One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened.