 Good afternoon. I hope everybody's having a wonderful day. I'm Connie Yowell. I'm the CEO of Collective Shift and I'm your moderator for this afternoon's conversation. You are you are here to hear a conversation about LRNG, a new model for learning and changing social systems. So that's the that's the panel you're for. We have a very distinguished and excellent panel this afternoon. To my left is Julia Stash, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino and an MSNBC correspondent. Next to Maria Teresa we have John Legend, the executive director of the Show Me campaign who also does a little singing on the side. And Elise Eidman-Adal, executive director of the National Writing Project. So if I had started, if I had come here to do this panel two months ago, I would be sitting here as a program officer at the MacArthur Foundation. In the last month I have spun out to run a nonprofit as I said called Collective Shift. And our first endeavor is a new model for education that we call LRNG. At its simplest and at its core, LRNG brings together all of the disparate learning opportunities that exist across our communities and across our cities. In libraries, after school programs, museums, community centers, in schools, out of schools and online. It brings them together in a seamless network that is open and inviting to our youth and transforms how they access and participate in learning and their paths to success. It comes out of ten years of grant making at the MacArthur Foundation. And Julia I want to turn to you to start us off. Part of the big question I think is how do we come to understand what these new models for learning should be? And for you to help us understand some of the things that you've learned in your time at MacArthur about how to support and advance innovation. So thank you, county. I really like to be here with you today in a different role. I want to say a couple things about innovation. First and foremost, I have learned that some conditions foster innovation and others do not. So before I talk about the conditions that foster innovation and particularly focused on LRNG, let me talk a little bit about the genesis of the work. Now foundations often say we're going to attack a problem and we know what the solution is and we know what the outcomes are at the outset. And what we're going to do is we're going to track our progress through the solution to those outcomes. So that is not a condition that is particularly conducive to innovation. So this particular work that has from which LRNG has emerged started not with a problem, not with a solution, not with outcomes. It started with a phenomenon and the phenomenon was young people and digital media and it started then with a question. Are young people learning differently? Are they socializing differently? Are they engaging civically in a different way because of their use of digital media, their exposure to it? And if so, what would the implications be for the social system that we call education? So what we were working in here in what ultimately came out LRNG, we were in not a space, not a solution space, but a space of inquiry and experimentation and innovation. So there, particularly in this body of work, there were six conditions that I thought were conducive to innovation. And the first is find some really smart, curious people and let them loose on the question. Let them follow that question in ways that we would not even anticipate. Let them follow that question to their insights and then their insights lead to new models, new approaches, new paradigms. And then give them the opportunity to go down some dead ends to fail without consequences. I'm thinking of virtual worlds there as a place that was absolutely. And then build community amongst them because no individual can carry paradigm changing thinking alone and everybody's thoughts are enhanced and refreshed by interaction with others. And then absolutely provide the resources to try these innovations, these new paradigms and these models, but do not demand outcomes. Only demand that the learning be documented and shared so that other people can embrace it and use it on their own. And then because ideas and pockets of innovation are not enough and actually to change systems, you have to have institutional change. Another condition is that you support bold, innovation-oriented institutional leaders and you help them push the boundaries of their institutions. Now the fact is that LRNG came out of all of this and it really shows the value of starting with a question. If we had started with a solution, if what we were looking for was better student performance, we probably would have stayed within the context of school reform. And what we never would have come across, we never would have fostered for such wonderful innovations like connected learning which is a new way of thinking about learning that starts with the young person. We probably never would have been able to even conceive of UMedia which pushed the edge on what a library can be, learning labs in museums, a hive learning network that brings together in cities, all of the out-of-school educators, institutions, online, everything, every place, every kind of venue that can provide learning experiences for young people. We never would have been able to see a quest to learn school where young people are on a mission. We wouldn't have absolutely been able to see the promise of badges and we would not have actually come up with the cities of learning which is the platform from which LRNG has grown and it is the innovation and the demonstration that Collective Shift intends to expand. So what I want to say, LRNG is not a startup. It's not an idea in a garage. As a matter of fact, it is all of these things and it needs $50 million in its first three years and MacArthur has provided the seed funding. But the fact is the challenge of providing the infrastructure that brings all of these innovative things together is the task of Collective Shift. Julie, one of the things that LRNG does and it's been piloted in four cities already, Chicago, Washington DC, Pittsburgh and Dallas is that it really seeks to be that infrastructure that can build an ecosystem of networked learning across cities. Can you say a little bit about why not continue that as grant making and why spin it out into a nonprofit? It seems so obvious to me now. But I am the president of the foundation and actually I like to think that good things can happen inside foundations. But there's two big areas of concern when you actually are facing an issue such as LRNG is addressing. First of all foundation constraints and second of all the need to really scale if what you're trying to do is have transformative impact on the maximum number in this instance of young people. So first of all, what do I mean by foundation constraints? Now I don't say this with any hubris but our brand is too strong and when your brand is too strong it's hard to invite other people to be with you as a peer particularly if others brands are just as strong even if they're in an adjacent sort of space. Matter of fact there's not enough money. I mean people may think foundations have a lot of money but we couldn't have conceived of doing only LRNG. We have other things that we need to focus on and so we had to spin it out to free it from the competition for foundation resources. Now we couldn't possibly test demand at scale within the context of a foundation and it was really hard to build the multi sector partnership that is going to be required for true scale and I have to admit that actually the entrepreneurial business doesn't fit with the foundation culture. So the hardest part of that though is the multi sector partnership which is essential for scale because for LRNG that partnership has to include every sector that cares about future success for all young people. And that's the kids themselves, it's the parents, it's corporations, it's schools, it's universities, it's cities, it's governments. Everybody who cares about future success for young people. So how do you put them together in a partnership sitting inside a foundation when you're a program officer with an allocation of dollars and you give out money only once a quarter? I mean what is that? So it just seems to me that there's just only so much that a foundation can do within its own philanthropic frame, within its legal, within its legal shell. So it just seemed to me that the right thing to do, not just to me, but to us, it seemed like the right thing to do to say is there another structure that addresses those. And for me the conclusion from all of our investigation was a business like organization with the rigor of a business with market savvy with solid technology, with product innovation and the kind of leadership that could say we have the potential for growth because growth is what's required for scale. So the fact is that I'm happy that we've done the R&D. I'm happy that we have seed funded this. But now if this has as much potential to be the transformative force that we think it can be, it needs new partners, it needs, it needs more money and different types of money and I am incredibly enthused about the interest and the promise. So I think we're in a very good place. Thank you. Murray, Trisa, probably the greatest challenge for any new model of learning in any attempt to change a social system is our ever increasing inequality gap. Latinos are the fastest growing youth population in the country. Overall our population has 16% Latino. 16% has 2% of the wealth in this country. You've been running power summits across the United States working with young Latino leaders. Photo Latino reaches more than 5 million youth every month. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're learning, how you think about how to deal with the inequality gap and what we need, what we can learn from the work that you've been doing as we think about building change in social systems in a new model for learning? Well, thank, first of all, Connie, thank you so much for having Photo Latino. It's nice for me to be back home. Photo Latino first started in New York, but when it became a nonprofit startup, which is a complete misnomer, was actually here in the Bay Area. And we didn't realize that we were doing civic media at the time, but that's actually what we set out to do. Not because we were clever, but because we didn't have any funding. And it was easy and cheap to get online. And what we've learned through the last 11 years is the need and hunger among the American Latino community for information. Connie, when you speak that you have a generation of Latinos where you have 16% of them as part of our population and they only own 2% of the wealth, what we're talking about is two things. One is that the Latino community is incredibly young compared to the rest of the population. The average American is 42 years old. The average Latino is 26, 27 years old. That tidal wave of Latinos where they're all the way around the corner, that cluster is actually at 14 years old. So we haven't even felt their impact yet. And when we are talking about transformational change, these young people live in increasingly areas where they're expected to know information and transfer that knowledge. Perfect example is what we recently saw with Sophie Cruz, the five-year-old who handed that letter to the Pope. What she was handing was a leadership role that had been put on her shoulders to navigate America for her parents saying, I need help. It's not that different from the millions of immigrant children right now that are expected to know the answers that are navigating America for their parents. And what we found is that, and one of the reasons why I'm so excited with LRNG is that when we talk about networks and transformation, one of these things that these young people need more than anything is information to navigate the systems. And LRNG is going to provide a platform of experts to call their expertise and give a massive amount of potential to transfer this knowledge to the second largest group of Americans who really don't know how to do it right now, but who 54 million people almost depend on their ability to do so. So I'm very excited. I think that with Voto Latino when we did the power summits last year, what we found, we did it in conjunction with MacArthur and MIT Civic Engagement Labs. We created a curriculum for going around colleges. And what we found that the number one thing that young people were looking for in these badges systems were how to network, how to actually improve their skillset. All of a sudden, we thought that we were targeting college students, but in reality, the majority of the folks were young women in their first or second year of professional development. And they were getting lost in the system because they didn't know how to actually identify cultural cues and how to basically make sure that they were improving and actually succeeding in the workforce. So overnight, not only are we still actively identifying and engaging young people that are 18 to 24, but increasingly, we're actually getting older because no one's telling them that the things that they need in order to be successful. We're coming to Stanford next week for our power summit. We're super excited. And there where we're going to have a conversation is how do we actually use digital badging for civic engagement? How do you actually use social media so that you can advocate for yourself or your families for your own professional well-being, but at the same time, connect it to a local place so that people don't get lost in the virtual world? And that was really one of the things that we learned is that for the first seven years of Voto Latino, we were very much on a virtual stage, but people still want to touch each other. They still want to connect. And this actually allows for not only a transfer of knowledge, but also meeting people where they are, which I think is incredibly important. Yeah. Part of what LRNG does is connect all of the learning opportunities that exist across our cities and online through this thing called digital badges. And badges can carry an enormous amount of information, both about who the learner is, what the organization is that is issuing the badge in this instance, Voto Latino, what the young person did in order to demonstrate their competency to earn the badge. And badges are also shareable. They can be put into LinkedIn. They can be put on Facebook, on resumes, and online. So part of what the work with Voto Latino population is really using those badges to connect from point A to point B, so that young people can begin to understand the paths that they need in order to move on to success. Well, and it's breaking down the classroom at the same time. Recognizing that a lot of these young people are either doing internships or they're working during the summer, they're doing other stuff that unfortunately is not necessarily captured within the classroom system. And this basically validates that they have actually mastered a certain skill set. For these young people, oftentimes who have to choose between dropping out of school or work, this is incredibly transformative and incredibly transformative because all of a sudden they feel like, yes, they're going to work, but they're not losing out on other opportunities. And basically that that's the key right now for upward mobility in a time when you have increased income gaps where people feel that they're stuck. This actually provides a light at the end of the tunnel saying no, we're actually going to help you build those pathways from A to Z and actually make sure that as you're achieving different levels, more of your opportunity is going to be opening up before you. Yeah, I appreciate that. John, you've been involved in philanthropy and in the nonprofit world and in education for a long time. Relatively long for my short life. You've focused a lot of your work on teachers. And we know in LRNG that it is absolutely critical both to connect the learning from out of school to in school to make the lives of teachers a little bit easier. Can you tell us a little bit about your focus on teachers? Well, first of all, we value teachers highly because we know that a lot of learning happens outside of school and outside of the classroom, but a lot of learning happens in the classroom or it should. And we know that when students have access to great teachers, everything is better. Their potential improves, their potential to make money improves, their potential to learn improves. All these things happen when you have quality teachers in the classroom, but what so often happens is the great teachers are isolated in a lot of ways because they don't get a lot of time to interact with other teachers and share what they're doing well. Great teachers are constrained by the by the demands of the system, the school, the testing regime, all these other things that kind of limit what teachers are able to do and how creative they can be. And they also just don't have the resources and the empowerment to be as innovative as they would like to be. And we wanted to give them the opportunity and the funding and the information they could use to really be innovative. And so we started a fund where we would ask teachers questions, challenge them and say, what would you do to make your classroom more creative, give your students more space to learn, take the constraints that you're working within and make the most of them. How would you do that? And we've got submissions from teachers all over the country. We gave funding to many of them and are using what they've done as individuals to share with other teachers around the country so that all teachers can learn from what these innovators are doing. So that's a program called LRNG Innovators. Yes. That's been going for about the last year. For about a year now and it was basically a pilot program the first time and we just didn't know what would happen. We got so many great submissions and we funded some really great projects where the teachers are really helping the kids to understand how what they're learning in the classroom connects to the rest of the world, projects that really help them understand their city better, their environment better, their how STEM relates to real life and the things that they want to do in life. And it wouldn't happen if these teachers weren't excited about innovating and we didn't give them the platform and the funding and the power to do that. And has that felt different from some of the work that you've done in the past on teachers? Can you say a little bit more? Well, we've done quite a few things, but I think we we always thought, you know, it's great to reward teachers, right? And great to highlight great teachers and you see these events where they have teachers of the year and this and that. But so often you don't see the practices of great teaching elevated so that other teachers can learn. You don't see a lot of communication between teachers because they're operating kind of in a silo in the individual classroom or they're working. And so a lot of our thought was around not just praising great teachers for doing a good job, but really saying how do we learn from each other and improve the entire pool rather than just highlighting examples of greatness. Elise, National Writing Project and you have partnered with John on LRNG Innovators and you sort of with National Writing Project, which is an organization, a nonprofit organization that has been around for 30 years and has really been sort of the infrastructure for teacher professional development for so many great teachers. You sort of sit at the intersection of the questions around inequality, the questions around innovation and really thinking about innovation and new models for learning. Can you just say a little bit about what you've been learning from LRNG Innovators and from your work? Yes, it's it's interesting and John framed it so nicely. A lot of people don't necessarily think of teachers as innovators. They think often as teachers or systems as the recipient of innovations created elsewhere. Things that make their life easier or will help a teacher stretch beyond his or her capacity. They don't actually imagine that person to be the curriculum designer, to be the the one who understands the local situation of these young people in this community, their aspirations, the potential community partners and the ability to design in that space. That's really what innovators, that's what entrepreneurs, that's what people like that do. We wanted to be able to bring that language, that frame, to help us understand what great teachers do actually on a pretty routine and daily basis when they are curriculum designers, implementers and leaders of instruction. And we think that's really critical in this conversation also about equity. Because the kinds of learning innovations that get created elsewhere and then exported, we have seen that those, and they're often great, are reaching the young people in communities and families where their communities, where their families can help them navigate, find them, access them, support them to take advantage of them. And a lot of communities, it is that amazing teacher or librarian or out of school mentor who is the trusted gateway to a particular community to understand that community, to be able to revise and re-understand that learning opportunity and place it there. It's critical to diversifying the pipeline. It's critical to bringing less engaged communities into civic spaces. That that anchoring person, that person who is not just the trusted mentor to say hey, this is cool, come here. That actually to be a design partner to make it work there. So we had to understand teachers and in the future also librarians, museum educators, after-school programmers as people who do that kind of work in innovation and should be partners with any aspiration to create and do learning system. So we wanted to endow, we're learning that from LRNG, we need to endow that space with the same understanding about innovation, innovation clusters connecting one innovator to another because their work speaks to each other, that this audience here would bring to understanding how to network entrepreneurs in a space, for example, for community development. And so as we think about LRNG building that ecosystem that connects for young people all of those learning opportunities, we also need to be connecting the mentors and the teachers together as well. Can you say a little bit about what's necessary for that to be successful? My organization for its 40 years has had teachers, librarians, all people from a number of learning systems and they would all say separately that they all share the same question. Julie talked about starting with a question. If you live in and work in a learning institution, your learning institution whether it was a school, a museum, a library was built at a moment when it was the way that we moved knowledge into a community. Out on the frontier we need a school, we need a new library, bring the books out, that's how we get knowledge to this place. And we all know that that is not necessary anymore, that the internet does it better. So if you think about these folks in these learning institutions, each of whom has inherited a tremendous wealth of material circumstance, buildings, hardware, stuff, all designed for an older learning system and all believing that they need to re-engineer their work for a new learning system. They need to be able to work together to co- think what will the new practices be for people in this new learning system. They're all funded from separate lines in the municipal government, let's say. They all compete with each other for local philanthropic dollars. They all have different timelines, schedules, the teacher's day ends and he or she can think about something at the same time you give kids over to the after school practitioners. We need a whole re-engineering of how we can think about bringing these communities together to work together so that in fact they can make coherent learning opportunities and take advantage of the digital tools we have now. That's actually the subject of the next challenge that LRNG innovators is setting out to teachers and out-of-school practitioners. How can you actually work across that divide, create new systems for your own interaction so that you can leverage the affordances of your two institutions and of all the new tools that we have now for learning. Elise, I want to say something that goes back to the very origins of the work when we started it, which was let's not look at institutional change or professional change from the perspective of the teacher, the librarian or the school or the museum. I think that key insight is we have to look at it from the perspective of the young person, the kid. What we found is that when you do that, you actually come up with very different answers than the adults who think they know what they should do to serve that young person. So I think we, LRNG I think will constantly challenge change to be very focused and centered on what young people want, what they need, often as expressed exactly by them and not by others. This moving from siloed systems into the ecosystem that we're talking about that LRNG represents that really begins with the youth and youth interests and youth passions and connecting youth to peers. It's very different than what many of our adults who work in those systems understand. And so we're really trying to grapple with how to create also a new narrative for how to think about learning and how to think about not siloed but rather connected ecosystems. You are both working on really trying to build out a new narrative. Elise, can you say a little bit about what you've been learning from LRNG? Yeah, it's also been privilege to work in partnership with media creators and people whose business it is to help us tell the story. So that's also been a very powerful partnership. But I'll just give you one example. Much of what we will when we try to dramatize teachers, let's say in the media, there's a couple of pretty common narratives about teachers. I like to think of them as either they are our saviors or they're the ones we need to be saved from one or the other. So there's a whole narrative about teachers and their inadequacies, what schools don't do, how we'll never get to the future from these people. There's also the heroic sort of stand and deliver teacher. Often that stand and deliver teacher, the beauty of that teacher is that he or she cares and loves the kids, which is true of many teachers. They're not often featured for their smarts or their design capacity or the way that they can, for example, network a community. So we have a video, it's one of the ones John was referring to about an amazing group of teachers, not one but several in Pittsburgh, who are taking advantage of a lot of the investment in Pittsburgh that's also an LRNG city model in order to have very young people who are not particularly interested in science, didn't see science as the thing that they wanted to pursue. In an engineering class where what drives them is STEM for social good. So this group of teachers takes them to Whole Foods and meets with the business community and they start to look at food deserts, a set of them become interested in that and how if they can design better packaging, they can rethink how fresh food can get to communities that are not getting fresh food in Pittsburgh. Didn't appeal to everybody, some other young people though were really interested in meeting with the veterans group and an engineering firm that is redesigning prosthetic devices for returning and wounded veterans. That kind of design of teachers, students finding their interests, networked with business, doing real projects in the real world, perhaps creating entrepreneurial return of some sort for those companies that are now investing in that model becomes a way to think that's completely outside of the school in many ways but completely anchored by smart teaching and following the learners and their passions. That group of young people that are doing that is probably the most diverse set of young people that you will see in an engineering class in any of the high schools in Pittsburgh in that particular program drawn from many communities to do this project. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's I think it's important because as we're here in Silicon Valley we all think about the power of technology, the power of all these resources that kids have that you would think might disintermediate the teacher or make them less important but you start to realize that kids need help navigating through all of this vast sea of information both in the digital world but also in their communities so they understand how to use the resources they have in the best way and teachers and other adults who are helping them learn are still the best conduits for helping them understand those things and we still need our teachers to be great and sensitive and aware of what is happening with our kids it's not enough for us to have all this great technology we need a way for them to understand it and connect with it understand how to use it for good and teachers are still the most effective way to do that. And Trisha, are you gonna Yeah, and I think what I think is what is really fascinating about it is that not only is the teacher becoming Christian the shepherd and the connector but it's something that again when you're talking about how do you maximize this incredible moment where we have never been more interconnected before but yet have so many of our young people that are completely siloed what you're doing is you're creating pathways for connectedness and you're allowing for young people to dream again and what I mean by that is last year when we were in San Jose we went we did our power cement last year in San Jose state it was our last stop on the road and I take for granted that I'm from from Northern California and I just assumed that all these young people have are highly connected and have access that conference was the only one where Voto Latino did not trend the majority of the kids in the rooms had flip phones didn't have smartphones and it was the very first time where they were for the they were actually opening their eyes to what Silicon Valley could possibly offer them because they had never been invited to the conversation and what you guys are creating is being invited to the conversation being shepherd into it I'm a big believer that if you give people access and roadmaps these young people are hungry they're hungry to identify how they can actually achieve their dreams but if we don't provide that those spaces and we don't provide experts that actually provide those spaces through the teachers and through the business community as well then we're actually falling short not only on their potential but also on the the rewards that the community as a whole could actually reap I was going to say that I think one of the most important things that is at the core of LRNG is not only marrying the innovation that teachers bring in addition to the love that they have always brought it's the alternate pathways that so many kids that come from different places with different experiences and different passions alternate pathways to success that through badging and other other mechanisms can be validated and that validation then is visible and over time badges the intent there is that they become that they have highly valuable credential worthy currency in both the workforce and in higher education I'm giving you warning that I'm opening it up to questions in a couple of minutes this is going to be one of my last questions for you all I want to shift just a little bit we are at Socap so for financial investors they're often looking at return on investment return on investment meaning financial we are talking about a social system we're talking about a new model for learning collective shift is a nonprofit just as national writing project is in Voto Latino Maria Teresa and Julie I want to start with you in terms of how do you think about ROI a return on investment when the investment is around social change in public good I think that oftentimes and I think that that's actually oftentimes where Silicon Valley has a very difficult time with this idea of nonprofit because we're always looking for a return on investment and what we don't see is by providing as an example providing someone the space to all of a sudden either do leadership development or actively identify who they want their elected person to be they are immediately becoming intertwined and part of that community and as default they're actually going to start giving more to the community as well that is hard to measure right away but if we one is one is if we don't I think that we're going to continue to see increasing inequality last year was the very for it was the first time in 72 years that we had the least voter participation at our polls the least I like to use the example of what happened in Ferguson in 2012 Ferguson had close to 56% participation in their in their electorate in 2013 when folks were deciding their municipal participation it was less than 6% you keep giving us depressing stories but no but I also think that there's opportunity and I think that that and that's all that is right is opportunities like yes there's there's work to be done but when you have when you you have folks that are asking the right questions and trying and are being curious on how to solve the answers that only gives us the opportunity to actually be successful I actually think that we are in the same place where we were at 100 years ago at the turn of the century we had massive immigration in the United States we were in the middle of one of the great you know greatest recessions we had massive technological changes industrial age everything and what happened we actually recognize that that with this system we had an opportunity to realign our systems to actually compete in the global scale to actually recognize that there was a space for both business and yes government and that there was an opportunity to take care of our citizens so that they can achieve the middle class folks often forget that the middle class was I mean my husband always you know he kind of frowns when I said but it was a government program and what I mean by that is that it was World War II vets not everyone but World War II vets that came back with a GI bill in their back pocket and they also had money to to buy the first home not everyone I think that we have to recognize that African-Americans Native Americans and Latinos did not have that opportunity but that created the middle class and if we cannot remember what are possibly what we did when we had so much less than today I actually think that when you talk to young people there and especially when you talk to young Latinos I mean young Latinos have one of as you mentioned have one of the hardest I mean I had a conversation the other day with Norman Lear and he was talking about how in the Great Depression he was basically talking about the importance of being a good provider that's what you wanted to be when you grow up how you had young people making these big massive decisions on behalf of their parents because nobody else nobody else could do he talked about how his father basically passed away at a young age and at nine years old the officer said you know it's up to you now Norman he was talking about it and then we was framing it that's the young American Latino experience today and if we give folks that opportunity then and feed on that idea that they that they're possibly that they definitely believe in America but we give them the pathways and the resources and the teachers and the massive opportunity of transfer of knowledge I think our best days are ahead yeah yeah so on that return on investment notion let's set aside the myth that there is no way to quantify return in the in the social sector but I'm not talking about the kind of return that you know you get on your quarterly investor call and you can and you report on it and you're either your stock is either up or down or whatever I mean MacArthur Foundation has spent more than 200 million dollars getting to this moment where we are launching with partners lrng and listening to you you say only this percentage or only this number of kids or only this level of poverty or only this level of disengagement the fact is we have all the we have all the baselines we need and the fact is that we can also begin to say is there movement through this mechanism which provides these alternate pathways to success is there movement on these and we're not going to talk about them quarterly but we're going to be tracking them over time and 200 million dollars is a lot but compared to the potential I think that not only was it worth it but it was actually a modest investment John you're a creative artist still talking about return on investment you're a creative artist you also have a background as being a Boston consulting group it's an interesting intersection yes how do you think about this question of ROI well I think about how many lives are you changing how many outcomes are you improving if you're working in a school you can measure by who's going to college and who's finishing who's you know the immediate I think feedback is through evaluation and test scores and things of that nature but I think the more telling feedback is how do you change their lives long term and I think schools are getting better at following up I'm on the board of Harlem Village Academies and one of the things that they're focused on is dealing with alumni as they go to college because we're having no problem getting them through high school they're graduating at a very high rate they're doing very well on the state tests while they're there but a key place where we start to lose a lot of the kids we work with is do they finish college not do they start college but do they finish college and so there are ways to measure impact and I think for each organization it's going to be different but but overall what we're trying to do is change lives improve communities and we can track certain milestones and outcomes based on what our goals are I want to open it up to questions from the audience great we have lots of hands I'll leave it to you state it and I'll restate it society that is I would consider very spiritually lacking and especially I think as a society that is increasing its literacy around neurodiversity I'm wondering if you can speak about yeah those aspects yeah so part of the question is really about art culture creativity as we think about new learning models in LRNG well this issue is very important to me because well one of the things I just did was raise money to build a performing art space in my hometown in our school because our state will fund certain building improvements Ohio I'm from Ohio our state will fund certain building improvements but they will not fund a performing art space that's just like and the rules that you can't use new state funding to build a performing art space so I was like well I'm going to raise the money then because I know how important it was to me to have a space to perform a space to express myself it gave me agency it gave me opportunities to collaborate on projects with my peers helped me become a leader helped me discover my own voice as a creative person and as a student in general and so I've spent time in Chicago with Connie with the students who were poets rappers musicians all people who wanted to express themselves and they were using the things that were learning about writing and expression and the things that were going on in their community to express themselves and create great art and so I think that's a critical part of any kind of integrated learning experience where you're trying to develop their soul their mind their creativity it's critical that you have great opportunities for them to express themselves artistically and if I could can I build on that that eloquently said I think one of the things that really illustrates this new model and what Julie was saying before about starting with the learner so this model of learning basically says let's hold back how our institutions are designed let's hold back things like Carnegie units in English and social studies let's hold back put them in the background and let's focus on learners their interests what they want to produce and do what they want to make and then let's figure out how to actually let that engine of their interests be the thing that powers the learning opportunity so in that you can hear artistic expression and performance you can hear engineering you can hear maker spaces you can hear writing and creation of all sorts so if we have a network which we do through LRNG innovators and more broadly of educators who want to ask instead the question how do I create good platforms and substantial learning opportunities that say we're going to follow kids and they're artistic or scientific or whatever production what would that institution look like what would that design look like so the very first LRNG innovation challenge was that here you are in an institution here are your schools how do you create more time and space for creative interest driven production in your in your building in your time plan with your community partners what would that look like and the 14 teams that got innovation challenges are all creating models that we know are completely exportable are completely replicable with the adaptations that a new place would want because they're actually designs that fit inside of existing institutions to expand the time space and opportunity for things like the arts for things like a maker space and solve the kinds of problems that practitioners creating those things are going to have to go through if we're going to scale those kinds of things so instead of thinking about the categories like arts, English, reading, writing we think about the young person who wants to make do and create and then how do you build a learning opportunity around that desire that young people have this is a follow up question to that my name is Lynn and I am from here in the Bay Area and I've spent my entire career working with alternative educators teaching artists and out of school time educators and I am working with a group of teaching artists right now who are looking at digital badging for the artists themselves because these non-traditional educators they have a love for the thing that they do and they go in and they teach the kids what they do but they don't have the credentials that school teachers have but they're the ones that might see the kid and say I know you I love you and I can see that you're good at this and that and bring them to something that's really exciting for them and so I'm wondering if the LRNG innovators program has considered kind of badging and connecting these non-traditional educators and I'd love to know about that and if you haven't I'd love to connect you with some of the things that I'm working on so I'd love to hear more about that we want to follow up anyway so absolutely and connect with you and the people you're working with part of the one of the wonderful kind of test bed models that led to LRNG Julie mentioned it earlier is the creation of these you-media learning labs in museums and in libraries and in these these are all places in those institutions those learning institutions where a place where young people can come and just drop in and be helped to make or create something it's where those wonderful young poets were learning in Chicago Chance the Rappers was one of the students that was involved in the you-media in Chicago and it ended up being a pretty successful young rapper and still is and I got to go see the what's the guy brother Mike who was like the mentor for all the young poets in Chicago that were coming through the program but continue and he's exactly the type of person that you're talking about in these spaces just because you're a librarian and you've opened up now a whole you-media center for teens to come drop in doesn't mean that you are the person who will teach them everything and be everything to them you need partnership with these amazing folks who may be from whatever aspect of the community but passionate about their art and able to connect with kids so this badging process and the partnership to give them the legitimacy but also a pathway for their training because equally able always to work in every every situation with young people how is there a learning or training pathway for them to develop their practice if this is where they want to go it's the same model of learning that we've been talking about just applied to the adults that we would talk about the young people because it's following the learner yeah and one of the things LRNG is working on is making sure that those badges that are being earned by the mentors and the digital artists may also be accepted at universities for credit because we really again that's a silo problem and we want to make sure that we're building that ecosystem but there's some questions over there go ahead go thanks hi thank you can you tell me if for how you guys are leveraging or engaging people who are trying to dress a lot of the same issues from a commercial standpoint so I can think particularly from the education technology side people like at Motu or trying to connect teachers and have quite a bit of scale already people like bloom border trying to help with teachers engage in professional development can you talk about how you're incorporating other actors within the ecosystem sure so part of what LRNG is about is about partnership and collaboration so LRNG is really meant to be the glue there's lots of extraordinary innovation that's happening in the education space it's bubbling up in different places but there's no infrastructure that connects all of it and so LRNG is really building that infrastructure that allows everybody to participate in it and to be a distribution channel for the innovations that could be happening in Pittsburgh or in Chicago or in any other city in the country so it also is a platform that can connect to other platforms so whether it's at Motu or whether it's a boys and girls club is developing a whole new platform for badging they will link into LRNG so that as a young person is discovering their interests and begins to move on a path that path may take them to the boys and girls club and move into that platform or it may move them to Edmodo and they can connect into that platform what we want is to be openly networked so that our young people aren't siloed by the technology that they're using but instead are able to explore their learning wherever it happens and on whatever platform as long as we're openly connected and that's what LRNG is really about let me add one tiny thing to that and that is that one of the tough things within the context of philanthropy is to create an infrastructure that puts at the table people who have different interests and I'm talking about the fact that this issue requires an all hands on deck not just a philanthropic approach not just a non-profit approach but think of all the things that corporations and others who may be coming to the issue from their own self-interest but they should be at the same table and that's a little harder for philanthropy and I think that underscore is one of the reasons that spinning out LRNG to enable it to function in a sophisticated way across all the sectors that need to be at the table Hi Girl Hi, thank you so much it's an amazing conversation my name is Jennifer Kuchel I run a company called YSN we've been testing global youth engagement campaigns around this exact topic for the past few years we were actually able to run a campaign for Subway which was started by a 17-year-old with a thousand dollars the biggest restaurant chain in the world and we got kids in 100 countries to play a business simulation game around business entrepreneurship but everyone told us we couldn't do it we've been trying to replicate it over and over and one of the things that I keep going back to is this whole concept of career planning is a disaster around the world the career centers which aren't even being used by half of the students on campuses are using 40-year-old models still teaching kids that they should spend all their time working on a resume and here when you engage them in real opportunities and bring them to Whole Foods and bring them out in their community that's just it's bringing up a whole new model but I believe that global scalability is possible now what's happening in Pittsburgh you know should be all over the world and we have the technology to do that so I was really curious if you were you know touch-pointing even with the career planning because they need to rework so LRNG is very much both focused on what we traditionally call helping kids to become college ready but really what it wants what we are about is helping kids to understand how to be successful in the world and what's changing most dramatically is our working world and so it really is because it can pull on learning experiences that are happening in school but also those that are happening out of school and because we're building paths with corporate partners those corporate partners can inform what those paths look like and it's and I believe that A that it's absolutely critical and B that it's a global problem yeah the yeah yeah you've had your hand up for a while being in the middle that's the problem it's better on the aisles hi my name is phoenix I love and completely grew with everything you're talking about strange but I'd like to talk to you specifically at some point because my team's created a piece of code that connects the Xbox PlayStation and Nintendo globally oh wow into one virtual education world that's ad supported my son would love you that's great that's great and I mean it's interesting because I mean it brings on educational curriculum entertainment but the most important thing is that it gets 300 million minds to focus on an innovation prize to create a new solution every 90 days for a million dollar prize yep that's terrific I would love to pick your brain because I'm like some research fingers and figure out if we could get a beta prototype into one of the schools the next eight months so absolutely I love you yeah it's great I'm here with a with a set of our team and be happy to talk and that's one of the things that's so important as we think about learning in the 21st century is that there are extraordinary innovations happening our young people particularly those who are least resourced don't have access to them don't know how to participate in them can't find them and so part of what we want to do with LRNG is to make those visible make them transparent to young people easy to access and with badges have them count for something and so that's part of what we really want to make those connections particularly for the kids that you've been talking about Maria Trisa oh and I don't know where the mic is who has the okay go hi great thanks I'm I'm Noreen thank you for the panel I'm Norender I actually a little louder please sure I'm Norender I lead BCG's Venture Philanthropy Arm in Canada so it's nice to so one of the things we talk about a lot is youth unemployment and youth engagement in Toronto and you touched on this earlier about about engaging corporations could you dig deeper on that how do you solve that puzzle how do you solve for the demand side of what employers are looking for what they need and how students will be then equipped with the right information yeah so the the way that we're going about it with LRNG is actually partnering with the companies so electronic arts EA is a partner with us Fossil is a partner with us we have a whole set of other partners we bring the badges together into learning paths that we call playlists we're co-designing those with the companies so that the companies can begin to tell us what are the core skills and capacities that they need in order to hire because it turns out that a lot of the companies really have a talent pipeline problem they have a diversity problem and they are looking for young people who have the skills and competencies that they need in order to hire but we have a fragmented learning context and so those things are never connected and I believe part of the reason why collective shift in LRNG is sitting at that intersection of for-profit not-for-profit entertainment and public sector is because we actually have to bring all those things together in the experiences that we're creating for our young people because if we leave it to our young people to have to figure out how to get from point A to point B they're never going to get there that's our job and then we need to make it open and inviting to them Connie do you actually want to talk a little bit about how it works? I think the fossil example that you shared with me the other day actually all of a sudden I think we'll actually crystallize it yeah so fossil is a company that has just joined us and they are developing fossil designs jewelry so what they care about are design skills and so we have been our partners in Dallas which is where fossil is located big thought and we have been working with the fossil company to identify what are those design skills that young people need how do you build badges so that they test for and represent the competencies that one needs in order to be a good designer and then we bring together a whole set of learning experiences that are local and are online so that a young person then is interested in design can begin to follow and go through those learning opportunities earn badges that represent competency in different aspects of design graphic design 3D printing those sorts of things as the person moves through the playlist and advances they unlock new opportunities one of those opportunities that they get to unlock is actually going to fossil and shadowing some of the employees it could be that they unlock the opportunity for once they've designed jewelry if it reaches a certain quality for fossil to showcase that jewelry all right so we're really beginning to build tight relationships between the companies and their needs and what they can offer kids because fossil has a whole set of employees who can serve as mentors and participate in this playlist and so it's really bringing the companies in around mentorship around opportunities and around skill sets that we're co-designing with I think one of the things I think a partnership with a company should also have as an imperative that a company would examine its own recruiting practices resume screening algorithms or certain degrees or certifications that aren't actually necessary for a job so it seems to me there's sort of a it's two-sided how can they be open but how can they how can they procedurally be open as well and so I think that's going to be going to be a big challenge to corporations around the world yeah I think here one of the things I'd much appreciate about the conversations here at SOCAP and this particular audience is that that notion that there's also corporate social responsibility piece there's also an internal equity piece because we can design already we don't need a new system to design learning experiences to give corporate America the high-end employees that they want we have built that system as much complaining it's a global system to deliver a group of people to a kind of high-end position in corporate America or elsewhere what we don't have is a system that makes it diverse that makes it open with equity to a wider range of people that ensures that all the jobs are quality jobs not just let's say the programmers but also the building maintenance crew and etc here I've been in so many conversations with this audience about that problem if we can create a partnership with with corporate partners that say in addition we want to look at our record our recruiting we'd like to make more learning opportunities available for our maintenance staff as well as our programmers as well as then we could create a learning and advancement system that takes up the challenge that many people here have been talking about about the quality of work about the quality of life in communities about income income inequality and in many many ways so that's another way that business can join us by looking to the learning space to provide a way to rethink internal operations to make learning in a corporation also a positive thing for all the adults that are there Elise, I'm going to end us on that note we're out of time but I'm going to end by saying the future of LRNG and the future of learning is about partnership and collaboration with the non-profit organizations with the for-profit organizations and with our government entities and I hope you all join us thank you