Peninsula Nonprofit Aims To Harness Power Of Intrinsic Motivation

EAST PALO ALTO, CA — To Paul Thiebaut III, founder of the East Palo Alto-based nonprofit Thiebaut Method, intrinsic motivation is more than just a buzzword.

The organization, which seeks to empower underserved youth by putting them in charge of projects that benefit other youth, was born out of Thiebaut reading Malcolm X’s autobiography and discovering the power of intrinsic motivation — engaging in an activity out of genuine interest rather than external benefits like money or fame.

Thiebaut Method, founded in 2009 under the name 10 Books A Home, recently began organizing what it calls “social good projects,” tailored to each youth in the program. Each youth completes four projects. Each project has 12 steps and centers on specific goals, like teaching STEM classes, organizing sports clinics, helping the homeless and giving away skateboards to benefit the community.

With help from a mentor, the kids are tasked with leading the project. They make phone calls, promote events, ask organizations for help and set up at the location. The projects, which take about three months to complete, focus on topics that intrinsically motivate each youth.

Thiebaut said that his program is different from community service in that the participants have a choice in the type of work they want to do, and that the goal ranges far beyond getting community service hours. Plus, most community service programs begin at the high school age, while Thiebaut Method serves fourth through eighth graders.

“Our program at first gets confused with community service,” Thiebaut said. “Community service is great, but social good projects go many steps further by empowering the youth to lead the project.”

By the time the participant finishes their fourth social good project, the objective is for them to have developed the skills to independently internalize a method for helping others, according to Thiebaut.

“You send your kids to school to get good grades,” Thiebaut said. “You put your kids in programs to learn art, or to learn science, or sports. But where does your kid go to learn to be the next leader in the community? That’s what the social good program is going to teach your child to do: Become a future leader in this community.”

Since February, 11 youth have completed 13 social good projects that have benefited over 875 people in East Palo Alto, in collaboration with 130 volunteer partners, according to the organization. Thiebaut Method, which has three full-time staff members, is supported by a number of grants and donors, including the Resonance Philanthropies and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Helping The Underserved

Kevin Mendoza, an East Palo Alto resident and eighth grader at Tierra Linda Middle School, recently completed a social good project with a goal of leading a free lego bridge workshop for kids in East Palo Alto. He said the biggest challenge was planning, which included calling different places to obtain the legos in the first place. He also had to create a website and a flyer, calling local schools to invite participants.

Mendoza, who wants to be an engineer, said the project helped him realize there aren’t a lot of STEM opportunities in East Palo Alto, and that every kid has a creative mindset but not always the skill.

“It just helps a lot of people because it focuses on what you want to learn — not like school, which makes you learn everything,” Mendoza said. “If you’re intrinsically motivated through something, you can use that to help others — while at the same time feeling good yourself because you feel motivated to do it.”

Mendoza was paired with Kyle Douglas, a research associate at the Stanford School of Engineering, who said that the Thiebaut Method’s objective of reaching kids at a younger age is critical for helping them not just find, but flourish in their interests.

“You may have incredible talent in a particular area,” Douglas said. “You may have the creativity and the mindset. But once you get on in life, if you feel like you don’t have that skillset or can’t develop that skillset, that’s a roadblock. Kevin is opening that gate early on. He’s allowing them to start building those skills and play around with them and give them something optimistic — something they built and created on their own.”

The program seeks to make an impact in an area like East Palo Alto, a low-income community compared to the rest of the Peninsula, where East Palo Alto parents like Victor Mora struggle to find development opportunities for his two daughters.

Both of Mora’s daughters attended Mendoza’s lego workshop, where Mora said Douglas helped his second-grader understand in simple terms the reason why the Bay Bridge doesn’t sink.

“There are plenty of coding classes and other types of STEM classes but paying for two classes will be an expense that is not in our budget,” Mora said. “Getting this opportunity in East Palo Alto from Thiebaut Method, it’s great. I think everybody should take advantage of it. Education is something that we need to invest in with our kids, especially in this community with fewer opportunities.”

Mendoza raised over $1,500 worth of donations in legos from the event, about $1,000 more than he thought he would receive. He said it felt great to realize that he was able to accomplish a successful workshop while helping other kids channel their creativity.

“I saw so many kids having a ton of fun building legos, building bridges, incorporating other stuff into their bridges,” Mendoza said. “Some kid made a plane hangar that was really cool. They were all creative. They just had their own type of creativity.”

Thiebaut, who has lived in East Palo Alto since he was a teenager in 1993, said his motivation for working with underserved youth in the city is to “exponentially increase the number of youth from underserved communities who receive Nobel prizes.”

He hopes to solidify a scalable social good project program, increase enrollment by 20 youth this year and eventually open a second location in North Fair Oaks with a goal of becoming a national model that can be replicated in underserved communities across the country.

“All kids deserve to make our world a better place to live in,” Thiebaut said. “Unfortunately, the least likely to do it are the ones who grow up in the most unfortunate conditions. I hope Thiebaut Method can demonstrate that all children are capable of great things given the right opportunities, support, and most importantly, access to the things they care about the most. In two words: intrinsic motivation.”

Visit thiebautmethod.org for more information on Thiebaut Method.