All posts filed under: Education

These Legumes Offer a Leg Up

Published by Swati Singh

In 1989, Jossy Eyre was volunteering at a daytime women’s shelter in Denver as part of her master’s degree in social work. There she met dozens of jobless women with little sense of where they were going or what came next. After a period of relative safety and stability at the shelter, the women simply stopped showing up. Jossy worked at the shelter for the entire academic year, and it didn’t take long for familiar faces to reappear. Often, the women had gotten jobs during their time away, but struggled to keep them. Jossy’s talks with them revealed an interconnected web of social and financial challenges that required a more sustainable solution. So she did what all accidental social entrepreneurs do – she asked herself what she knew how to do, and how she could use her skills to create opportunities for others. 500 Bucks and a Vision Jossy knew how to make soup. So she invested $500 of her own money and put two women to work making single pot mixes – 10 Bean, …

Vote With Your Feet to End Youth Homelessness

Published by Swati Singh

Sam Harper was thrust into the life of a social entrepreneur early. “I was 18, and my buddy asked me to join a class project,” he recalls. A student at St. John’s University in Minnesota, Sam said yes to an audacious plan – selling warm knit beanies with a give-back model that would provide a free beanie for every child suffering from cancer in the United States. It was a new business model at the time that took off after a few short years, inspiring Sam to search for his own socially conscious business concept as college came to a close. The next opportunity popped up quickly. “One of my friends had this idea for a sock company,” Sam says. “He discovered that socks were the most requested, but least donated item at homeless shelters across America.” The friend was Michael Mader, another Minneapolis-based social entrepreneur searching for a way to help the local homeless community. So in 2016, Sam and Michael joined forces to launch Hippy Feet, a one-for-one social enterprise that sold warm, fuzzy …

It’s a Beautiful Day for Refugees

Published by Swati Singh

Where does most granola begin? Probably in a factory, or maybe a sticky bowl at home during an oatmeal cookie project gone wrong. At Beautiful Day, a nonprofit gourmet granola powerhouse in Rhode Island, the answer may surprise you – a classroom. In 2008, Keith Cooper was an educator struggling to meet the learning needs of his refugee students. The decontextualized atmosphere of the western classroom – desks and chairs arranged in neat rows – wasn’t conducive to learning for kids who had just arrived from camps. Since most people learn by doing, Keith decided that one of his personal hobbies might be a perfect hands-on project. So he got together with his friend Geoff Gordon and started teaching his students how to make granola. English improved. Morale improved. Students found something that bound them together and gave them purpose – and Keith saw a chance to make it all sustainable. Honoring Work & Roots Fast-forward a dozen years, and Beautiful Day is a thriving nonprofit with a mission “to help refugees, especially youth and the most …

Who are “Opportunity Youth”?

Published by Swati Singh

The term “Opportunity Youth” often gets flung around in education and other youth-serving spaces, but it is often misunderstood or conflated with “At-Promise Youth”. While At-Promise Youth broadly refers to under-resourced young people in danger of dropping out, Opportunity Youth are more specifically young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who have already disengaged from school, and who are not participating in the labor market. There are currently 4.6 million Opportunity Youth in the United States. This is 11.7% of all youth between the ages of 16 and 24. The proportion is higher in historically underserved and minority communities. For example, 17.2% of all Black youth between the ages of 16 and 24 are considered Opportunity Youth. Unfortunately, the current economic situation will likely inflate these figures, and amplify their inherent inequity. According to the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, “Nearly 40 percent of our young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are weakly attached or unattached to school and work at some point during that formative stretch of their …

The Overarching Importance of Communication and Basic Digital Literacy

Published by Swati Singh

As millions of educators and students around the world shifted to distance learning over the past few weeks, all sorts of incredible virtual tools have popped up. Companies have generously offered free accounts and product trials to teachers, and I’ve already familiarized myself with a few that I plan on using next year: Screencastify, Flipgrid, Esri StoryMaps, and Doodly. I am sure this list will grow. The plethora of tools and services are useless, however, if we are unable to locate and communicate with students. Once again, like most challenges related to our social infrastructure, the problem of broken channels of communication disproportionately affects those who are already disadvantaged. I read a local news story the other day about how the pandemic is revealing just how many households in Southern California lack internet access. I am sure this trend can be extrapolated to communities nationwide. We can huddle all we want as school leaders, and devise and roll out new learning plans, but what is our sustainable strategy as a community of changemakers to address …

The Disproportionate Effects of Uncertainty

Published by Swati Singh

For the past few days, like many Americans, I have watched my nest egg get tumbled along a path of peril and uncertainty. Needless to say, it has some new cracks, and I have suffered. I consider myself young, but I’m old enough to remember what happened in 2008. My friends and I were wee babes who had just entered the workforce after graduating college. I was working my dream job at a global hospitality company in Las Vegas, and my sister was wrapping up law school to move to Manhattan. Then suddenly, everything changed. I lost my job and came home. I planned to take refuge in graduate school, and my sister mentored me from afar. Our family business had taken a hit, but we were still prodding along. My resourceful parents and the relationships they had built in the community kept our company alive. That is something I remember distinctly – leaders within tight ecosystems rising to the occasion and helping one another. I was fortunate enough to work in that business for …