Elevating students to a position in which they can compete on a level playing field is what’s currently driving Isaac, who, beginning in 7th grade, taught himself computer programming, after his family couldn’t afford to pay to fix his game console.

“Giving back” isn’t an empty catchphrase to Isaac. He lives and breathes it every day. Pathways to College instilled that quality in him about a decade ago.

That’s because one of Isaac’s Pathways teachers so believed in him and so wanted him to stay at their school that when it looked like he may have had to transfer because of distance, the teacher agreed to pick him up every day at his home, drive him to school and drive him back home in the late afternoon.

“She became like my adoptive mother,” says Isaac, a computer software engineer originally from Plainfield, New Jersey. Isaac now lives in Ohio and owns Haki Labs, a company that teaches website design and coding to mostly low-income students of color at public high schools. “She would pick me up at 6 a.m. and later, drive me the 18 miles home.”

Elevating students to a position in which they can compete on a level playing field is what’s currently driving Isaac, who, beginning in 7th grade, taught himself computer programming, after his family couldn’t afford to pay to fix his game console.

“Haki is a Swahili word for fairness,” says Issac, who gained fluency in Mandarin, thanks to a year he spent studying Chinese history and culture while enrolled at Ohio’s College of Wooster. “I developed my business to help students of color.”

Isaac was born in the West African country of Liberia; his ancestors left America to repatriate there. His family moved to England for a few years and later resettled in New Jersey.

“I didn’t really fit in when I came,” Isaac recalls. “I had an accent that wasn’t quite English and not quite west African. The other kids saw me as ‘the smart guy,’ but also saw me as ‘the dark-skinned guy’ and I got made fun of for that.”

Pathways to College attracted Isaac, who carefully steered clear of the gang activity and drug abuse he saw some of his high school peers gravitate toward.

“Pathways kept me out of trouble,” Isaac says. “I’m a first-generation college student, so I couldn’t get advice on going to college from my family. I thought I was going to be a professional soccer player. Then Pathways brought back an alum who spoke about how he thought he was going to be a pro football player, but that changed with a knee injury after he got to college. He never went in thinking he was going to be a great student and he never really thought about deciding on a major. That was important for me to hear.”

While a Pathways Scholar, Isaac twice earned all-state athletic honors, and his academic brilliance earned him a coveted Gates Millennium Scholarship. At the College of Wooster, he combined an old love, computer science, with a new one, philosophy, to double-major in both fields.

Isaac eventually passed on his experience and knowledge as a college student to his younger brother and sister, who currently are studying at four-year institutions. But he has ensured that his passion for expanding opportunities reaches far beyond his siblings and American students.

In 2021, he founded the Champion International Standard School, an elementary school in Liberia that primarily serves the children of generational farmers. While agriculture is the area’s common industry, Champion International introduces career paths and hobbies outside of farming.

Already, enrollment has tripled from 50 students to 150, encouraging Isaac to begin planning a technical high school in the area. Initially named the Liberian Institute of Technology, the new school will focus on teaching students how to code and program within a rich liberal-arts curriculum.

Reflecting back on starting Haki Labs, Isaac’s thoughts turned to his Pathways teachers.

“They helped me with my business plan,” Isaac says. “They vouched for me with the schools I was trying to get contracts from, to work with them.”

When Isaac now works with students, he’s particularly struck by the reactions he gets from African-American boys when he teaches them coding.

“They don’t ask me so much, ‘How do you do this?’ They ask more like, ‘How are you doing this?’” Isaac says. “Some of them look at what I’m doing as if it’s magic. It makes me feel good, but it also highlights the need for more of us in the field. Pathways helped with my ability to be confident. Without Pathways, my business wouldn’t exist.”