The Bay Area is known as a thriving startup community. But Suzanne McKechnie Klahr was struck by the inequality she saw there while working as a pro-bono lawyer in East Palo Alto. She wanted to make it easier for those with disadvantaged backgrounds to both get a good education and to find support for their small businesses. So in 1999 she founded BUILD, a nonprofit which gives entrepreneurial support and funding to disconnected high-schoolers with small business ideas.
BUILD now serves more than 930 students in three cities across the country, providing small business classes and start-up funding to the kids most likely to drop out of high school. “We are looking for students who were truant and had low test scores in middle school,” McKechnie Klahr says. “We want to engage them as soon as they get into 9th grade because disengagement in 9th grade is highly predictive of dropping out of high school.” Such intervention has already been successful. According to the folks at BUILD, 99 percent of seniors in the program have graduated from high school and 95 percent have been accepted to college.
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Tag: build
Big Bets: 8 Game-Changers Shake Things Up to Solve Our Country’s Challenges
We know about the challenges.
We know that too many young people are struggling to find employment and a ladder up; that too many children fail to receive the sort of education they need to flourish in the 21st century world; that more young people should be given the opportunity to partake in some form of national service — and that too few actually do.
At NationSwell, we are deeply concerned about these problems, and we are always grateful to find a smart report or analysis of the challenges. Developing a true and deep understanding of a problem is the first step in solving it.
But it’s what comes next that truly excites us — and defines our mission.
It’s the innovators, the pioneers, the change-makers who not only understand these national challenges and all of their complexity, but who also dare to solve them. At NationSwell, we are ever-focused on finding them, telling their powerful stories and driving action in support of their efforts.
Who are these leaders, what are their visions for change, what motivates them — and what, exactly, are the big bets they are making to advance our country?
NationSwell sat down with eight innovators at the Gathering of Leaders, an annual event held this past year in Napa, Calif., hosted by leading venture philanthropy organization New Profit, for a series of extraordinary conversations in which we posed some of those very questions.
The answers we got were as varied as they were illuminating — and, to us, heartening. If the odds are anything like Vegas, some of these risk-takers will fail and some will succeed. But, in thinking creatively and acting boldly, what these men and women are doing to tackle our biggest national challenges demands our consideration — and participation.
We invite you to watch and be part of the conversation as we present the NationSwell series: “Big Bets”.
All the best,
Greg Behrman
Editor-in-Chief
NationSwell
MORE:Big Bets: How to Bridge the Gap Between Practitioners and Policy Makers