring of 2017 for the grand opening of the center. It was a trip of a lifetime for me, seeing the beautiful people and culture of a country struggling with such a weak infrastructure. Unbeknownst to me, the senior center was named after my glorious mother Dorothy. In what will always be the most surreal moment of my life, 3,000 villagers from dozens of villages walked miles to the event and in unison, they started chanting “Dorothy York, Dorothy York, Dorothy York!” They were revering her like a patron saint. It was surreal, powerful, and joyous.

To this day, many years since the Dorothy York Senior Center opened, it is brimming with life. Francis sends me pictures of the activities at the center regularly. It has continued to grow as partnerships like one with Melissa Banko from Banko Design have added to the journey.  We raised money for CDCVTA through telethons, bringing goats to the LeadingAge national conference in Philly, and coordinating projects with Mr. Beast (aka Jimmy Donaldson, the world’s largest YouTuber).

This story has no ending. We just finished our second trip to Cameroon in January 2024, and the joy and gratitude of the villagers—particularly the elders and the children—is contagious. They have virtually nothing from a material standpoint but live each day to the fullest. They cherish their culture, their relationships, and each meal. I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but I believe they seem more joyful than most Americans!

Francis has accomplished so much since the journey started. Here are some of the outcomes:

• 10 wells were built, providing fresh water for over 50,000 Cameroonians.
• Construction of eight classrooms and 12 VIP bathrooms for students, serving 15,000 students.
• The establishment of the Dorothy York Senior Center.
• Hundreds of goats donated to dozens of villages.
• Four farming and social care projects supporting women and elders impacting at least 20,000 locals.

All of these projects have collectively impacted over 130,000 Cameroonian elders and children. While impressive, there is so much more to be done. Fundraising efforts remain underway, conversations about life plan communities partnering with villages in Cameroon are in the works, and there remain many opportunities to partner.

If you want to become involved with this journey, or just to learn about CDVTA, please reach out to me at jyork@talgate4joy.com. Our next journey to Cameroon will be in June of 2025, and I invite you to come on board.

So that’s our journey, a story that has had a mystical component to it since we first met.  It’s a journey that just keeps moving forward, one Cameroonian smile after another. I believe there are lessons learned for all of us on this journey: Keep your eyes open, be curious about what may motivate some of your donors, be willing to trust your intuition, and take risks. If you do, maybe someday you too will meet a magic Knight from across the globe, and even have a goat named after you!

Thank you, Global Ageing Network, for providing the forum for our relationship, thank you to Common Age for funding Francis’s trip to Perth, and thank you Francis for showing me that anything in life is possible if you approach it with joy and gratitude.