Aimee Heckel, Camera

Eric Glustrom, the Boulder founder of the nonprofit Educate, takes notes during a meeting with African students. Glustrom, who graduated from Fairview High School, hopes to make his mission more sustainable by helping students to teach others.

Editor's note: Fairview High School graduate Eric Glustrom established the Boulder-based nonprofit Educate to help fund the education of students in Uganda. In August, Camera Staff Writer

There comes a point when the bubble bursts. When idealism is not enough to secure something lasting.

If you've never run a nonprofit, you might best recognize idealism as that flutter of hearts between new love prospects, that moment where nothing else exists around you. It is beautiful, yet breakable.

Not to belittle it. Idealism is necessary, because it is the first breath of a movement. But today, as Boulderite Eric Glustrom sits next to a sobbing African orphan named Benson Olivier, Glustrom realizes that he can't change the world on idealism alone.

The thought feels simultaneously sad and intriguing. Olivier's tears fall.

So this is growing up.

For 22-year-old Glustrom. For Olivier and the Africans on the Kyangwali Refugee Camp in western Uganda. And for Educate, the nonprofit Glustrom started as a high-schooler five years ago.

Educate is a student-run group that puts African refugees and orphans through quality private schools, with the hopes of creating leaders to some day help turn around the sinking ship of abject poverty and corruption.

This growing up spurred changes that would shake the students sponsored by Educate — Glustrom hoped for the better.

He has a hunch it also reflects something bigger: an overarching evolution for nonprofits in search of a sustainable approach to help developing countries. A shift toward self-sustainability.

If only Glustrom had realized that five years ago when this story started.

Glustrom started Educate in 2002, when he visited Uganda alone as a 17-year-old Fairview High School student. There, he realized he could afford to put refugees and orphans through school. Glustrom recruited other American volunteers, spurring more than a dozen clubs at schools across the nation, who have since put more than 40 Africans through school. Students helping students.

This has been Educate's most successful year yet. The nonprofit raised more than $100,000 from a record number of donors. They sponsored five new students.

Glustrom wrapped up his biochemistry degree from Amherst University, with enough money saved to take off the next year to dedicate to his nonprofit.

Then he learned about the two Bensons.

The first, Benson Olivier, was the catalyst behind the movement. The face that people back home see when they think of Educate.

The Congolese orphan, who is Glustrom's age, was the first student Glustrom decided to sponsor. He became one of Glustrom's best friends and a model for the program. Glustrom raised money for everything the boy needed, from books to health care to transportation. It was such little money per trimester — the cost of a pair of nice jeans back home — that even a teenager could afford it.

But this year, amid Educate's list of successes, Olivier failed out of his final year in secondary school.

This was not the Olivier that Glustrom had met five years ago, a wide-smiling, fearless boy with dreams to become a politician and end the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that had taken his family's life. The boy with hundreds of quotes memorized from literature, and a philosophical view on politics like Glustrom had never heard before — not even in ultra-progressive Boulder.

Now, Olivier is crying. His words fester in Glustrom's head:

"He says the organization gives him everything he has, but it forces him to take everything because he has no other option."

Glustrom continues:

"He said, 'It brings more problems to me. If I had less money I'd use the money I do have better, and I wouldn't be tempted to spend it on a soda or things not necessary.'"

"He said he wants to help with his education, to have a sense of ownership."

"He said, 'I feel like I'm just taking and not giving back.'"

"He said he loves and hates the organization at the same time."

This wasn't how it was supposed to go for Olivier.

This also wasn't how it was expected to go for the other Benson, Wereje Benson.

The two Bensons are best friends who both live on the Kyangwali camp. Not only do they share the same "Christian" name, they're the same age: 24. They grew up in the same village in the Congo and both narrowly dodged death in 1996 by slipping through the back window of their school while rebels in the other room killed their classmates, one by one, with a hammer to the head.

But it seemed they would have a different ending to the same story. Because Wereje Benson wasn't the lucky one standing on the side of the road when Glustrom's taxi first pulled up. And Wereje Benson's scholarship application wasn't getting touched. The stack of would-be students was too daunting for the small student-run organization to tackle.

While waiting, Wereje Benson founded an Educate club on the camp, which he called Coburwas, short for Congo-Burundi-Rwanda-Sudanese for the nationalities of various members. His club began raising money to help other needy students and organizing community service projects to transform the camp.

He didn't know it then, but that club would transform his life, too.

This year, a Boulder donor heard Wereje's story, and offered to pay for his schooling. And he plunged into his education with everything he was made of, graduating at the top of his class and getting accepted to the best college in eastern Africa, Makerere University.

Glustrom calls Wereje the "perfect success story."

"He doesn't feel dependent on our organization because he is able to give back," Glustrom says.

Then it clicks. An answer.

Maybe it's not perfect.

But that is growing up: not repeating mistakes, Glustrom says. His organization must change.

And anyway, he adds, a mistake in and of itself isn't failure.

"It's what you do about it — that's what makes it a failure or not," he says. "It's the 'so what?' The 'what now?'"

In the same way, it is also the "so what" that defines success, Glustrom says. Filing money into Africa, via Educate or on a larger scale, doesn't abolish poverty, or accomplish Educate's goal to form leaders.

Africa received about $200 billion in foreign aid in the 1980s and '90s, according to a book by Martin Meredith called "The State of Africa." Nearly $1 trillion since African nations gained independence in the 1960s, according to the Royal African Society. Yet Africa continues to struggle with even the basics, such as health care and clean water.

As Glustrom sees it, the solution is not the old adage of "giving a man a fish." And not just teaching a man to fish. But teaching a man to teach others to fish.

And, as with most innovations, Glustrom and his friends see it as their responsibility — as youths — to come up with an original way to do it.

They believe one of the latest humanitarian booms — microfinancing — or offering Third World residents small loans to jump-start their businesses, is on the right road.

Almost.

As one of Educate's other young leaders, Boris Bulayev, of San Francisco, puts it, "Microfinance needs to be accompanied by a change in attitude." Of the people being helped, as well as the people helping, he says.

Bulayev, who was born in Russia and speaks with a staccato matter-of-factness, doesn't mean to sound cruel.

"You can't always do what your heart wants to do," he says. "You just need to use your heart to motivate you to think critically about how to really help people."

He calls it a different kind of idealism.

"The belief that you could somehow empower somebody to help their community, that's still an idealistic belief. It's just more experienced, more educated, more intelligent, more realistic."

More grown up.

Enter Educate's changes. Counter to impulsive will, Educate would begin giving the African students less money.

The group would also hire a Ugandan-based organization to handle the finances, to free up Glustrom and his friends to be creative. The student-selection process would become more rigid and focused. And in addition to giving the students money for school, as Educate had been doing for years, it would add leadership workshops and encourage community-service projects.

Because education without good character can be pointless, Glustrom says. Even dangerous.

"Educate tried to best help Benson excel in school by giving him everything he needed, yet in doing so, we actually took away his motivation," Glustrom says. "I think this is very relevant to aid to Africa on a larger scale. The West tries to give Africa what it needs: food, medicine, peace, etc. But in doing so, a dependency is developed such that the people of Africa no longer have the drive to find their own solutions to the challenges they face."

Glustrom stands up from the cement step where he has been listening to Benson Olivier. Glustrom pushes through the guest room's wooden door and tugs out a bag of 90 doses of malaria medicine. Instead of distributing it himself, he asks Olivier to do it. Starting with saving 90 lives on the refugee camp should infuse Olivier with a sense of empowerment.

Which it does. Later, Olivier mentions that he'd like to get more involved with the community, maybe even start tutoring and start an Educate club at his school. He wants to return for a second chance.

Only appropriate that Educate's evolution was sparked by the same Congolese boy who started it all, Glustrom says.

Despite Olivier's struggles, or maybe because of them, Glustrom considers Olivier the model student.

He hopes when people back home think of Educate — as a nonprofit growing up tenaciously, but not flawlessly — they see Olivier's face.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Aimee Heckel at 303-473-1359 or heckela@dailycamera.com.