 It's quite touching to hear this. I don't usually want to hear this, I want to cry. That's why we need to start PMA Kids. Within three years, we finally make it happen. And this summer, we finally started PMA Kids to get prime management education for free for kids from middle income families. This is one of the biggest achievements in 2023. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product and featuring Forbes. I've helped 100 people blend the dream PMA job offer in fan companies and unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. And in this channel, we talk about tech trends and free prime management training. Like and subscribe and check out new video every Tuesday. And this video is actually very different from anything I've filmed in the past because this is something I truly feel very happy and it's about helping kids from middle income families. In the past couple of years, I have donated over $20,000 into all kinds of educational non-profit. And this year, we finally achieved our own mission, which is start our non-profit and dedicated to help kids from middle income families and teach them entrepreneurship. Do you know that in the US, about 15 million Americans, their household income is less than $34,000? An individual income is less than $17,000. Among these group of people, 15 million are children. These children significantly lacking resources such as food, stable living environment, not to mention premium education. I truly understand how they fail because I was one of those kids where I grew up in a low income family in China. Our family never had family vacation until when I was age of 20. I literally remember that when I was in elementary school, I saw my mom buying the fall over grapes from the vendors to save money. The way it works is now everyone today you go through the story by beautiful grapes out of the whole branch of grapes. And sometimes there's one or two or three grapes fall off at the bottom. And my mom would go to those street vendors and buy the fall off grapes and collect all the little grapes together so that she was able to only purchase the individual grapes for the price of one third of the whole bundle of larger grapes. This is what a hard-working mom is trying to save money but still trying to provide good quality of food to the children by being very frugal. This kind of story is happened many times in my own personal life. I grew up in China. No matter how poor we are and my family mainly focus on education because they believe that education is an equalizer. And luckily, few years later, I was able to move to the US with only $800 in my pocket to study my PhD. But the rest of the tuition is all covered by the scholarship. Seeing how hard my mom works and how hard my whole family just trying to use education to have a breakthrough, I suddenly realized that there are millions of little nances out there. They are in China, they may be in India, all of the world in the US as well. The family may have little resources but they really deserve better education so that they can have a breakthrough of their life as well. That's why this year I started PMA Kids which is to give free education to kids from middle-income families and teach them entrepreneurship. I've been trying to fulfill my non-profit mission in the past three years when I just started my PMA accelerator which is a coaching program. I was always dreaming about can I just put some kind of profit from PM Accelerator to the non-profit so that we can sustain ourselves and really make those premium product management education for free for kids from middle-income families. And this summer, we made it happen. We're able to do one-on-one donation matches which means each of students who are inside the PM Accelerator coaching program will give one free education to kids from middle-income families. It's one-to-one donation matches right now. Through the process, I discovered something very important I'd like to share with you guys. Number one thing, I realized that entrepreneurship and the product management have 70% overlap because it's all about how we create the best product to impact people's lives and drive users and solve problems for them and fall in love with the users. But lots of kids from middle-income families that never knew entrepreneurship and product management is such an amazing career and can actually help them to break free and jump their class from low-income to mid-income even to any different levels they can never imagine. They probably only receive traditional education thinking about just do some math problems do basic classwork but only reach people nowadays than their kids to start a lemonade stand to learn entrepreneurship but people from low-income families never thought about that because their parents probably blue color workers working really hard and didn't know that's one of the most important skills and values that kids need to learn. That's why we decided to give away product management education for free. And right now for PMA Kids we do not even accept donations because PMA Kids was funded by my PM Accelerator coaching program. The student who enrolled in the coaching program and the tradition is sponsoring another student to take the program for free. Now here is how it got started and also important lesson learned I'd love to share with everybody who's interested in the nonprofit mission. In June 2023, I made several social media posts and sent out email to my followers and nine people enrolled as my volunteer for PMA Kids. And then we immediately started customer interviews to understand what the truth needs and desire for kids from middle-income families what they're looking for, what the life looked like. And I also had a lead project manager called Karen, she's leading the PMA Kids. But together we're able to visit five churches and five high schools to identify those teenagers from middle-income families contact voice of customer interviews. And I discovered something shocking. For kids from low-income families, they're very practical. Their focus is how can make more money? Because they have seen their parents just like me working really hard only bringing maybe $100 per day for the family. So those kids, whenever we had conversation with them they always ask, can you help me to learn any skills so that I can start working early? I can start making money for my family. But whenever we talk about entrepreneurship product management, they didn't even understand how this is able to help them to grow their career. All they want to understand is can this help me to make more money? And nobody in the family was able to help them to do career planning at the stage. I remember one of the kids we interviewed and he is a teenager kid and he actually started really hard in those public schools in California. He said that, I saw my mom working really hard. He said that, I must study very hard and go to good university and learn a good job because I want to free up my mom. My mom is very busy. She works at the airport and she always work in the weekend because during the weekend her hourly rate can be doubled. So therefore my mom is always working but I truly miss my mom. I want to spend more time with my mom. But I know how hard she has been working for the family. So therefore I must go to a good university, learn a good job, get paid lots of money so that my mom doesn't need to make that much money for the family. It's quite touching to hear this. I don't use time when I hear this, I want to cry. That's why we need to start PMA Kids. The second biggest discovery is that for teenagers from many income families, their decisions are very school-oriented because each time when we tell them, hey, we're teaching entrepreneurship for free and giving you different kind of mentorship and resources, their responses, can you help me get into Harvard or Stanford? And then they will compare our product management and entrepreneurial free education to mass Olympic school saying, oh, if I do mass Olympic, it's more likely I will go to Harvard, MIT, Stanford. But learning entrepreneurship, is this really going to help me out? Can you tell me more? Because to them it's more about time allocation. It's actually not about money. Even if we give the free education to them, they're more thinking about time as money. What kind of activity they should do outside school can help them literally get into best and top schools. And lots of parents from the middle income families, they already have good enough education to understand what it takes for the children to be successful. They love to invest into education to help all the children to grow. So therefore they probably already told the children if you go to Harvard, you're able to land really good jobs so education is a top priority for the families already. There's no big database of low-income families to understand the needs and desire and true challenges. When we started to do customer interviews, we found out it's very difficult to access those low-income kids because in general it takes lots of money to do customer research, to build a full customer persona to understand what their needs desire and pain point. But because it came from low-income families and literally you're not able to make any profit from doing research about people from middle income families. So therefore the very limited information about where do they live, where's the persona and lots of people who came from low-income families, they don't speak English either because their parents are probably immigrant. So lots of information cannot be easily collected just because of language barrier. To conquer this challenge, we have worked with two non-profits. One is E-School for Girls, stands for Entrepreneurial School for Girls. The other one is Tech Goes Home, a brain technology to bring digital equality to kids. With the help of those two organizations, we're able to collect more information of kids from middle-income families to truly understand what can we really help them. And also if they don't think entrepreneurial and part of management education can help them achieve the goal of making more money, what specific needs do they have? Maybe what they're really lacking is career guidance. Maybe what they're really lacking is someone who point out to them there is more than one career path in front of them except just working hard to make more money and better career paths than just being a software engineer because you can actually generate better income by being a product manager. So there's a lot of moving part inside the PMA kids right now. This is just a brief update regarding what we've been doing in the past half a year. If you're interested in joining and really bringing entrepreneurship and part of management education to kids from low-income families, feel free to email my project manager, Karen at PM Accelerator.io. And happy holidays, everybody. If you resonate with any of my message today, feel free to like, comment, and share this video with anybody who want to be part of this mission. This is Dr. Nia C.D. from PM Accelerator.io. I'm gonna see you next time in my video right here.