About Frank Shooster

Author · Attorney · Educator · Humanitarian

Frank Shooster is a former trial attorney, corporate Co-CEO, and United States Senate staffer. He is the author of A Blueprint for Educating Every Poor Hungry Child in the Developing World and its companion volume, Education as if Everyone Mattered, which explains the intellectual foundation for the Blueprint.

He was educated at Antioch College and the University of Chicago, where he pursued graduate study in public policy. Antioch's political spectrum ran from center-left to Marxist, with exceptions. Chicago's ran from center-left to libertarian, also with exceptions. That breadth runs through everything that follows.

The Senate and Energy Policy

In 1974, Frank Shooster was hired to work in the United States Senate, where he conceived and wrote the Alternative Long-Range Energy Strategies Act. He had seen a RAND Corporation report applying backcasting to solar energy and expanded the approach to encompass seven different energy plans evaluated by a non-partisan body across fifty-year horizons.

Amory Lovins, working independently, arrived at a related insight: that integration of energy strategies would yield far more than the sum of the parts. Lovins thought we could get by with much less energy than most specialists across the political spectrum believed possible. He was right.

Fifty years later, sitting in a coffee shop in the Netherlands waiting for a grandson to be born, Frank Shooster had no idea that integration would yield the same kind of outsized payoff when applied to education. No one, as far as he can determine, has previously applied backcasting methodology to education in a developing country.

Four Decades in Law

Frank Shooster's legal career spanned four decades. He was a National and Florida Board Certified Trial Attorney concentrating on civil rights, corporate fraud, and government fraud, representing clients ranging from the Society of St. Pius X to American Atheists. He is a former AV-rated Superlawyer and a Gusi Peace Prize laureate. The Gusi Peace Prize, sometimes described as the Nobel Peace Prize of the East, has recognized heads of state, diplomats, scientists, royalty, business magnates, and educators.

In his final decade of practice, Frank Shooster served as Co-CEO and General Counsel of Global Response, a company with 2,500 employees, where he spearheaded the merger with Connexus and the subsequent spinoff, working with investor groups, bankers, and legal teams.

Humanitarian Work

Alongside the law, Frank Shooster led humanitarian missions delivering food, medicine, and supplies in Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, and Haiti, and visited schools across sub-Saharan Africa. He has traveled through more than 150 countries.

He has worked alongside Lead Haiti for fourteen years, with approximately thirty days of episodic field presence at Academie Lead Haiti near Milot. He has donated $750,000 to Academie Lead Haiti to date and has pledged an additional $750,000, the final $300,000 of which is contingent on meeting minimal KPIs. He has spent approximately twenty hours per month for fourteen years working alongside Lead Haiti, plus an additional 2,400 hours writing the Blueprint.

The Blueprint and No Forgotten Kids

Frank Shooster was enjoying retirement as a global nomad. Then he made a discovery and everything changed. It was too important to leave to armchair generals and cocktail-party conversation.

If he is right, the Blueprint could help millions of children and their parents climb out of extreme poverty. If he is wrong, they will still have built hundreds of schools, and even continued aid at the current level would be an improvement over the status quo.

The result is A Blueprint for Educating Every Poor Hungry Child in the Developing World: a 400-page model containing 74 interventions, stress-tested across 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations, showing that schools in the developing world can be self-financing at $117 per student per year in cost and $262 in projected revenue.

No Forgotten Kids is the nonprofit organization bringing the Blueprint to life. Haiti is the Proof of Concept. The world is the mission.

Frank Shooster lives in Boca Raton, Florida.