Our History

When the two founders of So What Else traveled to the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans in 2009, the emotional impact of taking part in philanthropic activism inspired them to organize their own community’s efforts through a local nonprofit. In their early volunteer work around Montgomery County, David Silbert and Robert Schless became acquainted with the various issues of hunger, poverty and unsafe behavior afflicting adults and children and worked tirelessly on a volunteer basis to ask local service organizations, “So What Else can we do to help?”

At its inception, So What Else’s primary activities included recruiting and leading volunteers to support local community service projects in a general determination to stimulate volunteerism in Montgomery County. In 2010, the founders decided to narrow So What Else’s focus and concentrate its efforts on addressing the shocking shortage of extracurricular programming and inconsistency of existing programming available to children in local under-served neighborhoods. Since then, So What Else has refined its youth development program to encompass educational, recreational, and community-building activities that reach +2,000 youth in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area each year.