Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Christina Rose - co-founder and chief marketing officer of RIVET, which funds micro-grants for youth-led social innovation in 66 countries - about what actually changes in a young person when they're trusted with real resources, and what schools might take from that. RIVET's model draws on Christina's two decades in cause marketing, including work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign.

Together, Seth and Christina explore RIVET's founding premise - that young people globally lack not ideas or drive, but access to capital - and the three-part framework Christina uses to describe what they actually need: financial capital, social capital, and imagination capital. They dig into why youth-led solutions to local problems tend to outperform top-down interventions, using the stories of Walter in Uganda and Stanley in Nigeria to show what that looks like in practice. They talk about patient capital, what it takes to bring skeptical communities along, and what both RIVET and schools are trying to do when they create space for young people to lead. The conversation ends somewhere Seth doesn't always get to go: a direct conversation about what education is fundamentally for, and why that question matters more than most schools are willing to admit. Walter's project, which started with a single $250 grant and a secondhand sewing machine, reduced teen pregnancies in his village by 65% within four years.

Key Topics
  • RIVET's micro-grant model for global youth
  • Financial, social, and imagination capital
  • Youth-led vs. top-down social innovation
  • Patient capital and redefining success and failure
  • Cross-cultural community trust-building
  • Connecting school curricula to real-world problems
  • The three purposes of education
Links & Resources
Guest Bio: Christina Rose
Christina Rose is co-founder and chief marketing and growth officer of RIVET, an organization that channels the collective consumer power of Gen Z and Gen Alpha into micro-grants for youth-led social innovation across 66 countries. She spent 20 years building brands at the intersection of profit and purpose, including work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign and in strategic marketing at Thorn, the child-safety technology nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher. She holds a BA from Princeton University.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators - building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

Creators and Guests

Host
Seth Fleischauer

What is Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast?

Make It Mindful is a podcast for educators and school leaders who think seriously about how learning is changing and want to explore what to do next. Hosted by Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning and former classroom teacher, the show covers three territories: what AI actually changes about teaching and learning, what it takes to help students connect meaningfully across cultures, and the human conditions — belonging, awe, trust, emotional regulation — that learning depends on regardless of what else changes.

Guests include district administrators, researchers, clinical psychologists, curriculum designers, and classroom practitioners. Conversations are long-form and honest. Produced by Banyan Global Learning.

# Make It Mindful — Transcript
## Guest: Christina Rose, Co-Founder & CMO, RIVET

*Note: This transcript has been cleaned for readability — obvious repeated words and minor false starts have been smoothed throughout. A closer-to-verbatim version is available on request. Discrete audio cuts are noted inline. Timestamps marked *(approx)* reflect recalculation after cuts.*

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[INTRO — recorded separately] [00:00:00]

Support for Make It Mindful is brought to you by World Savvy, partnering with K-12 schools, districts, and community leaders to prepare youth to thrive in a complex, interconnected world.

We are proud to feature Svitlo School - a free, extracurricular online school in English, that has educated more than 3,000 Ukrainian children since 2022. Children learn from native English speakers in the UK, US and across the world. Visit SvitloSchool.com to learn more about volunteering.

Welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast about how students learn, who they're becoming, and how new technologies and global experiences reshape teaching. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning. Christina Rose is co-founder and chief marketing and growth officer of RIVET, which funds micro-grants for youth-led social innovation in 66 countries. One of the concepts she's developed — that young people need not just financial capital but social capital and imagination capital — shapes a lot of what we get into.

This episode of Make It Mindful is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning.

At Banyan Global Learning, we design structured live experiences that connect classrooms to the world.

Banyan Global Cohorts is a 4-week journey in global competence. Classrooms join an international cohort of 3–4 schools and meet weekly during regular class time for facilitated, 45-minute sessions built around a compelling Big Question.

Students explore global contexts through virtual field trips, exchange ideas with international peers, and create a final digital artifact that expresses identity, perspective, and connection across cultures.

If you're curious about what this could look like in your classroom or school, we'd love to talk. You can find us at banyangloballearning.com.

And now here's my conversation with Christina Rose.

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**Seth** (00:00)
Christina, welcome to the podcast.

**Christina Rose** (00:02)
Thank you, Seth. It's great to be here.

**Seth** (00:04)
It is so great to see you. We've known each other since we were, gosh, teenagers at Princeton University so many years ago. And yes, in some reality, that is true. We recently reconnected at our 25th reunion. I just outed us. I just outed our age. Sorry. And I heard about Rivet and what you are doing there. And I had to have you on. This seems—

**Christina Rose** (00:09)
Teenagers, yeah, which was like at least five, ten years ago.

**Christina Rose** (00:23)
You did. It's fine. I don't think we were hiding it very well, so it's okay.

**Christina Rose** (00:30)
Yes.

**Seth** (00:34)
Amazing. And I want to dig into what it is, how it works, and if we can kind of bridge the gap between this startup nonprofit and what's happening in schools. I'm looking at your website — it says Rivet backs the world's most promising young innovators tackling social, environmental, and economic issues. By delivering startup grants to young changemakers, we provide the first yes—

**Christina Rose** (00:45)
Mm-hmm.

**Christina Rose** (01:00)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (01:00)
That can kickstart a lifetime of impact. I love that "first yes." That's such a great idea. How does this work? You are funding young people across the world. You look at your website, it's got a global map with numbers representing projects done on each continent. Except Australia — no, not Australia yet.

**Christina Rose** (01:03)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

**Christina Rose** (01:28)
Not Australia yet. That's our — and I think Antarctica has also been elusive, but we're gonna get there. Yeah.

**Seth** (01:32)
We'll get them. We'll get them. So how does this work? Take me under the hood a little bit. How do you find your people? How do you create this impact?

**Christina Rose** (01:45)
Yeah, terrific question. So Rivet was really built to address the reality that we have today's generations of young people. And when we say young people, we really mean globally under 30. So we're talking about Gen Z and Gen Alpha right behind them, who are facing challenges — political, social, environmental — that feel fairly unprecedented. And we know because the data tells us that they are often looking at older generations and really understanding that we have not done the trick to resolve. I know it's shocking. I thought Gen X was — yeah, I thought as Gen Xers we could take credit for all the things. As it turns out, it's blame mostly that we'll be taking. Yeah, regrettably. But in their defense, they're looking at a world that—

**Seth** (02:20)
What? I thought we fixed everything. Dang.

**Seth** (02:33)
Fair, fair. Yeah.

**Christina Rose** (02:42)
Feels deeply troubled, right? And many of these young people across the world tend to live proximal to some of the issues that we're talking about, right? Poverty, lack of access to education, the climate crisis — these are not SDGs to them. These are issues that impact their homes, their families, their communities, their peers, their schoolmates. And many of them, because of that proximity, have a really unique lens on these issues and some incredibly insightful ideas for potential solutions. The challenge is that 85% of the world's young people live in what we call capital deserts. So they live in environments where they really will never have even the smallest amounts of early stage startup capital to take an idea from stage zero to stage one — much less reach our current innovation infrastructure in our society, right? So you think about: well, the philanthropic world should be funding young people like this. Or in the private sector, doesn't the venture world pick up early stage innovation? We're talking about innovations that are at the fourth, fifth, sixth and tenth stages of development, and young people just cannot get on that ladder unless we do a better job of providing greater access to more youth to start that journey.

**Seth** (04:26)
Incredible. It suggests what I think is a true reality — that young people have great ideas, and the main thing they are missing in terms of putting those ideas into action is access to capital. And that seems to be the premise you're building on.

**Christina Rose** (04:40)
Mm-hmm.

**Christina Rose** (04:50)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (04:55)
The devil's in the details though, in terms of how capital turns into impact. And I'm curious — with eight billion people in the world, of which billions are kids, students, of which some percentage have a good idea, some percentage less than that have a good idea that they could actually turn into something that sustains—

**Christina Rose** (05:00)
Yes.

**Seth** (05:23)
Let alone has the impact that you hope it to have. I see hundreds of projects you've funded across the world, approaching towards a thousand. What is the process for identifying which of these ideas you're going to fund and which ones you don't?

**Christina Rose** (05:37)
Mm-hmm.

**Christina Rose** (05:47)
Yeah, absolutely. So the Rivet model is that we're really a micro-grants platform for global youth. It's important to note that the sums of money we're giving out — at least at our initial grant stage — are under a thousand dollars. In some markets, 500 or 250 USD is catalytic, right? That's enough to bring an idea to the next stage. So what's really helpful is to keep in mind that this model is designed to plant a lot of seeds. Not every project will be a success. And I'd love to talk about the concept of success versus failure, because there's a lot of nuance there. But every project will enable a young person to start to see themselves as an agent of change — in their school, in their home, in their community. Some of those projects, which we estimate at about 10%, will have real traction and the young person will be able to take that project to the next level, do some deeper prototyping, think about expanding their audiences. Let's say another 10% of that cohort could be really sticky — potentially world-changing ideas developed by young people, grown out of their own lived experience. That we can then continue to support until they're able to scale those projects fully. And that's really exciting. And the fact that it may be 10% of 10% is actually exactly the right math for the kind of innovation pipeline that we're trying to build.

**Seth** (07:42)
Why is that the right math? It feels like something that is implied here — that even amongst the 90%, you're still creating impact in those students. So let's stay there for a second. What is changing in the student when they win this grant, when they get this capital?

**Christina Rose** (07:57)
Yeah.

**Seth** (08:08)
What kind of impact do you see with these kids, even if they're not the ones in that 10% that are able to build something sustainable?

**Christina Rose** (08:17)
Yeah, I love that question because empowering young people to take a first step as a changemaker, as a social innovator, as a social entrepreneur is transformative, right? It changes not just that outcome, but it changes the person. So it's interesting to think of changemaking as a process that has a specific goal in mind. But to me, it's even more interesting to think of changemaking as an experience that fundamentally transforms a young person. The vast majority of the young folks that we talk to — when we say, what was the moment that really changed your perspective on what you're capable of doing, affecting, changing in your world? — it was: one person took me seriously. One adult gave me an opportunity because they took me seriously. Now, yes, financial support is absolutely critical and it's the fundamental basis to the work that we do, but "took me seriously" has no cost, right? And "took me seriously" is what allows a young person to think about themselves and their potential contributions in a different way. And so the language that we use at Rivet is: young people in these situations need financial, social, and imagination capital. Financial capital could be that micro-grant that allows them to develop a website, build a prototype, start to reach out to their community. Social capital is the reality that without networks who can mentor you, who can keep you going, who understand the types of challenges that you're facing, it's very difficult to make progress — even with a small budget in hand. So there's an element of surround sound social support that's really important. But imagination capital is a really interesting piece. Young people, just like people of all ages, have goals that are shaped by their current reality. So it's not that they can't dream big — it's just that they may not know what those dreams look like. And when they're suddenly able to see themselves move from a generation that's relatively disempowered vis-à-vis their parents or teachers to a young person who can actually be an agent of change, that can be really catalytic for them. That's the imagination capital that allows them to see themselves not as who they are today, but as who they have the potential to become.

**Seth** (11:08)
And is the financial capital the seed of that social capital and imagination capital? Or is there something that Rivet is doing to directly impact those two types of capital that isn't the grant money?

**Christina Rose** (11:22)
Rivet really seeks to provide all of those pieces. So to get back to the model — and I'm realizing I didn't fully answer that question, forgive my jumping around — the way that Rivet is able to reach young people who lack access all over the world is really through global partnerships with NGOs.

**Seth** (11:31)
Good, all good. We are with you.

**Christina Rose** (11:51)
The problem that Rivet has identified is that there is this disconnect between all of these young people who see issues in their lives that they are proximal to, that they have potential solutions to, and they simply don't have the support to launch that idea. There are organizations from the Boys and Girls Clubs to the Scouts in the US, to the International Red Cross, to Grameen — who we're working with in India right now — who have spent decades building infrastructure for last-mile philanthropy that reaches specific communities on the ground globally. They're close to those communities. They understand them best. Rivet came in with a clear sense that we didn't want to replicate that infrastructure, but resource it — both leverage it and resource it. And so what we do is we work with a really expansive portfolio of NGO partners who are able to distribute Rivet grants on the ground to reach young people who are just not otherwise being reached with these types of resources. In addition to delivering financial grants to them, Rivet — along with our impact partners, as we call these distribution partners — put support systems around them in the form of a curriculum. So let's say you're a young person who wants to start a pro-social business. Even with a couple hundred bucks in your hand, you still need to understand a little bit about financial planning. Maybe you need to understand how to build a community. Maybe there's some tech support you're looking for. Rivet is able to bring to bear mentorship, learning, tools, curricula — very often networks with professionals across different industries who are eager to work with young people and share their experience and knowledge. And it's interesting because as I was doing some research into Banyan and the work that you all do, I think there is a lot of alignment across this notion that—

**Christina Rose** (14:11)
Young people around the globe — and the people who are committed to educating them — require a set of tools and opportunities that, once identified, can be fairly easy to distribute. But it's not piecemeal. There's this 360-degree support that is required to allow a young person to be empowered and then to really thrive in those positions of power.

**Seth** (14:44)
Yeah, and it makes a ton of sense to leverage what are not just presences in communities, but relationships, right? You're talking about NGOs that are based in the community, that know these people. The curriculum to me is fascinating. Can you say a little bit more about that? Are you partnering with people as well in order to have that financial literacy, or is that stuff you make in-house?

**Christina Rose** (15:11)
So to some extent, that depends on the needs of the specific youth and the organizations that we're working with. I'll give you an example. We have launched a project. And actually, I'd love to speak to the other side of Rivet's model, which is really about how we raise these funds for young people. We know that for as many young Gen Z, Gen Alpha changemakers as there are in the world, there are Gen Z, Gen Alpha consumers who have a real desire to support brands that share their values, that give them opportunities to invest in their own generation's ideas. We work with brands to create products, events, virtual and digital experiences, subscription-type opportunities that raise funds. And that's actually predominantly how we fund the micro-grants to young changemakers.

**Seth** (16:06)
That's brilliant.

**Christina Rose** (16:08)
Right, so it really is — again, without replicating infrastructure — creating connective tissue between two markets that can mutually benefit each other.

*[CUT #5 applied: "I've now forgotten the question you asked, which I was supposed to come back to." removed]*

**Seth** (16:20) *(approx)*
Wow. I would love to hear some of these examples. You must have some that stick out as being some of the exemplary projects that these students have brought into the world. Tell me some stories.

**Christina Rose** (16:32) *(approx)*
Yes.

**Christina Rose** (16:40) *(approx)*
Yes, I would love to tell you some stories because I am consistently blown away and humbled by the caliber, the quality, and the commitment of the young people that we're lucky enough to fund and work with. One of the questions you had asked is: how does funding young people directly and at the grassroots level differ from, let's say, top-down funding or funding that may come in from outside of their communities? And I always think about the story of Walter. So Walter's a young man in his village in Uganda. The vast majority of girls that he knows drop out of school when they start menstruating because they don't have menstrual products that are easily accessible, and their schools don't have the infrastructure to dispose of or upcycle or process those products. Many girls — like his own sister — once they drop out of school, will marry extraordinarily young and have children in their teen years. So his sister, before she was 20 years old, had four kids.

And he looked at what that meant for her life and her opportunities, and he felt like there simply had to be a better way. So five years ago, Walter was one of the first young people to receive a Rivet grant. That grant was in the amount of 250 USD. And what Walter did with that money was go out and buy a sewing machine — an old pedal-run sewing machine. And with that sewing machine, he started to make reusable, eco-friendly menstrual products for the girls in his community so that they could, when they started to menstruate, actually stay in school and start to solve some of the issues that were requiring them to drop out. He saw his peers start to stay in school. He scaled his operation.

**Christina Rose** (18:56) *(approx)*
Because he couldn't keep up with the demand. So he came back to Rivet, and we understood that he was ready for the next level of grant-giving. We funded him at $2,500 for his next grant. He bought ten more sewing machines and employed the young men and women in his community to start to make more of these products. So now they had the products that allowed them to stay in school, and they had some employment opportunities that they could use to supplement their incomes and provide more options to them. What he found was that within about a four-year period, he was able to reduce the number of teen pregnancies in his village by about 65%. That is mind-blowing. That's impact. That's local impact.

**Seth** (19:45) *(approx)*
Wow. That's impact.

**Christina Rose** (19:52) *(approx)*
But it's a model that can be deployed at scale, with the right types of interventions. And the reason I think that the youth-driven, youth-conceived, youth-led component is so critical here is that an org, a foundation, could easily have come in and said, okay, we're diagnosing a problem. They could have McKinseyed this. They could have said, we're diagnosing a problem—

**Seth** (20:19) *(approx)*
Ha ha ha.

**Christina Rose** (20:21) *(approx)*
And it's teen pregnancy. So maybe abstinence education, or maybe contraception, or maybe X, Y, and Z. But unless you're Walter or someone who lives in his community, you would really probably not be able to go way upstream and say the teen pregnancies are because of the early marriages, and the early marriages are because of the lack of continuing education for girls, and the lack of continuing education is because of a lack of menstrual products. And those are the insights. That's the type of lived experience that we have to find a better way to evaluate so that those voices are elevated in our problem-solution explorations when we think about these types of things.

**Seth** (21:12) *(approx)*
Yeah, I see why you picked that story. It has everything, right? It's got the personal lens, it's got the initial insight and success, the coming back and scaling up, the system that it creates. It's not just about allowing a few girls to not drop out a couple grades sooner — there's a whole economy based around it. That's incredible.

**Christina Rose** (21:15) *(approx)*
Ha ha!

**Christina Rose** (21:28) *(approx)*
Right?

**Christina Rose** (21:35) *(approx)*
Yeah. Yes.

**Seth** (21:41) *(approx)*
I kinda want another one. Do you have another story or two?

**Christina Rose** (21:44) *(approx)*
Gosh, I have so many.

*[CUT #2 applied: fourth-wall break / editor reference removed]*

**Seth** (21:50) *(approx)*
What an incredible story. I'm wondering — what's the hardest thing you've had to let go of in order to actually trust young people to do something real?

**Christina Rose** (22:04) *(approx)*
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. And the thing that really comes to mind for me is there is a need to be able to redefine success and failure when it comes to innovation. We look at some of the innovators who capture the public imagination and it feels like every idea they ever had was a raging success, and the line was always up and to the right with no challenges. The truth is innovation is rooted in learning, and learning is a process that can only happen if you are failing and failing and failing until you succeed. And so one of the challenges with funding young people is if you require instant early success — by a set of external metrics that aren't always the right measuring stick anyway — you can quickly deem youth investments a failure and move on, before you've been able to allow that young person to fully walk the innovation journey, which is to fail and learn and iterate, fail and learn and iterate.

And one of the young people that we've been working with for a number of years now — whose story comes to mind here — is a young man named Stanley who lives in Nigeria. One of the things he realized in his school community is that a lot of the kids were just struggling academically. So Stanley thought: they need extra help. He set up an afterschool program focused on tutoring his peers. And it was an abject failure. No one showed up. He got funding from Rivet to set up that first iteration. If he was working with a foundation measuring success by a specific set of criteria, they might have said: okay, you tried it, it did not work, we're moving on. But what Rivet really does is invest in the young person and not just the idea.

**Christina Rose** (24:58) *(approx)*
So what Stanley did was take his learnings from that experience to build the next thing. Here's what he learned. The young people in his community didn't need tutoring. They were going home at night, and during the hours when they would potentially be doing homework or reading or preparing for the next day, they had no electricity. The electricity was never dependable enough for them to work at night. And so upon realizing this, what Stanley did was change his focus entirely and start developing electrical kits from upcycled, reusable materials that he would distribute to young people in his school community so that in the evenings they had light by which to do their schoolwork. He quickly realized that he could not individually keep up with the demand of creating these energy systems for all of his schoolmates. And so what he did was change course again. He said: I'm not going to provide this to young people. I'm going to build a kit where there are some simple components that allow them to put an electrical product together — that gives them enough light energy to do work in the evenings. And now we're going to turn every young person in our community into an electrical engineer who can both build and use this tool. And to me, that is a true innovator's journey. But it requires redefining our typical understanding of success and failure, and letting go of the need to immediately prove a concept — in lieu of giving young people patient support and patient capital that can lead to longer-term, sustainable growth.

**Seth** (26:55) *(approx)*
I recently had on the podcast Katie Wales — I'm not sure if you knew Craig Wales at Princeton —

**Christina Rose** (27:02) *(approx)*
I did, yeah.

**Seth** (27:04) *(approx)*
So his wife was on here, and she said the exact same thing. She's working with adults, people who have innovative school models. But it's a similar kind of idea — identifying people through partnerships all over the world to invest in. "Relentless visionaries" is what she called them. But she made that exact same point very clearly about patient capital. And I do think that requires a redefining of what success is. We talk about that all the time in education, and it's easier said than done. There's so much built into all systems where you try a thing, and there's a thing you're trying to make happen by doing that thing. And if that thing doesn't happen, only an idiot would keep banging his head against the wall and not recognize that there's a wall in front of him.

**Christina Rose** (27:48) *(approx)*
Right. Or a genius.

**Seth** (27:50) *(approx)*
Fair, fair. Yeah. And so in schools, it requires a cultural shift — a real celebration of learning, of the process of learning. And decoupling from the external validation, the external results that you may be seeking eventually, but recognizing that along the way are all these things that can count as successes. But we often must redefine and state what these things are — what is the actual evidence of learning? Not just vibes, but how do you know that this learning has happened? And I'm wondering how Rivet deals with this from a cultural standpoint. Because every country I've been to has some kind of relationship to success where they would like it, and they would like it soon, and they aren't always patient. So how does Rivet approach the cultural challenge of encouraging patience across everyone who's working on these projects?

**Christina Rose** (29:38) *(approx)*
That's a terrific question.

*[CUT #4 applied: pause and trailing fragments removed]*

**Christina Rose** (29:40) *(approx)*
I think what tends to be true when you make investments — even small investments in young people — is that those investments have a real ripple effect. You're going to start a changemaker's journey with a young person that's a personal transformation. You're also going to enable them to start to change things in their schools and communities. And the impact of those changes extends to their peers — whom they often engage in these types of projects — extends to their teachers, extends to their parents and families. So there's something about seeing firsthand proof of the work being done and the transformations happening that makes it a little bit easier to bring communities along. Now, that's not always the case. One of the things that comes to mind is there's a young woman who lives in Pakistan, and the challenge she was facing is that her family and all of the families in her community had, for as long as any of them could remember, used a certain kind of cooking apparatus in their kitchens that could be extraordinarily toxic — detrimental to the health of the predominantly women who were in those environments cooking. She tried to introduce a new type of stove. And the pushback was enormous, because you're talking about a cultural norm, you're talking about tradition, you're talking about history. And you're trying to change systems that are really deeply entrenched. And so it took a lot of proving, and a lot of education, to get her community to adopt the new tooling that she was suggesting. But eventually, with enough small success points over time, these young people can build the trust they need to bring their communities along. I also think this is the place where not just money, but mentorship and networks and full-circle support comes into play. Because when they face that type of challenge, they need to be able to have access to others who've been through similar challenges. And so what Rivet does is — we've funded over 1,300 projects globally to date. All of those young people are now in community with each other digitally, sharing experiences, sharing best practices. That makes a huge difference in being able to convince the stakeholders they need to convince to let them continue to innovate.

**Seth** (32:45) *(approx)*
Hmm. It's amazing.

*[CUT #3 applied: Seth losing train of thought and water break removed]*

**Seth** (32:48) *(approx)*
I love that idea of connecting students internationally with a common purpose, sharing best practices, being in community — not just physically but digitally. Another thing that I work with is schools. And you explicitly are not working with schools — you're working with NGOs who have similar types of community footprints as schools in terms of the type of work they're doing and the type of involvement they have in the community. Why not schools? And what do you think — I understand you're not an educator, and you're in the nonprofit world — but as a relative outsider, as a parent and a stakeholder in education, you've seen enough to have an opinion. What lessons can we take from Rivet and potentially put into schools to have a similar kind of impact? Which to me is all about agency. You're trying to get students to believe they can create change by taking them on this changemaker's journey. We do a lot of work with the sustainable development goals, kids coming up with ideas all the time that they may or may not actually be able to do, because hey — you might need a $250 microgrant to do it, and that's just not part of your school program. So — why not schools, and what can schools learn from Rivet's model?

*[CUT #6 applied: false start and duplicate word removed]*

**Christina Rose** (33:46) *(approx)*
There are so many smart and dedicated individuals who do have expertise in creating school environments where students can thrive to come into a community and sort of seek to engage young people in that way. Now, having said that, many of the young people that we fund are students — they're probably just receiving Rivet funding through other channels. But I'm really interested in the question you posed — what's the distinction between the two, and what can a school environment learn from some of the types of innovations that we inspire among the young people we work with?

And I really feel more than anything that it's about connecting curricula to real-world challenges. The reason that young people are so invested in the work they're doing with Rivet is because it grows most often from their own lived experiences, where they have a vital stake in the outcome of these issues and deeply personal lenses towards solving them. So I think creating opportunities for innovation that are real and not conceptual for young people, bridging that gap between the classroom and the world at large — which also feels very much like a Banyan core value — and inviting their perspectives on issues that are relevant to their community, their schools, and their peers. One of the things that strikes me about education — even simply as a parent to two daughters who are eight and eleven — is it's not just about imparting knowledge. We send our children to school because we want them to do math and read Tom Sawyer or whatever it is. But it's really about cultivating citizens. It's about how young people have an opportunity to practice how they show up within a community. It's about cultivating communication, leadership, collaboration, shared goal setting. So all of these pieces are already part of the schooling experience, whether or not they're happening directly in the classroom. I think there's a way to be more intentional about naming those parts of the educational experience, and in that way, better connecting a formal educational experience and its curricula to the types of innovations that young people can see real-world applications through. Did that make sense?

**Seth** (37:49) *(approx)*
It's funny. Yeah, no, it's great. It's funny — I just wrote a blog post talking about AI cheating and what that reveals about what people believe education is for. And I identify three schools of thought around what education is for. Some people — like you — believe that it's to prepare citizens to go into the world and have an impact on their society. But there are other points of view as well. One is that it's simply to develop capabilities within the person, and however they practice those capabilities, those capabilities are the primary thing — not necessarily impact on society. And another one is that it's for the market — to be able to say, you got this piece of paper, so now I as a job creator can understand that this piece of paper means you have these capabilities, and therefore the market will work. What's great about your comment there is that I think a lot of schools don't necessarily take a perspective on that question. It's the biggest question, it's the deepest question, it's the hardest to answer. I think a lot of schools might say, look, yeah, it's all three. But I think if you pick one, you might find yourself approaching things a little bit differently. And I appreciate the work you did looking into Banyan — it would be no surprise to learn that I agree with you that the citizenship piece is the most important to me. Society itself is the biggest stakeholder in education, and it's our job to prepare students to go out and have positive impact on each other, on the world. And my gosh, Rivet is doing that in spades.

**Christina Rose** (38:50) *(approx)*
Right.

**Christina Rose** (38:53) *(approx)*
Right.

**Christina Rose** (39:03) *(approx)*
Appreciate that.

**Seth** (39:04) *(approx)*
Thank you so much for your work, for the impact that you've had. I know that a lot of the funding comes from these projects where Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are providing the funds for their peers across the world, which is incredible. Are there — what would you like from my audience? Where would you like to send them? Is there an ask?

**Christina Rose** (39:35) *(approx)*
Absolutely. I'd love to send them to our website at rivet.org to just learn more about the work that we're doing. I'd also love to encourage them to follow our Substack — rivet.org on Substack — and start to engage with some of the stories of young changemakers, because I think that will become a source of inspiration and illumination for anyone who gets a real understanding of the types of changes, ideas, and innovations that young people are already bringing into the world. We kind of talk about younger people as if they're the future, they're the next generation. Well, the truth is they're the now generation. And so I would encourage people to learn more about how young people are actually contributing through Rivet. There are opportunities to mentor, there are opportunities to fund, there are opportunities to support us in a lot of different ways, and we welcome all to our community.

**Seth** (40:42) *(approx)*
Beautiful. Christina, thank you so much for being here.

**Christina Rose** (40:45) *(approx)*
Thank you, Seth. This was great. This was really fun.

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[OUTRO — recorded separately]

That's a wrap on our conversation with Christina Rose. She introduced a framework I hadn't encountered before: financial capital, social capital, and imagination capital — the idea that what young people most lack isn't ideas or drive, it's the chance to see themselves as capable of change. The stories of Walter in Uganda and Stanley in Nigeria made that concrete in ways that are hard to forget. If you work with young people, it's worth sitting with the question of which of those three types of capital your students actually have access to. RIVET's website and Substack are both in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and we'll see you next time.