A cool thing about Derreck Kayongo is that he spent much of his life being pretty ordinary. Well, if you ignore the part where he experimented with strangers’ used soap in his Gwinnett County basement.
Last week, Kayongo was named the new CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the latest attraction in downtown Atlanta, and one that competes for visitors on a tourist circuit that already includes celebrations of college football, Coke, CNN and whale sharks.
I first called on Kayongo more than a year ago. We agreed to chat over his kitchen table in Lawrenceville, in a home that looks pretty typical for Atlanta suburbanites. Typical, except that the man across from me was like a Mardi Gras parade, dressed in bright colors and crackling with energy.
At the time I was writing columns about local entrepreneurs I found inspiring. I like being around people willing to take gambles and work like dogs to change their piece of the world.
Kayongo had become that kind of person, after years of resistance. Which is interesting because the story of civil rights is shaped by seemingly ordinary people doing the extraordinary.
“Many of us are called to do different things in our society even with our imperfections,” he told me recently.
Kayongo had bunches of entrepreneurial ideas as a young man. But he spent much of his life planning and being wary of risks.
He and his wife had two kids. He had a stable job with the nonprofit CARE and a sweet BMW in his Lawrenceville garage.
Not too shabby for a guy who was born in Uganda, witnessed war as a child and lived as a refugee. Then, as a middle aged man in the Atlanta suburbs, he launched into an idea that first struck him when he was 22. With the help of others, he started a nonprofit called the Global Soap Project to collect used soaps gathered from hotel guest rooms (gross, right?), clean and remold them, and then ship them to impoverished people in other countries. Millions of bars of soap have been given away to help save lives. And Kayongo was given a CNN Top 10 Heroes award.
How he got to that point is pretty remarkable stuff. (He's the focus of a "Personal Journeys" story I wrote last year. You can check out here: http://www.myajc.com/news/news/freedom-fighters-son/nfND6/ .)
The next adventure
Now, Kayongo is 45 and starting on another adventure with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
I’m sure it will have special challenges. The center opened last year with big-name corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, and backing from the city of Atlanta’s economic development arm, Invest Atlanta.
But when I asked the center’s spokeswoman for the latest basic financial figures and a tally of the number of visitors so far this year, she informed me the center’s board had decided not to disclose such figures.
Uh-Oh.
I’m taking that as a bad sign. The spokeswoman told me she wouldn’t guide me on how to interpret the reasoning of the board, which is chaired by former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin. (Eventually, the center apparently will have to disclose some financial figures as part of federal regulations tied to its particular nonprofit status.)
Kayongo listed for me his top priorities in his new job:
Fund raising.
Attracting more visitors. (“I want to see lines of people. We want to be in the same category” as the neighboring World of Coke and Georgia Aquarium.)
And doing what lots of businesses are doing: Globalize.
“We don’t want to be Atlanta-centric,” he told me.
A bigger picture
The center’s goal is to link the civil rights movement to the wider push for human rights internationally. He’s hoping to engage not only people in other countries, but also fellow immigrants now living in metro Atlanta who may not appreciate the applicability of the civil rights movement in the South.
That’s a message Kayongo should be good at delivering. He’s eloquent, and he has spent time on the speaking circuit in recent years and done work for CARE. (He hasn’t been an operational leader of Global Soap for years now.)
Beyond that, Kayongo seems like a remarkably hopeful guy for someone who has witnessed brutality in his native Uganda. And he’s eager to contribute more to the nation he’s become a part of, having been granted U.S. citizenship a decade ago.
When I talked to him recently he was about to watch his son’s first game as a starter on a high school basketball team.
Kayongo told him not to take for granted what he has as the son of an immigrant.
“I told him, ‘We are here to contribute.’”
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