by Katherine Dumais
“What are your thoughts?” Someone from across the table asked me. The whole group stared. I was completely thrown off by the question; where did I think the future of the education reform movement was going to be by 2017 for underserved populations? I was two weeks into my co-op and taking notes at a conference, still a little unsure of where my role fit in within the office. A group of social entrepreneurs, business consultants, educators, and policy makers waited for an answer. I replied something slightly incoherent about codification of practice, the rewriting of ESEA, and the need to establish stronger student agency. Everyone seemed satisfied. While not my best showing, it was the start of my realization that I was now in the thick of a conversation, a movement, which is going to fundamentally change education in the United States.
My path here has largely stemmed from my life at home. After years of watching my brother struggle through his homework night after night, and watching my parents act as his biggest advocates, battling the school and teachers for accommodations and support to help him through, I began to think about how my brother’s life would be different had our parents not spoken English. Or how it would be different it they were working two jobs and couldn’t visit his school whenever they pleased. I wanted to explore what innovative ideas and the social enterprise space had to offer to serve those kids, and ended up stumbling upon the Reimagine Learning team.
Reimagine Learning is a fund within New Profit that seeks to create a movement around personalizing learning for all students and to forge student agency for kids who have experienced trauma, are living in poverty, are English language learners, or are dealing with a learning disability. There are currently 7 to 10 million students in this country in poverty who fit into this category. The Reimagine Learning fund consists of a network of innovative social sector organizations, many of which are financially supported by the fund, who encompass many different business models and localities. It also contains a funder group that helps to inform the overarching goals of the movement. The objective is to have a funder group that is continually engaging with underserved learner related topics with New Profit shaping the conversation, creating a direct, informed involvement for funders with their investments in the fund but also to help further shape their endowments outside of the network. Practitioners in the network continually come together to discuss how to bridge gaps in the field in order to create holistic solutions for kids who are experiencing multiple risk factors for underachievement and to discuss partnerships. These practitioners are also engaging with the funder group, ensuring that every organization has the financial backing to make their goals a reality.
As an Associate for Reimagine Learning, I work on network engagement and incubation grants. At New Profit, incubation grants are $100,000 of unrestricted funds set aside biannually for organizations or companies attempting to pilot a new program around underserved learning communities or who want to explore new partnerships. This cycle, I helped define the criteria for the reading and ranking of the letters of inquiry, completed the data work to establish what our top choices were, contributed in due diligence calls, and helped pull together the final presentation for our funders. For network engagement, I researched and eventually established the platform architecture for an online working group encompassing our 350 person network as well as supported the implementation of our biannual convenings. My final project is to create the synthesis deck from our last convening.
As I prepare to leave my final co-op, I reflect on the amazing time I have had working with great coworkers and engaging with some of the most disruptive educators in the country. My only hope is that I can speak more eloquently about education in the United States than I could that third week.
