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How could $50,000 transform learning? On Pitch Playground, we invite education innovators and social entrepreneurs to throw their best ideas at us. From technologies that build empathy to providing affordable childcare and reimagining the way we learn—this is a place for pitches from visionaries. Each episode features an intrepid edupreneur workshopping a $50,000 project to solve a critical problem in education. With support from mentors, funders, and fellow entrepreneurs we'll explore what it takes to turn dreams into reality.
At the end of the season, we award $50,000 to the best pitch we've heard on the show. We're inviting educators and social entrepreneurs to play in the sandbox with us and share their vision for the future of education. We encourage these visionaries to be BOLD—don't just think outside the box; reshape the box itself. Draw outside the lines. It's about making good ideas last longer and go further.
About the Host, Nicole Jarbo:
Nicole Jarbo is the host of Pitch Playground and the CEO of 4.0. A serial entrepreneur, former educator, and proud 4.0 alum, Nicole has a track record of building impactful ventures across a variety of industries, including education, financial technology, and media. Passionate about storytelling and innovation, she’s sharing the inspiring stories of the 4.0 community and believes in work that makes the world more livable, creative, sustainable, and fun.
About 4.0:
4.0 is a hub for education innovators and social entrepreneurs reimagining the future of learning. Through mentorship, funding, and community support, we empower bold thinkers to turn their dreams into reality. To date, 4.0 has helped spark and invest in over 1,600 ideas, and our alumni have impacted millions of students and families. We envision a future where our education system meets the needs of every family and improves life outcomes for all.
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Jonathan Santos Silva:
The bottom 10 poorest counties in America. The majority of them have some of the largest populations of Native Americans. Now in Pine Ridge where I lived and taught according to the UN, we had the worst quality of life indicators of anywhere in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti.
Nicole Jarbo:
That's Jonathan Santos Silva, founder of The Liber Institute.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I land in a community that all those things might be true of, but that is amazing and vibrant, complex. I have some of the most amazing students that are anywhere.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan founded Liber to embolden and equip students, families and educators to transform the schools and the communities they serve.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
When I think about education, the data supports that we are failing Native students chronically, habitually, and at a rate higher than any other subpopulation.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan believes that if we design better schools at the margins, what we learn could impact all schools for the better.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
If we go to Native American students and we continue to ask them, their guardians, their families, their educators, "How do we do this better?" And then we continue to keep staying in community and answering those questions and approaching them with new solutions and improving schools, then the things that we learn there should work throughout rural America and eventually throughout urban America as well.
Nicole Jarbo:
I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo, and this is Pitch Playground from 4.0. Each episode we hear ideas from entrepreneurs transforming education and they get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to funders. This week we've got Niloy Gangopadhyay working with Jonathan who shares some advice to help strengthen his pitch.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Y'all are filling a need that is huge, that there are not that many people that are talking about or thinking about it. You do have a track record of outcomes. Now it's like to tie that story up, spending some time and money to be able to sell that, that'd be really helpful.
Nicole Jarbo:
And they discuss the challenges with philanthropy and investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
As a black leader who serves in primarily Indigenous spaces, I didn't fit anybody's definition. Even though we talk a lot about working across lines of different and coalition building, almost nobody funds it.
Nicole Jarbo:
This is episode nine of our show. Remember, at the end of the season, you'll be able to vote for the idea you think should win $50,000. Stay tuned for when the voting will open. Jonathan grew up in a small city called Brockton in Massachusetts about 45 minutes outside of Boston.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
It was a working class town. It used to be the shoemaking capital of the world way, way back in the day where I grew up, you could get a bat bus ticket, ride the bus, you can get to the library, you could get to parks, the community college. You can get to a lot of things with which you could augment your education.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan's mom encouraged him to prioritize his education. His library card was a passport to knowledge. His parents also instilled a spirit of advocacy in him that has been a through line of his career.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I'm really fortunate to still have what I think are the perfect parents for me. I don't think anybody is perfect, but for me, they were perfect. The fit, the ways that they challenged me, the way they supported me, there was something really risky that I wanted to do. I would do it because I always believed that if everything went wrong, I could always go home and that's the gift they have given me. What my mom instilled in me from early on, she would always tell me "To whom much is given, much is required." Which was her paraphrase of the scripture. I feel so fortunate not just to have my parents, but my extended family, the educational experiences that I had that I remember from a young age feeling like I was operating from a debt so much is given to me. What is required, what is being asked of me?
Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan graduated from Northeastern University in Boston with a degree in business administration. He stayed at the university for a few years working on the financial and admin side. He also ran a mentorship program at the University for Black and Latino first generation college students. Then got a job teaching math at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Entering Pine Ridge reservation from one of its many boundary roads. You'll see the landscape opening wide in front of you. There are vast grasslands, sparse trees, rolling hills in a wide horizon, you'll see signs letting you know that you've entered the lands of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Some signs feature names of Lakota leaders such as Crazy Horse and Red Cloud at around 2 million acres. Pine Ridge is one of the largest Native reservations in the United States. Help me understand what it's like to teach and be on a reservation.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
In terms of life expectancy, the rates of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes are really high on the reservation and it goes back to the way that the government has fulfilled its treaty obligations. The United States entered into treaties with a large number of tribes as a way to secure peace. In those treaties there are commitments to provide housing, healthcare, education, food.
Nicole Jarbo:
In the 18th and 19th centuries, treaties were often signed between Native nations in the US government. In these agreements, Native people ceded vast amounts of land, often under pressure and agreed to disarm. In return, they were promised certain rights to protections and reserve territories where they could govern themselves. But time and again, the US government broke those promises. Today, communities like Pine Ridge continue to live with the consequences facing systemic underinvestment and challenges rooted in this long, painful history.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
We send the worst food, we send the worst of almost everything to the reservation, and then we stand back and point the blame at Native people for their current condition, which I feel like it is an outgrowth of white supremacy or systematic oppression, is to set up the situation against somebody and then blame them for the situation.
Nicole Jarbo:
The conditions on reserves like Pine Ridge are often not conducive to learning.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I have gone to schools where the building is literally condemned, not figuratively condemned. It's on a federal list and saying it's condemned and kids are still being educated in it. That wouldn't be allowed anywhere else in America, that would not be allowed.
Nicole Jarbo:
Buckets on the floor to collect water from roofs in the midst of collapsing exposed wires and popping circuit bracers, gas leaks, attending school in your coat, hat and mitts because the heating isn't working. These are the realities of some of the environments that students are being educated in on reservations.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
You go to places where teaching staff is either alternatively certified or emergency certified, not certified, and not because people don't think it's important, but because any teaching shortage that exists in an urban area is going to be heightened in a rural area. Kids on the rez are going to have more teachers on average than anyone else who are brand new to the profession, alternatively licensed or not licensed yet, emergency cert. They're going to have some of the oldest textbooks and materials a lot of times. So none of that means that the kids aren't great, that they don't deserve great things that they don't learn well because I had phenomenally talented students.
Nicole Jarbo:
Students in places like Pine Ridge often don't have access to some of the resources that Jonathan had to augment his education growing up.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
There's probably not a library, probably not public transportation. There's no Boys and Girls Club or YMCA or other organization that's doing afterschool aftercare.
Nicole Jarbo:
And because those things don't exist, there's extra pressure on schools to provide additional services.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I had kids that were getting on the bus at 6:00 or 6:30 to get to school for 8:00, they get to school early for breakfast. Then they go through their whole school day, then they stay at school to play sports or some activities and then they get dinner, so they get breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then they get on the bus after 4:00 or 6:00 or whatever time to go home because the school has to play so many roles.
Nicole Jarbo:
Despite the critical need for change, rural education is often overlooked in education reform. The national focus tends to land on urban schools. One reason is population density. When decision makers want to create the biggest impact, they gravitate towards places with the most kids.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
And as my friend Vichi Jagannathan at Rural Opportunities Institute, she's talked a lot lately about how if we are thinking about our country and the communities that we have routinely left behind and failed to serve, the big four are rural actually. You're talking about border communities, so the US Mexican border in the black belt down south, the Appalachia, and then our tribal communities, Native American and Alaska Native. So when I share those four, you can see all of America is impacted pretty much. We spent a lot of time and energy and money in urban areas and we should, but not to the exclusion of rural. That's where we missed the boat.
Nicole Jarbo:
After working on Pine Ridge for a few years, Jonathan moved to Rhode Island. He worked as a teacher coach, working directly with teachers to help them be better. This is when he started developing an important skill that would be integral to his development of Liber.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
This was really the beginning of my introduction into design thinking, even though I didn't really know the term at the time. So we had kids from four different towns and because of the socioeconomics of those towns, we ended up with a school that was roughly 60% black and Latino, and then the other 40% was white Asian. How do you build a school where all those kids can thrive?
Nicole Jarbo:
Some of the core principles of design thinking include taking a human-centered approach to problem solving. It requires leading with empathy, staying flexible and embracing experimentation to arrive at solutions that truly meet people's needs.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
So from there, I got into education consulting. So that got me looking at the system's level of change. How do you make things better?
Nicole Jarbo:
Shifting from design thinking to systems level change required Jonathan to rethink the way the whole education system operates while still centering human experiences. This experience would be integral for this next role.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I ended up moving back to South Dakota to support a Native American Achievement Schools grant. So the state of South Dakota through legislation put, I don't know, $1.8 million aside for radical school re-imagination in an Indian country. And so I was on the ground support for the Native American leaders, the Indigenous leaders who were leading that transformation.
Nicole Jarbo:
But time and time again, Jonathan saw that moving forward was incredibly difficult.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
There's one thing to have a policy or a bill that says we're doing this, it's another thing that when you have actors on the inside who actually don't want to see Indigenous schools thrive, and so they can put the money aside, but then every time you ask for something, it gets declined. It gets declined, or it gets held up. I was frustrated watching my leaders try to navigate systems that were not designed for them to thrive, and so Liber was born from that and it was with this idea of what would it look like to build leadership capacity in Indian country so that local leaders with local visions could be in the driver's seat.
Nicole Jarbo:
What's the elevator pitch for the Liber Institute?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
So the Liber Institute mission is to embolden and equip Indigenous young people, families, and educators to transform schools in the communities they serve.
Nicole Jarbo:
There are three main things that Liber does. The first is leadership coaching.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
We are providing one-on-one or small group leadership coaching around emotional intelligence. So how can you better communicate and invest others in the execution of this vision? How do you enlist others in the co-creation of the vision so that investment is not a problem? So they already feel like deep and abiding ownership of this vision and the desire to be a part of the implementation of it.
Nicole Jarbo:
The second part of the work that Liber does is what they call their empathy or storytelling work.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
In Indigenous communities, but in a lot of communities of color as well, storytelling is a valuable skill. We are really big on training staff, how to conduct empathy interviews, but then also on us as a team, as a partner, executing empathy interviews and focus groups to understand and collect the stories of a community. Tell me about a time when you were successful at a school. Tell me a time where you were really frustrated at school. Tell me about a person at your school that supports you in your goals. Asking questions that surface the strength, the assets of a school, as well as maybe the opportunities for growth, and then bringing that into our strategy.
Nicole Jarbo:
The third aspect of their work is where Jonathan's experience with design thinking really comes into play, co-creating immersive design experiences.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
How do we take a whole team through a redesign process to reimagine their school or their system or even a policy?
Nicole Jarbo:
So to recap, the three parts of Liber are leadership coaching, storytelling or empathy work, and lastly, redesigning. Every step of the process is supported by the POWER framework, which allows for reimagining possible futures.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
Our POWER framework is our in-house process that we go from problem definition all the way through observing and empathizing to broadening our perspectives to the actual implementation of something new.
Nicole Jarbo:
What are some of the examples of the types of problems that Liber is actually tackling?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
If you are a school leader and you notice that you have chronic absentee problems, which is something that would be happening in a lot of rural areas, a lot of Native American school communities, we do our work. We build empathy. We're going to identify what kids are saying the barriers are, you might hear things like, and this is legit, this is a real example, "We don't have a washer and dryer at home. So when my clothes get dirty, if we don't have a chance to get to Rapid City and do the laundry, I'm not coming to school in dirty clothes because I don't want to get picked on." That's a real thing, and that's something that you can solve. You could spend a couple of hundred dollars to put a wash and a dryer in a school and get some of those leaders around the school community, those elders, those grandparents that care about your kids to volunteer to do laundry during the day. And we've seen, not in our work, but in other people's work, the impact of a washer and dryer on chronic absenteeism.
Nicole Jarbo:
And it isn't just students who are impacted by the work that Liber is doing, it's the whole school system.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
We have a principal that we work with named Dana. She was born and raised on the rez when she became principal, they would have not kidding, 20, 30 and 40 kids lined up outside their principal in the APS office almost at all hours of the day. They would be sending them out because it was a hyper punitive model. And so more than not, they were dealing with things by punishment and detention and suspension as opposed to engagement.
Nicole Jarbo:
The first thing the school did before Jonathan and his team arrived was build something called the reflection room.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
Instead of getting kicked out to go to the principal, they would go to the reflection room and get mental health support from a certified therapist or counselor to then get back to the classroom. When I got to the school, I started working with Dana. I started working with another leader in her building around how do we bring culture and language to the forefront? What does it look like to have an academic model that is based on competency and mastery? We have provided support with them on full day trainings with their staff to reimagine and redesign their instructional models, what materials that we're going to bring in the classroom. We've brought elders so that they could pick elders' brains to make sure that what they're teaching honors Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding and teaching.
Nicole Jarbo:
The collaboration with leaders like Dana has been integral to the success of Liber.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
She is confident, she is passionate, she is visionary, and the fact that she is of the community to me is the dopest thing. Because so many times in my experience, leaders have been from outside the community and they mean well, and they do. A lot of times they do great work, but for me, it's like there's a power of walking in that building and knowing that for every little Lakota child in that building that they don't think they could be a principal or a leader because they've never seen someone who looks like them or from where they're from Excel in that role. Dana is doing it, her team is doing it.
Nicole Jarbo:
Liber is also working to ensure that those from outside the community understand the context they're teaching in.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
We did empathy work with a bunch of Native American students, and they talked about their teachers not knowing who they are, not knowing their history, not knowing their culture, and feeling like they were not valued in the classroom. And so that system, the Lake County Office of Education revamped its whole summer training program for the new incoming teachers, the alternative certified teachers, put them through that training. And so we interviewed the kids in May. By the time we interviewed them again in September, they were like, "I don't know what you all did, but the new teachers connect with us better than the old teachers. They ask us questions. They want to know who we are. And so I'm doing better in those classes." You know what I'm saying? So these are things that are low hanging fruit, but it's about building the energy and the collective will to then tackle bigger things.
Nicole Jarbo:
Even though some of these things are low hanging fruit, we are chronically letting down Indigenous students.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
If you aggregated these Bureau of Indian Education schools as a 51st state, they would be the 51st state in order of academic outcomes. We are failing Native kids faster, harder, worse, whatever adjective or adverb you want to use, we're failing them worse than anywhere else. Not that we're not failing elsewhere, but we're failing them worse. And so I believe strongly that if we design at the margins, if we go to Native American students and we continue to ask them their guardians, their families, their educators, "How do we do this better? How do we do this better?" And then we continue to keep staying in community and answering those questions and approaching them with new solutions and improving schools. Then the things that we learn there should work throughout rural America and eventually throughout urban America as well.
Nicole Jarbo:
So when you think about the Liber Institute and everything that you all are doing and how you can potentially increase your impact, what does success look like? What are those specific outcomes that you want to achieve?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
So in order for it to grow, it's like some of the things that we want to do is we want to create a group coaching model so that we can teach more leaders our POWER framework so that they can do empathy work and they can do redesign work in their community.
Nicole Jarbo:
What are you going to do with that $50,000 if you win?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
It would be going towards just filling our power framework into the group coaching program so that we can begin to expand, not just to serving in the places where we can reach physically with our small team, but begin to reach places virtually that by distance could be prohibitive. There's the Havasupai community at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and we don't work with them, but reading about them has always struck me where it's like you can only get to them on a donkey or a helicopter. And there's a part of me that says, if we couldn't serve Havasupai, we're not done yet.
Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan and his team are looking to expand their reach beyond Pine Ridge and other communities that they serve. How are they going to get from where they are now to where they want to go? That's where your mentor, Niloy Gangopadhyay comes in. Niloy has spent over 20 years making public education more equitable. He co-founded a charter school in New Orleans, led statewide programs for at-risk students at the Texas Education Agency, and has been shaping policies that make a real difference for students and schools.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Most of my career has been still working with communities that are predominantly black and brown communities that are predominantly low income and don't have access to the same opportunities that they historically have now.
Nicole Jarbo:
Niloy will dive into what Jonathan needs to think about to make his vision for Liber a reality. We'll dive into questions like how do you balance depth with breadth as you scale? How could a podcast help Jonathan spread the POWER framework more widely? And what would the drawbacks be and how does philanthropy play into their economic model? Here's our conversation.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Let's dive into the model at scale. What does it look like now and what could it look like in the future? What vision do you have for the future?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
So my experience on the rez and in other rural communities is that the relationships are the lever or the pivot point. And a lot of times what I experienced as a teacher in Pine Ridge was somebody flies in for a PD on Friday and they do the full day immersive experience, less immersive and more of the lecture, and then on Monday, there's really nothing actionable that you can apply because the person came from New York City or DC or wherever else they came from with no context. And so what it looks like now is, like I say, we go to Lake County. We're there for Monday through Friday, and so it's jam packing probably weeks or months worth of professional development that you might see in another model into the week, and we do that four times over the year in that particular model. It's dope. I love it. And it's not ultimately sustainable or scalable.
And so the question becomes, well, how do you still lean into relationship in places where relationships are critical? Work moves at the speed of trust when you can't be there. And so that's why we're pivoting to try to augment or supplement it with another way for our partners to engage with us. And so we're talking about we want to release a new podcast so that we can teach what we're learning and spotlight, not just the work that we do, but that other rural innovators are doing in schools and in parallel organizations because we understand that the work that school leaders and district leaders do is more than academic. Sometimes. It's making sure kids have housing, making sure kids have clean clothes, making sure there's food in the fridge, making sure that there's transportation, and that can't all be just educators. So we want to spotlight those stories.
Nicole Jarbo:
So remember Jonathan's idea to reach the Niloy Gangopadhyay community at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. What if rather than sending facilitators there, he could create a podcast that could reach them virtually, but would anything be lost in that model when compared to the week long training that Jonathan and his team have been doing in the past? Is there a middle ground?
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
The beauty of what you're saying is you are going for depth. You're there all week. You're immersing yourself. You're saying students are dapping you up and that's not sustainable. Is it possible for you to train the trainer model where you actually train somebody and then they're with their particular districts for a lot longer?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
so we can do what we do in Lake County, the problem is we can't do it everywhere that it needs to be. When you look at the scale of the problem, rural almost always gets overlooked. How do we get to all those places? But then how do you think about breadth and scale, right? So one part is teaching the POWER framework through the podcast, getting that out free to people, to the individual educator who does not have a district or school leader who is willing to invest or ready to invest. Then we're talking about a mastermind community to your point of how do we build the capacity of leaders who will stay when we fly away? And so that's the way we're trying to continue the work that we do, but undergird it with leveraging technology so we can reach places we can't.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
I think it's fascinating about podcasts. We see podcasts influence so much of life. I'm curious though, the magic is the depth, you want to get to everybody, but you can't get to everybody. Do you run the risk of the product being diluted if you can't give direct instruction to the folks that have the close proximity to work?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I have to be willing to do the work to become this teacher and facilitator and host that can turn this into bite-sized stuff that you can implement, because otherwise it's like what? It has to be me. So then the whole of rural education and rural social impact is dependent on me. I think that's first of all, I'd be gassed, but second of all, if that was it, then it'd be hopeless, I have to be better. I have to be good enough, and my team needs to get good enough at facilitating so that not only are we teaching leaders in a way that is impactful to them that they can implement, but then that they are then able to become teachers themselves so that it can grow and spread.
Nicole Jarbo:
As we mentioned earlier in the episode, a lot of education reform is focused on cities because so much of the population is based in those areas. But then how does Jonathan present his idea to potential funders who are looking to demonstrate the greatest amount of impact and think that that means that it needs to be an urban areas?
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Two communities, I think in particular that don't get enough attention is rural education, and the second is Native and Indigenous. So I was curious to hear how has philanthropy responded to this? When you signal to philanthropy, I'm ready, I'm open. Is it harder because rural and Indigenous doesn't get as much love or it's actually easy?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I think it's hard. There are folks in rural communities who are experiencing life vastly differently than the way we are in cities, and that extends beyond schools. And so number one, I think that a lot of funders hadn't been thinking that way because if I go to New York or if I go to dc, I go to New Orleans, I go to Los Angeles, there's a million kids there, or however many thousand, if I go to coach at Pueblo, how many kids are there? If you go to Kyle, South Dakota, how many? And so unfortunately to folks that measure impact in just numbers in reach and whatever, the rural is never going to scratch their itch.
Nicole Jarbo:
Not only that, but when diversity, equity, and inclusion investment has been available, Jonathan has found it difficult to receive support.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
Aas a black leader who serves in primarily Indigenous spaces. I didn't fit anybody's definition. Philanthropy is very comfortable with supporting women who lead women or folks in the LGBT community who do LGBTQ, black people who do black or Latinos who do Latinos. But even though we talk a lot about working across lines of difference and coalition building, almost nobody funds it. They don't feel comfortable with it. They are very comfortable being oftentimes white in white led organizations stepping into other communities. But when we as people of culture and color seek to do that, they don't really know how to deal with us. So it's been a challenge.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Quantitatively, I'm curious, can you give a quick overview of the impact that you've had in rural communities or Native Indigenous communities of just outcomes with students or even teacher tenure. I'm curious to hear some more about that.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
Well, we can say without a doubt is that when we went back to the students who we interviewed, they unprompted, when we sat down for the follow-up focus group, the first thing that one of the kids said was, "I don't know what you guys did after you left, but the new teachers that we have are way better at relationships in our old teachers." It's one of those things where the qualitative feedback from kids and district educators, it's the preview of what we hope is deeper teacher impact and better teacher retention.
Nicole Jarbo:
Now, Niloy will distill some final advice for Jonathan to take with him as he develops Liber.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
I think I'm sold on the passion. I'm sold on the conviction. I'm sold on the stories. What I would need is some way to show me quantitatively because of Liber Institute, that PD has shown an impact in student sense of belonging, staff sense of belonging, student appreciation, staff appreciation, family, community appreciation, attendance, student attendance, staff attendance, staff retention. What y'all have done is you are putting a stake in the ground to talk about high school graduation rates and college enrollment. I know it could be a stretch to be able to say, "Because of the Liber Institute, we are actually seeing school graduation increase. We're seeing college applications increase. We're seeing college enrollment increase and down the line, college persistence." I have no doubt that it's been transformed. Y'all are filling a need that is huge, that there are not that many people that are talking about or thinking about it. You do have a track record of outcomes now it's to tie that story up, spending some time and money to be able to sell that. So that would be really helpful. How does that land, resonate?
Jonathan Santos Silva:
It does resonate. You're talking about even though the individual districts are smaller, the numbers are not insignificant. You're talking about 650,000 or 630,000 teachers and all of the kids and families they impact. And so getting this right in rural and getting this right in Indigenous communities, number one, is important just for those kids if it was for no other reason. But I also think as a designer, when we design at the margins, what we figure out in rural will help us do education better everywhere.
Nicole Jarbo:
As Jonathan continues to build his idea, he'll need to work to get some great stats that he can use to help strengthen his pitches to funders. Thank you Niloy for your mentorship and advice, and thank you, Jonathan for sharing your idea. Here's some takeaways from the episode.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
I remember from a young age feeling like I was operating from a debt so much is given to me. What is required, what is being asked of me.
Nicole Jarbo:
For all of us working in education, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider what is being asked of me? You may have more ability to impact the system than you think.
Jonathan Santos Silva:
If we go to Native American students and we say, and we continue to ask them, "How do we do this better?" Then the things that we learn there should work throughout rural America and eventually throughout urban America as well.
Nicole Jarbo:
Designing at the margins can help us make education better across America.
Niloy Gangopadhyay:
Do you run the risk of the product being diluted if you can't give direct instruction to the folks that have the closest proximity to work?
Nicole Jarbo:
This is something that comes up over and over again on Pitch Playground, but we'll repeat it here because it's so important. As you scale, you'll need to consider the depth of what you've been doing with the breadth you can potentially achieve by scaling your impact. This has been Pitch Playground from 4.0. I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. Learn more about Pitch Playground at pitchplayground.com. Like this episode, send it to a friend who you think might like it to. Next episode, we'll be hearing a pitch from Jaime-Jin Lewis of Wiggle Room.
Jaime-Jin Lewis:
Wiggle Room is back in daycare operations simplified. We take all of the complex and confusing rules and regulations that daycares have to comply with, and we put them into simple workflows that any person who's running a daycare can easily manage.