Doug Pitt and What We Can Do When We Care to Learn

“Some things choose you,” Doug Pitt says. “It really wasn’t my choice. I remember the exact second, sitting at a stoplight, when I just knew.”

It was 2007. Earlier, while attending a meeting of the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, he’d heard outgoing board member Morey Mechlin describe the challenges faced by kids living in poverty. She’d shared details that grabbed a hold of Pitt and wouldn’t turn him loose. He kept thinking about the three siblings who used a single toothbrush and the boy who wore his mom’s jeans because he didn’t have pants of his own. In the same week, Dr. Norman Ridder, then-superintendent of Springfield Public Schools (SPS), proposed starting a fund that could help students with targeted needs like the ones that were haunting Pitt. 

Applying Business Principles 

The elegance of the model might have something to do with the fact that Pitt says he never set out to found a nonprofit. He came up through Springfield’s business scene, which helped him bring an outside perspective to the work. In 1991, he founded ServiceWorld Computer Center, although he jokes that at the time, he “couldn’t even turn on a computer.” This was well before computers became the driving force in offices, but Pitt could see their emerging impact on the workplace. He sensed that soon, every business would need the kind of IT support ServiceWorld provided.

In the company’s second year, “Great Southern Bank took a chance on us with a large service contract,” he says. “That put us on the map, and I’m grateful to them.” More clients followed, largely through referrals and word of mouth. Pitt became active in the Chamber. “I met everyone I could,” he says, and ServiceWorld grew. In 2013, it merged with TSI. Pitt stayed on as a leader of the company’s Springfield operations, and the merger opened up time for his interest in real estate development. With Brian Hayes, his partner in the commercial real estate company Pitt Development Group, he began specializing in medical office space. 

Around this time, Kevin Waterland, who was now 25 and had started working at ServiceWorld when he was just 18, approached Pitt with a business idea. “It was a small cloud storage company, and it worked,” Pitt says. “I funded it, and we sold it off.” Waterland came back to Pitt with an idea for a new company, Syndeo, which grew very profitable. Syndeo became TSI’s client. In time, it started doing so much business with TSI; it felt natural to buy back the TSI operations that had originally belonged to Pitt. In 2017, Pitt and Waterland reacquired components of TSI to form Pitt Technology Group (PTG). Since then, PTG has grown. Late last year, it announced its third acquisition, Protel Systems and Supplies. “I believe in Kevin,” Pitt says. “I like the way the company is working, and I’m super proud of him.” 

If it sounds like it’s been a dynamic ride, it has been. “You can say you want to stay the same and not grow, but life doesn’t work that way,” Pitt says. “Businesses are organic—they’re living, breathing things.” And he isn’t afraid to change course. “Anytime I wake up with a better idea than the day before, I’ll make that change. Why wouldn’t I?” he asks. 

Care to Learn and the Future 

Principles like these, which Pitt workshopped in his businesses, have taken Care to Learn from the $50,000 fund that Ridder initially requested to an organization with a budget of nearly $2 million—from one school district to 41 chapters across the state. And there are more plans for growth. “We’ve never left the state of Missouri,” Pitt says. “That will change... I like taking care of our own in Missouri... But if we’re going to talk about efficiency in helping kids, why are we putting boundaries on things? What’s the path of least resistance to help the most kids?” 

It started with that moment in 2007: Pitt sitting at a stoplight, haunted by the “significant but easy” fixes that were out of reach for too many kids. “I’m a fixer; that’s what I do,” he says. “It’s where a businessperson’s brain is.” And while Care to Learn began with the coat, the shoes—simple items to improve a child’s quality of life—it’s kind of become about how kids are programmed to see our world. 

Pitt came up in the tech industry, where programming is typically a straightforward process—specific inputs lead to specific outputs. The reality is: Kids who are living in poverty receive a lot of demoralizing inputs. No matter how well intentioned, the big services that are meant to help can be complicated and unwieldy, which means even small outcomes might take a while. Much of the world runs on certain assumptions, including that kids will have enough food and baseline stability, so kids in poverty can feel like the exception, like they’re always left out of the equation. It can seem like nothing really works. 

But then an organization like Care to Learn comes along, and it works. Someone notices that you’re cold or hungry or dirty, and they’re able to do something about it. They can do it quickly and without much fuss. It’s a totally different kind of input, and like a rogue piece of coding, there’s no telling how it might resonate inside the developing mind of a child. “At the end of the day, does a jacket or new shoes solve it?” Pitt asks. “Maybe not long term, but that day it does. Self-esteem is really what we’re doing. That’s what we’re building up in these kids because we’re helping them feel whole and feel good and not invisible.” 

In 2006, John Bongiorno, president of WorldServe International, reached out to Doug Pitt through Pitt’s pastor. Bongiorno wanted to talk about WorldServe’s water projects in east Africa. He invited Pitt to travel to Kenya and Tanzania and see the projects for himself. Pitt agreed that it sounded interesting.

“He’s calling me literally within five days and booking a trip,” Pitt says. “And I was like, ‘This is on. Okay, let’s go.’” It was a smart move on Bongiorno’s part. “If you can get someone in a village and show them ‘before water’ and ‘after water,’ you’ve got them,” Pitt says. “It got me.”

Since that first visit, he’s returned again and again. In December, he took his 30th trip to the region. During these visits, he’s seen programs aimed at worthy goals like strengthening infrastructure, improving healthcare and combating malaria. “But those don’t have my heart,” he says. “Water has my heart. It chose me, and it’s what I like to put my energy behind.” He loves the lasting nature of a new well—it’s a resource the community can use for two or three decades, and it raises the quality of life for everyone who depends on it. “It’s the people who keep me coming back,” he says.

He often brings his camera along. “I’ve been able to experience some things that take your breath away,” he says. “For someone who loves photography, you can’t shoot enough.”

Pitt enjoys photographing the people he meets, the extraordinary natural beauty and the wildlife. And his camera gives him a different way of seeing the world—something he thinks he might have picked up from his mom, Jane, a visual artist. “I do like that artistic switch,” he says.

It also helps keep him in touch with the very human stakes of his work with water. “It’s okay to step back and look through another lens,” he says. “It’s a big world, but it’s also really small. We’re all just people, trying to do what we do, and we deserve to be happy.”