Learning for Civic Action Challenge
Mapping Justice
trubel&co champions underserved youth to tackle complex societal challenges using equitable data analytics, responsible technology, and inclusive design.
What is the name of your solution?
Mapping Justice
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
trubel&co champions underserved youth to tackle complex societal challenges using equitable data analytics, responsible technology, and inclusive design.
What specific problem are you solving?
The need for trubel&co was born from the lived experiences of our co-founders who, having navigated STEM curricula and work environments as POC, experienced firsthand how traditional models push STEM solely as workforce development, rather than a tool for equity and social impact. Coursework excluded conversations of ethics, responsibility, and history, and was devoid of critical thinking paired with skill applications for societal impact– so we’re building a solution.
Racial disparities in STEM education and career pipelines are detrimental to developing the innovations we need as we face sweeping societal issues. BIPOC folks are underrepresented in STEM education, therefore STEM skills are inadequately used to drive community-led innovation and grassroots change that most affect underserved communities. These pipeline disparities begin with education, where BIPOC students who have the most lived experience of urgent issues facing this country, from climate to racial disparities, and the intersectional impacts of such emergencies, lack equitable access to STEM skills as a way to drive change.
BIPOC youth are not offered opportunities to see themselves in the essential work of building innovations that shape their lives. Black and Latinx populations remain under-resourced in STEM, particularly within engineering/computing fields. Disparities deepen within certain industries — 4% of big tech is Black/Latinx — and more so when one considers intersectionality: Latinas, Black and Indigenous women comprise 7.3% of all STEM college graduates. These disparities illustrate that technical education is failing us all, as BIPOC folks are excluded from the digital conversation and aren’t provided equitable opportunities to shape the technologies that shape us all.
Data literacy is essential to today’s youth in the digital age no matter what they end up studying and applying their skills to. We all engage with algorithms and technology across society, which involve elements of data science and coding that are increasingly prevalent. Youth need to be aware of their own agency within the context of their own digital experiences–the media they consume, the algorithms that influence their actions, and the lasting impacts of technologies in their communities.
Students need early opportunities to explore their passions through tools that enable their success and value their lived experience, and our pedagogy harnesses students’ existing social awareness and citizen expertise. This is why we choose to teach GIS skills through Mapping Justice: disparities are undeniably evident when visualized, and GIS does just that–illustrating data-backed inequities that our students experience every day while building a skill-driven cohort of critically conscious STEM thinkers. With equitable opportunities for historically underrepresented youth in STEM education, we foresee a future for technical innovation that dismantles oppressive systems. The current status quo of technical education is not a viable option if we wish to see liberation from rampant inequity in education and society as a whole.
What is your solution?
trubel&co’s mission is to build youth power in the digital age. We do so by integrating technical education with experiential learning and liberatory design, so underserved students can use data, design and technology to build responsible innovations that spark positive change in their communities. trubel&co envisions a future in which underserved youth are equipped and supported to be changemakers for their communities throughout their careers, with the critical thinking skills to question and disrupt systems that maintain inequity, and the skills & tools to create sustainable change.
trubel&co creates programs such as Mapping Justice (MJ) that equip diverse students with STEM tools and a commitment to reshape society for the better. We create learning environments where students leave with increased technical proficiency, a concrete understanding of the role identity & place play within STEM, and an opportunity to design & implement their own vision for civic change. Developed over three pilots, MJ is a part-time, virtual summer course teaching high school youth how to design geospatial tools for social change. Our instruction on mapping and data visualization skills paired with Race, Power, and Technology curricula is channeled into self-directed capstones, as students use geospatial data to illustrate issues that impact their lives.
Three pilot programs of MJ demonstrated how community-tailored learning environments, produced by instructors with lived experience in the cities where MJ is executed, are essential to students’ production of successful capstone projects and pursuits beyond high school. To successfully implement MJ, we work closely with geographically-specific partners to tailor the program to community needs, such as a curricular focus on uses of GIS in coastal cities facing accelerated impacts of climate change as we are doing in Florida. Our past pilots were created in partnership with the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science (MITES) program, as measured through survey and interview data.
One previous capstone modeled global migration patterns sparked by climate change– produced by Edelawite, a now-freshman at U Chicago, who has since worked on water scarcity research through National Geographic Society's Freshwater Conservation Externship. She is motivated to pursue such STEM opportunities in part from her identity as an immigrant to the US and her experience with resource inequity in her home country, Ethiopia.
Christian’s MJ capstone, ”Travel Inequality of New York City Students: Correlation between travel distance, neighborhood, and quality of education” informed his current studies in Urban Planning and Computer Science at MIT. He maintains strong interest in data visualization and shared, “...because of my lived experience and MJ, I can see how different communities have different needs and should be taken into consideration as urban planners.”
These are just a few examples from our 60+ majority BIPOC MJ alumni, and 300+ workshop participants, who demonstrate how trubel&co’s programming is building a pipeline of diverse changemakers. Their pursuits of higher education integrating sciences and social justice illustrate the impact MJ has already had, and how trubel&co can spark widespread “trubel” as we scale.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our programs prioritize students from underserved backgrounds, facing historic and/or institutional barriers to STEM due to race, gender, or class. We measure success by reflecting on how we amplify opportunity within underserved communities and measure our ability to drive critical consciousness. We value identity-informed lived experience in all that we do, and bring this directly into the classrooms and all spaces we enter. It is essential for youth of all lived experiences to have the skills to ask, “Where do I have an opportunity to promote equitable outcomes?” “Where might there be a risk of potential bias?” While we work to diversify the STEM pipeline, we must also work to ensure that anyone in the pipeline sees opportunities in their work to shape justice, promote positive social impact, minimize harm and dismantle oppressive systems.
We assess how Mapping Justice helps improve student’s technical proficiency, self-efficacy and critical consciousness (the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality). By acting outside the traditional educational environment, we have the opportunity to reimagine the liberatory power of education, promote innovation & creativity within STEM, and address soft skills that are often under-measured by school systems. Using research-backed pre and post-assessments, we measure technical knowledge gained and retained during the course of the program, and evaluate participants’ ability to apply skills. Paired with this is the measurement of critical consciousness–assessing knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequity–developing a sense of agency–power or capability–and ultimately the self-efficacy to commit to take critical action against oppressive conditions. We source tools for measurement and assessment from research universities and leading education hubs across the country such as Education for Liberation Network and Feedback Labs.
Mapping Justice produces youth drivers of sustainable, meaningful change by empowering them with the tools, skills, and community to overcome the opportunity gap. By scaling our offerings, which we are currently exploring in a community-informed, experimental phase of pursuing Mapping Justice as 8-week, 1-week, and 1-time offerings, we can achieve increased impact across the STEM workforce pipeline. For trubel&co, the next year is crucial to our exploration and intentionality in building earned revenue streams that diversify our income and create organizational sustainability while meeting the express needs of intentionally selected communities.
If wildly impactful, trubel&co would spark a generation of changemakers who are confident in using technical skills to improve the communities around them. Our programs would encourage widespread critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration– essential skills for addressing complex societal challenges. Furthermore, the voices and experiences of marginalized communities would be central to all fields of innovation, giving them the tools and resources they need to challenge and transform the systems that perpetuate inequality and oppression, and accelerating their agency. To get there, trubel&co curricula like Mapping Justice would be available to students across the nation in various forms: summer programming, intensive workshops, service learning opportunities, and alumni development programming. trubel&co will shift the status quo in STEM education, making the orientation around civics a default.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
As a socially-conscious technologist today, I embrace the thread of empathy across my work; my identities, education, and career all underscore my belief that empathy is critical to creating sustainable equity in society.
My family valued education as a form of social mobility, having used it to combat poverty and overcome societal barriers. My mother was a math teacher, and my Nigerian immigrant father is an engineer. Seeing my community reflected in STEM careers was deeply formative as my interest in design and creating blossomed. I knew what engineering was at a young age, and realized that most opportunities are dependent on community (and that opportunity is not dispersed equally & colored by trends in race/class). I focused on how I could use STEM skills to create opportunities I was experiencing in the US for folks back in Nigeria. Empathy was core to my interest in engineering a better world - I was told I could create products to make cities better for humans everywhere, and because I wanted to gain that skillset, I majored in both Mechanical Engineering and International Development.
In college, I encountered tensions between traditional STEM curricula and social history. To learn how to make things, I needed to learn mathematical theory, but if I wanted to learn how to help people, to understand why inequity exists, I had to look beyond my STEM education; I took classes in global health, sociology and Black studies. I was forcing an “unintuitive” integration into my curriculum, which was a major hurdle in a field of study that is already less accessible to students from marginalized backgrounds. Upon graduating, I was met with the workforce realities the lack of social impact education creates in the field. I saw few real career opportunities for those committed to equitable data, responsible technology, and inclusive design.
My multi-hyphenated identity and career showed me the potentials and challenges of working at the intersection of innovation and impact, and motivated me to launch trubel&co together with co-founders Alija, Alani, and Natalie. Our collective multi-minority perspective informs trubel&co’s pedagogy, which is driven by the urgency for equity and culturally-informed teaching practices in tech. As design strategists, creative technologists, and product managers, we bring our collective work experience to the mission of bridging the gap between technology and social impact.
Our team is led primarily by queer people of color with experience in technical fields, shaping the cultural competency embedded in our pedagogy. Outside of trubel&co, two founding members also pursue institutionally-backed research on equity within STEM education: Natalie (through Northwestern) studies anti-blackness in CS education, and Nick (through Stanford) studies the integration of liberatory design into traditional innovation coursework. Co-founder Alija Blackwell drives trubel&co’s community-centric design, edtech ethics, and learning impact evaluation, and recently piloted a culturally-responsive learning intervention about children’s digital rights using interactive game design. Co-founder Alani Douglas is a mission-driven product manager driving trubel&co’s scaling, and has worked within social impact organizations incorporating equity in technology, currently at Included Health.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Enable learners to bridge civic knowledge with taking action by understanding real-world problems, building networks, organizing plans for collective action, and exploring prosocial careers.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
San Francisco, CA
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization testing a product, service, or business model with a small number of users
How many people does your solution currently serve?
300
Why are you applying to Solve?
We’re excited to potentially join the MIT SOLVE community because we acknowledge it was much more than just a funding opportunity. We were drawn in due to the opportunity to launch an additional pilot, furthering the idea we’ve manifested, but grow excited with the ability to continue developing the vision based on MIT SOLVE's input and community engagement. Reviewing available materials on the program showed me the lasting impact alumni felt from the program, being a part of a broader community to support them in this journey. We look forward to being pushed to ensure our idea is successful and deeply informed by community practice, as we work to innovate for social change. This challenge in particular is increidbly algned as we foster civic action into traditional STEM curricula. We hope to work closely with the MIT SOLVE team to iterate and ensure we are on the right path, evaluating our impact and centering the community we’re working with. We’ve tested demand from our three pilots, but hope that in scaling, we can ensure broader desirability and accessibility into our programming. MIT SOLVE would be an incredible opportunity for us as entrepreneurs, educators, and members of the community that are committed to creating lasting impact to grow the potential of others.
We hope SOLVE can help us address open assumptions. We may be assuming that there is ample need for additional STEM programming in these communities especially in regards to a civics deficit, so it will be important for us to assess what type of education resources this community already has access to, both formally and informally. While our team comes from various racial and gender backgrounds, our pathways and motivations may not be the same as those we plan to work with. I’ve learned when in the classroom, we do not know all that may be happening outside the classroom in students’ lives, which definitely plays a role in their engagement and overall performance. We embrace empathy when working with students, knowing that capacity may vary and structure ourselves to support students in bringing their best selves to the group.
Multiple signs also show that this is the right time for the venture. Threats against critical race theory are at an extreme high, while schools also are challenged to meet mid-pandemic needs. Civics education rates are at a low. Students and systems have proven that digital models of education can scale, and they have done the work to adapt to these models of learning. For the 2022-2023 year, there has been a peak in ESSER funding (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) to address post-pandemic learning loss, and our programming aligns with their key pillars.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Nick Okafor
What makes your solution innovative?
trubel&co is actively working to strike the appropriate balance between scaling an abolitionist, equity-focused curriculum in geographies with expressed need, and adapting to ideological pain-points for the communities and leaders that are essential to our student outreach and funding.
trubel&co’s instructional approach, with core tenants of centering historically marginalized perspectives and investigation of biases in data, is antiracist and grounded in liberatory design: a practice in building solutions and innovations that disrupt inequitable systems and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression. trubel&co’s approach is unique among more traditional STEM educational solutions in that it centers identity and place in grappling with issues across society while working to produce a pipeline of socially responsible innovators. MJ centers GIS because it is a powerful and intuitive tool to visualize disparities that otherwise remain invisible. GIS is a highly accessible mapping tool for gathering meaning from data compared to technical programs such as R and Python that require deep technical expertise before getting to real-world insights. Throughout the course, student learnings are driven by their own identities and lived experiences.
trubel&co’s instructional approach, with core tenants of centering historically marginalized perspectives and investigation of biases in data, is antiracist and grounded in liberatory design: a practice in building solutions and innovations that disrupt inequitable systems and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression. We prioritize community network building through strong alumni engagement, including internship placements and research opportunities with trubel&co and other institutions. trubel&co’s approach is unique among more traditional STEM educational solutions in that it centers identity and place in grappling with issues across society while working to produce a pipeline of socially responsible innovators.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
trubel&co plans to spend the next 12 months accomplishing the following: 1) scaling our program impact by bringing Mapping Justice to three new cities in 2024, and 2) effectively and intentionally assessing outcomes of and learnings from our 2023 SW Florida pilot to inform 2024 scaling.
Scaling to new cities in 2024 requires early investment in existing and ongoing relationships in St. Louis, MO and Detroit, MI, where we plan to bring Mapping Justice in 2024 in partnership with Washington University in St. Louis and University of Michigan, respectively. As our curriculum centers identity and place, scaling to new geographies requires building relationship with on-the-ground partners with lived experience in these cities, and a pedagogical approach that is informed by expressed community needs. This funding allows us to invest time and labor into these relationships to bring future programs to fruition in these key cities. We have demonstrated this approach with our current work with Florida Gulf Coast University to bring a climate and environmental justice-focused Mapping Justice to SW Florida.
The 2023 Mapping Justice pilot in SW Florida is our first time running the MJ program outside of the MIT ecosystem, so measuring and assessing impact of this pilot is essential as we pursue further scaling in geographic reach of MJ. This funding is essential to our internal evaluation systems and team.
We plan to launch in 4 cities in Year 2, with us already ecosystem building in Bay Area, Detroit, and St. Louis. We plan to launch in 7 cities in Year 3, 10 cities in Year 4, and 15 cities in Year 5.
trubel&co will spend the next year accomplishing the following with this funding: 1) scaling our program impact by bringing Mapping Justice to two new cities in 2024, and 2) assessing impact of our 2023 SW Florida pilot. The activities associated with each goal are:
2024 Scaling: 1A) Each city requires a Mapping Justice project manager to drive contracts with university customers, student application processes, student recruitment strategy, Lead Instructor and TA recruitment, hiring, and onboarding, and manage the distribution of labor and contributions between the trubel&co team and our university customers - in this case, Washington University in St. Louis and University of Michigan. Staff are already investing time and resources into ongoing relationships with Washington University’s Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement & School of Engineering, as well as U Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning.
2023 Pilot assessment: 2A) Evaluation & Impact metrics system development: Co-founders are already building our evaluation metrics; all of this research and systems building labor is essential to how we will measure impact. 2B) Evaluation: through tools developed in R&D for impact assessment, we will evaluate our impact at the conclusion of 2023’s MJ course.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
We will assess how Mapping Justice helps improve student’s technical proficiency, self-efficacy and critical consciousness (the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality). By acting outside the traditional educational environment, we have the opportunity to reimagine the liberatory power of education, promote innovation & creativity within STEM, and address soft skills that are often under-measured by school systems. Using research-backed pre and post assessments, we measure how much technical knowledge was gained and retained during the course of the program, and evaluate participants’ ability to apply skills. Paired with this is the measurement of critical consciousness–assessing knowledge about the systems and structures that create and sustain inequity–developing a sense of agency–power or capability–and ultimately the self-efficacy to commit to take critical action against oppressive conditions. We source tools for measurement and assessment from research universities and leading education hubs across the country such as Education for Liberation Network and Feedback Labs.
We aim for Mapping Justice students to be measurably 1) empowered to identify problems and work through nuanced solutions, 2) equipped with the language and empathy to be able to discuss complex issues centered around Race, Power, and Technology, and 3) excited about new future opportunities that they may not have been aware of previously. Our alumni become explorers in their own right, ready with the tools to tackle inequity and advance justice with courage & conviction, illuminating stories that need to be told.
A core tenant of our curricula is to empower students with the technical tools and nuanced language needed to be an agent of change. We assess students’ grasp of technical tools and concepts by their completion of the final capstone projects. We additionally plan to survey students several times through the course to understand what personal growth they have experienced through the critical discourse they engage with in each session. Our surveys will lean on proven methods shared by the Wallace Foundation and will primarily deploy Likert scale questions with optional short answer prompts to share more. We already have survey data from prior Mapping Justice cohorts and will continue to compare results from future cohorts to identify areas where we need to update curricula or identify additional opportunities. Some example questions:
I understand how data analytics can be utilized for social change, and I can draw connections between the two.
I'm confident that I can have an immediate role in shaping my community and creating change.
I believe I will pursue a STEM degree and find a career in STEM after graduation.
I feel comfortable adapting to new technology, tools, and learning methods independently.
What is your theory of change?
BIPOC and low-income youth have been historically denied access to STEM education, skill-building, and career pathways. STEM fields need technical expertise and diverse representation to develop in equitable ways towards the sustainable, scientific, and technical advancement of our world. Civic literacy for frontline communities is critical to supporting their future wellbeing and climate resilience.
trubel&co champions underserved youth through its programming to tackle complex societal challenges using equitable data analytics, responsible technology, and inclusive design, accelerating liberatory innovation where it's needed most. We offer tuition-free out-of-school programs for high school and college students students, building the STEM skillsets, experiences, and career connections they need to thrive.
trubel&co will increase academic attainment, economic mobility, self efficacy, and civic engagement within BIPOC and low-income communities. Our participants will become leaders towards a just and sustainable future, creating economic mobility for themselves and their communities while diversifying the future of science and increasing innovation within STEM.
Short-term outcomes:
? Academic Trajectory: improved grades on report cards; increased confidence in STEM as measured by survey data
? Economic Mobility: knowledge of variety of potential future careers measured by survey data
? Self-Efficacy: increased confidence in tackling new subjects & topics measured through survey and interview data
?️ Civic Engagement: increased appreciation for civic engagement and justice; improved awareness of civic and equity challenges; strong attachment to community as measured by survey and interview data
Intermediate outcomes:
? Academic Trajectory: increased high school graduation rates; improved grades on report card; college enrollment rate; STEM and environment coursework per academic record data
? Economic Mobility: career readiness as measured by survey data; internship rate
? Self-Efficacy: confidence to set and achieve ambitious goals for themselves (college and post college) as measured by a survey
?️ Civic Engagement: increased participation in pro-civic activities and behaviors measured by survey data
Long-term outcomes:
? Academic Trajectory: more coursework and degrees in STEM and the environment at college and graduate level; college graduate rate
? Economic Mobility: entering and remaining in stable, high-paying careers (plus if STEM) measured by annual follow-up surveys with past participants
? Self-Efficacy: confidence to achieve long-term ambitions
?️ Civic Engagement: working in (or regularly contributes) to pro-civic and equity causes as measured by the annual follow-up surveys with past participants as measured by the annual follow-up surveys with past participants
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
trubel&co’s flagship program Mapping Justice (MJ) teaches diverse youth how to design geospatial tools for social change, mobilizing students as skilled change agents within their own communities. Developed over three pilots in partnership with MIT, MJ is an eight-week summer course for high school youth that uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a spatial tool for mapping complex data, as an educational tool to promote data literacy and empower students to tackle community-based challenges.
We center GIS because it is a powerful and intuitive tool to visualize disparities that otherwise remain invisible. GIS is a highly accessible mapping tool for gathering meaning from data compared to technical programs such as R and Python that require deep technical expertise before getting to real-world insights.. Throughout the course, student learnings are driven by their own identities and lived experiences, concluding with self-directed capstone projects. MJ students have harnessed their newly gained technical skills to map a wide variety of injustices rooted in their experiences, from gentrification’s impacts on BIPOC communities in San Diego, to food deserts’ correlations with learning outcomes in the School District of Philadelphia. Johna’s capstone asked: “How can we use geographical data to learn about and divert the school-to-prison pipeline in our school districts?” As a current senior exploring college options, he shared, “[MJ] expanded my understanding of how to merge STEM and justice - you don’t have to go into government or politics to enact justice in a very impactful way.” MJ boosts students’ critical consciousness, technical proficiency and self-efficacy by promoting understanding of the power of data, tech, and design, with awareness of inequities sparked by traditional STEM fields.
Data literacy is essential to today’s youth in the digital age no matter what they end up studying and applying their skills to. We all engage with algorithms and technology across society, which involve elements of data science and coding that are increasingly prevalent. Youth need to be aware of their own agency within the context of their own digital experiences–the media they consume, the algorithms that influence their actions, and the lasting impacts of technologies in their communities.
Students need early opportunities to explore their passions through tools that enable their success and value their lived experience, and our pedagogy harnesses students’ existing social awareness and citizen expertise. This is why we choose to teach GIS skills through Mapping Justice: disparities are undeniably evident when visualized, and GIS does just that–illustrating data-backed inequities that our students experience every day while building a skill-driven cohort of critically conscious STEM thinkers. With equitable opportunities for historically underrepresented youth in STEM education, we foresee a future for technical innovation that dismantles oppressive systems. The current status quo of technical education is not a viable option if we wish to see liberation from rampant inequity in education and society as a whole.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
trubel.co
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
How many people work on your solution team?
3 full time, 7 part-time, 3 interns
How long have you been working on your solution?
2 years
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
At trubel&co, we know that diversity, equity and inclusion determine community resiliency in the face of complex issues. DEI is the throughline that ripples across all trubel&co offerings.
Our commitment to DEI is reflected in our team, students, partners and metrics for success. Our team is led primarily by queer people of color with experience in technical fields, shaping the cultural competency embedded in our pedagogy. Outside of trubel&co, two founding members also pursue institutionally-backed research on equity within STEM education: Natalie (through Northwestern) studies anti-blackness in CS education, and Nick (through Stanford) studies the integration of liberatory design into traditional innovation coursework. Our programs prioritize students from underserved backgrounds, facing historic and/or institutional barriers to STEM due to race, gender, or class. We measure success by reflecting on how we amplify opportunity within underserved communities and measure our ability to drive critical consciousness. We value identity-informed lived experience in all that we do, and bring this directly into the classrooms and all spaces we enter. trubel&co targets emerging market demands for identity-driven, conscious STEM education, which traditional platforms lack. Growing activist movements like Black Lives Matter, paired with the localized surges of misinformation such as critical race theory bans suggests a need for integrating race and power into curricula.
Our work is to build youth power in the digital age, so while we are BIPOC focused to amplify access to innovation skill-building, our programs exist to reach innovators across race, gender, class and other identities. It is essential for youth of all lived experiences to have the skills to ask, “Where do I have an opportunity to promote equitable outcomes?” “Where might there be a risk of potential bias?” In our work to promote access to liberatory innovation programming, like in all coalition building, we value the passion for STEM expressed by historically and currently privileged identities. While we work to diversify the STEM pipeline, we must also work to ensure that anyone in the pipeline sees opportunities in their work to shape justice, promote positive social impact, minimize harm and dismantle oppressive systems.
What is your business model?
Beneficiaries: Our program supports students underresourced in STEM and/or would benefit from exploring how technical careers can advance equity. BIPOC communities, women & nonbinary/trans, or first generation/low-income students face increased barriers entering, remaining, and thriving within STEM roles. Additionally, it’s necessary for students of all backgrounds already passionate about STEM to grapple with the societal impact of technical tools and understand how innovation can empower everyone.
Customers: Our target market is split into three customers: universities, corporations, and school districts–within this market, we prioritize those invested in 1) expanding & diversifying STEM pipelines, and 2) sparking civic innovation & community engagement. Universities are the ideal customer, considering the expectation for civic engagement (including NSF-grant mandates), connection to STEM/geography programs, and desire to engage & recruit diverse high school students. There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S, most of which have education outreach programs. MIT sponsored the last three pilots of Mapping Justice; we are currently confirming 2023 launches with Washington University in St. Louis and Florida Gulf Coast University. Nick has upcoming speaking arrangements at NAAEE and AAG conferences to reach more institutions interested in enabling this work. Corporations experience increased pressure to show social responsibility, backed by a 24% increase in charitable corporate giving in 2021. Our work aligns with the following markets: geospatial analytics ($67B), GIS ($14B), data visualization software ($12B). Esri (leading geospatial tech provider) has given trubel&co $30K of in-kind donations, and invited Nick to deliver a keynote during their 2022 Education Summit. School districts face national STEM teacher shortages, academic recovery requirements, and demands for increased family/community engagement. Our program addresses 3 pillars for ESSER funding ($13.2B) for post-pandemic education stabilization.
Please see Business Model Canvas here.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
Our earned-revenue strategy targets the same customers: universities, corporations, and school districts. We estimate $2000/student for a 50-person virtual course. We forecast 1 cohort in Y1, 4 in Y2, and 7 in Y3. Each cohort costs $100,000—this scales to $100K in Y1, $400K in Y2, and $700K in Y3. 66% of budget is instructional staff, 20% technology, and 13% instructional materials & services.
Universities spend $16B annually on public service, and engagement with WUSTL and FGCU validates the cost with available university funding. Esri has agreed to continue delivering in-kind services (geospatial-tech), reducing budget needs by 20%. U.S. corporations are now investing $350B annually in education (mostly STEM), with 95% of employees believing CSR & community impact is critical. Schools with access to ample funding may become the primary funder, motivated to deepen STEM learning, broaden student career potential, and eliminate summer learning loss. We are exploring “Robin Hood” models where the price for schools’ with resources may exceed the cost to help supplement other communities. Partnership with schools also opens the door for professional development and “train-the-trainer” models in later years, historically requiring less bandwidth than student instruction and taps into more flexible district budgets.
Grant funding will offset overhead costs not included in the program budget. USDOE invested $540M in STEM education in 2019. We’ve identified the following as potential funders based on feedback from internal contacts and alignment with past recipients: NewSchools Venture Fund, W.K.Kellogg Foundation, Bezos Family Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, Segal Family Foundation, Mozilla Foundation. In addition to a national approach, trubel will seek partnerships with local family foundations, which often support youth development. Our city-specific model enables us to target and build relationships within that ecosystem, which self-supports itself—university sponsors tap existing corporate relationships to supplement funds, and their combined engagement validates participation from aligned foundations.
Solution Team
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Nick Okafor Founder and Executive Director, trubel&co
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Our Organization
trubel&co