A short facetime call later and I’ve interviewed the founder of, and recipient of a youth delegate award from the United Nations in 2018 on behalf of her charity, Girls For CS. Trinity Donohugh, seen by her peers as astonishingly intelligent with the world as her oyster, agreed to a last minute conversation to allow me explore the mind of a “philanthropreneur”; a character with genius ideas and the aspiration to better the world for others before herself. 

The audio crackles a little as the connection weakens between my kitchen in England and her dorm room at Stanford University, California. “I guess I think the biggest thing, at least for me, was like going out and seeing the situation that people were in” she says explaining the fundamentals as to why the computer literacy initiative was founded. Trinity went out to Burma in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis and one conversation after another got her thinking. “There were a ton of kids going to school and that was a great thing but they were going to monastic schools because they couldn’t reach government schools” referring to her travels almost four years before, “and all these monastic schools are completely reliant on donations and so like the kind of education that they were getting was just so different to the kind of education that we were getting in the UK.” 

We speak back and forth about her discoveries and travels but then remember that I was only promised fifteen minutes before Trinity has to rush onto the next meeting; we get back to the point. “Initially I was like ok English is good, but English was very widely taught with non-profits.” Upon talking to businesses in Yangon it became clear that yes it was important for their employees to speak and understand English but as Trinity made clear “what’s more important now is like people being able to like write a word document, do a powerpoint.” Having studied Computer Science at school, it wasn’t difficult for her to start teaching small coding classes locally in England and in Hong Kong.  It wasn’t something she’d done before but it seemed like an obvious way forward and Trinity has always been one to push the boundaries of what she knew and how she worked. “I think with the teaching part, I definitely found it challenging,” I nod understandably, “to motivate the kids, deal with that, it was all a complete learning curve.” 

I go on to ask how such an idea then led to the production of computer coding podcasts that then went on to be translated into four other languages in order to provide the same service for countries such as Cambodia, India and Vietnam.

“I always feel like it starts from a problem and then you kind of brainstorm solutions, test out solutions and then you find one that works and then you go with that one.” I knew Trinity at school, mainly because we shared a boarding house from the age of sixteen, but also because I was constantly going to her for help with my economics essays and maths problems. She was always introducing me to podcasts such as NPR’s Planet Money, The Indicator, Masters of Scale as well as many more; in other words she knew her way around the world of podcasts and audio learning and she was never not listening to something on the podacast app. Podcasts therefore seemed like a desirable and viable way of going about her goal however she made it clear that it was a lucky coincidence that it had worked out that way. “I feel like even at the end of the day if you’re trying to find a solution, you’re searching up stuff, you’ll probably come across something somewhere.”

In terms of starting a business and/or a charity and moving towards your goal has always baffled me especially when Trinity set hers up within a matter of weeks, she tells me what matters most “is talking to a ton of people. I always find that yes I love my work and yes I think it is important but like at the same time it’s so so so important to just have those conversations. It might even initially seem like ‘ok I don’t even know what I’m going to learn from this person’ but like saying yes to a meeting and going and talking to them, you’re surprised what you learn.”