Dave Thillen gently shakes his head and laughs. "Are you ready to hear this?" he asks. The story he's about to tell is too crazy to believe. Actually, he and his wife, Elaine, have a series of crazy stories to tell.
"Has Dave told you about this space?" Elaine says about the enormous room where she's standing adjacent to Greene County High School.
The room looks like it belongs to a Fortune 500 company. Every time the Thillens walk inside, they can barely comprehend the generosity it took to convert what was once a storage area for wrestling mats and forgotten miscellany into the Greene College and Career Academy (GCCA) career center with six glassed-in offices, 100-inch TV screens, a 12-foot-long conference table, and dozens of chairs suitable for executives. At any time during the week, you can witness 50-60 high school students in these chairs, engaging in one-on-one conversations with volunteer career coaches - most of them Reynolds Members.
"I'm telling you," Dave says, shaking his head again, "this is way beyond anything I ever imagined."
Dave and Elaine officially launched the Thillen Education Foundation in 2020 to expand on a vision bordering on unrealistic: end generational poverty in Greene County. Not reduce it. The goal seemed far-fetched in a school district where the graduation rate had been traditionally low (77%) and the poverty rate unfathomably high (98%).
The Thillens would need to convince career professionals to believe strongly enough in their optimistic vision to commit to four years of relationship-building with students.
"We were hoping to find maybe 10 people to volunteer and 100 students to participate," Elaine says, still trying to process how quickly the program mushroomed to more than 200 career coaches and more than 600 students. "Crazy, isn't it?"
The graduation rate at Greene County High School is climbing. The poverty rate is certain to decline as a steady stream of teenagers embrace highly structured academic and career paths while earning "Dave Dollars" to be used toward college, trade school, work tools, and business start-ups.
"The culture of the school is changing," says John Ellenberg, who left his job as high-school principal in Newton County to return to his alma mater (GCHS class of '91) where he serves as the principal and as the CEO of GCCA. "Students see their peers going into careers that until recently didn't exist to them. They want to follow the same path."
Maybe Dave Thillen isn't so crazy to believe poverty can end in one generation.
"If you don't believe it," John says, "then you don't know Dave."
The man with the soft-spoken voice is driven by an internal fire fanned by the craziest story of all.
"Wait until you hear what I've come from," Dave says, "It's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing."
The most improbable story begins in a small apartment on the north side of Chicago. It includes seven children. The mother had her first child when she was 15 years old. Of the seven children, only five survived past their first birthday.
Dave never knew his father. What he does recall are dubious crowds hanging out near the apartment, finding a gun while playing, and acting tough to endure his environment. Once, he asked his mother if she could buy him a popsicle.
“She didn’t have ten cents,” Dave says. “I mean, she literally did not have ten cents.” Dave found a private spot and cried. He never asked for money again.
When his mother was able to move into a trailer, Dave thought they’d hit the big time. The kids who lived around him were different. They took school seriously.
“The question I asked myself back then is the same question the kids we work with today need to ask: are you going to be cool or are you going to school?”
Dave’s decision to study propelled him to become the only person in his family to graduate from high school. From there, he went to Wheaton College, earned a master’s in math, served in the military as a gymnastics coach at West Point, and worked 30 years for IBM. Then, the same Dave Thillen who fought to survive
from the time he was born moved with Elaine to Reynolds Lake Oconee, where he turned his focus back to the inner-city.
“I know what it’s like to live in poverty,” he says, “and I know what it takes to escape it.”
Dave is still astonished about this next part, where he arrived at Reynolds and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity. After helping build one home, he couldn’t help but think, “Now what?”
“I wanted to do more,” he says, “so I decided to put a computer in every Habitat home and train kids how to use it. From there, I’d help them organize a plan for school and beyond.”
When graduation statistics became available, school leaders were stunned to find 92% of the kids living in Habitat homes with Dave’s computers had graduated, compared with 77% of the general student population. More than 80% were going to college, trade schools, or the military.
“We saw what Dave was doing with Habitat and asked him to do the same thing at GCCA, where he could potentially connect with every student in the high school,” John says.
At the time, Dave’s career coaching program consisted of one coach (him) and 25 kids.
“I said, ‘Heck yeah.’ But honestly, reaching 600 students seemed like a pipedream.”
When he told friends at Reynolds, his internal fire spread. In year one, 26 volunteer coaches and 100 students signed up for the program. A year later, there were over 50 coaches and 200 students. In the fall of 2024, more than 200 coaches (about 75% of them Reynolds Members) are working with almost the entire student body at Greene County High School.
“Eighth graders move into high school now and ask when they can get a career coach,” John says. “They think it’s cool.”
They cross the threshold from the high school to the career center where they can talk with engineers, CFOs, doctors, lawyers, and business owners.
“Anything a student can dream of being, we have a career coach for it,” Dave says. “And most of the coaches are like me: they worked their way out of difficult backgrounds and now they want to do something transformative.”
The volunteer commitment follows a strategic plan. Year one: Build relationships. Year two: Develop academic and career plans. Year three: Prepare for the SAT and ACT. Year four: Create a vision for life beyond high school.
“It’s important for these kids to know their walk across the stage at graduation is not the end of their journey,” Dave says. “It’s a steppingstone toward the life they want.”
The students are on paths to become professionals and the next career coaches for another generation of students.
“I see myself in each of these kids,” Dave says. “Remember when I said this is a crazy story? There you go. Now you know why I believe we can end poverty in Greene County.”
