COEUR d’ALENE — Glenda Setshedi wants a world where everyone is fulfilled.

“You serve better if you’re fulfilled,” she said. “It makes it so much easier to do the job.”

She serves by enabling children to better understand themselves and make better educational and career decisions as a result.

“I think you can’t be fulfilled if no one’s giving you the opportunity to discover yourself fully,” said Setshedi, co-founder of Johannesburg-based Career Active. “And so a perfect world is just granting everyone an opportunity to do that.”

Setshedi is in Coeur d’Alene through Wednesday, exploring the possibility of expanding to North Idaho. A 2019 Mandela Washington Fellow for the U.S. government’s Young African Leaders Initiative, Setshedi created Career Active in 2015 to serve children in her native South Africa.

The organization uses individualized profiles to help adults, college students, and high school students in particular identify and pursue career paths which suit them. The profiles can take as little as three hours to develop, but are more often delivered in a three-day, upbeat and active camp for students.

Many find the experience transformative, and later return to become camp mentors to the next generation.

As Setshedi says, the lack of adequate and personalized “career pathing” for high school-and-college-aged children, as well as a general lack of personal fulfillment, are global issues.

One of Career Active’s main goals is to bridge what Setshedi calls the gap between tertiary [university] education and high schools.

Young adults are expected to identify a career path and figure out the steps to pursue it — and many become structurally or financially barred from rectifying missteps in those paths.

In South Africa, where students must begin making these decisions in early high school while many are disadvantaged, this can leave engineering-track teenagers unable to pursue their intended college major because they took the wrong math courses, she said as an example. The problem is exacerbated by language barriers there. In most schools, classes are taught in English or Afrikaans, whereas many students speak tribal languages at home.

During her fellowship at Notre Dame University, where she befriended local Century 21 broker and graduate student Craig Smith, she was surprised to find a similar situation in the States.

While U.S. students tend to make career choices after high school, many find themselves equally unprepared, and uncertain about what they want. They bounce around in different roles and industries or spend more time and money switching college majors.

“All that says to me is that somewhere, someone didn’t bridge the gap between high school and [higher education],” Setshedi said. “Couldn’t someone have helped you prepare so that you make a decision, stick with it, and know what it is that you want to do instead of having to redo it so many times?”

To do that, Career Active uses psychometric tests adapted for high schoolers. The tests employ simplified language, based on a thinking inventory tool called the Neethling Brain Instrument. Career Active helps students understand their thinking preferences, personality characteristics, and skills in a wholistic approach to better planning.

That’s reflected in their motto, “Work, Play, Discover.”

“We’re whole human beings so all three aspects matter,” said Setshedi.

If students discover who they are, she reasons, they can be better prepared and make better decisions without feeling pressure.

“Not just children, but I believe people should be given opportunities to discover who they are before they can then decide what passions they want to pursue when they’re older,” she said.

While the South African Department of Education has endorsed Career Active, it’s not government funded. Schools pay on their own or find corporate and private sponsors. Career Active also provides professional development to teachers and helps underperforming schools improve student achievement rates, saving them from being shut down.

“And that (school closing) would have caused crazy overcrowding,” Smith pointed out, “because it would have made the classrooms in the surrounding schools up to 70-plus per class.”

Despite her current focus on teens and young adults, Setshedi’s career focus began by working with mine workers, enabling them to widen their horizons.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in industrial psychology, she worked for South Africa’s Glencore mine, where she quickly realized illiteracy was a common barrier. Setshedi developed a basic education program, allowing workers to learn to read and write at work between shifts.

It was after expanding this work to include the miners’ children — whose parents were unable to help them with homework and who often felt pigeonholed into narrowed options — that Setshedi realized her greater passion was to branch into education.

This led her to earn her master’s degree in social entrepreneurship, co-found Career Active with childhood friend and business partner Masego Sehoole, and receive an endorsement from the South African Department of Education to work with schools.

Through Sehoole and her own organization, 4fusionfitness, dance and exercise help comprise the “active” side of Career Active. Sessions often begin and end with exercise and nutrition talks.

“It’s to remind them that though they may have an amazing brain, it’s just as important to take care of the body,” she said.

Since its founding in 2015, Career Active has already gone international. Their team of 16 professionals has served over 5,000 children at 70 to 80 schools across South Africa as well as in Botswana and Namibia. With Smith’s help, Setshedi is hoping to bring Career Active to the U.S. — with Coeur d’Alene as one of her first locations.

She’s in the process of establishing Career Active as an LLC, getting to know the area, and networking with Idaho education and government experts.

“Technology is moving so far ahead of the education system that workers are getting left behind, with workers getting replaced by robotics all over the world. This gap is in Idaho as well,” said Smith, who said he and his siblings had to leave North Idaho to achieve their goals. “Career Active could help education bridge this gap by teaching kids what their gifts might be and career pathing at a younger age.”

Setshedi also hopes to observe local schools to understand the particular challenges North Idaho students face, a method she says has greatly helped her serve schools at home.

Back in her hometown of Hammanskraal, she hopes to expand children’s services.

“I want to build a walk-in center for children...where children can walk in and just get assistance,” she said.

“The bigger picture in 10 years is to have a physical center in every country.”

She calls it Project 68, because it will take $68,000, or 68 people gifting $1,000 each, to build the first center in South Africa.

“I think it’s tragic that people sit in jobs they hate every day, and they do it because of money I think. And they’ve just kind of found a way to live with it,” Setshedi said.

“I think if we spend 80 percent of our lives in these jobs, wouldn’t it be more fulfilling if we did something that we really love?”

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For more information, visit Career Active’s Facebook page. Its website Careeractive.co.za is currently being updated.