Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
Tag: Milwaukee
A Better Way to Register New Voters, A Talking Cure for Homicide and More
Here’s What Happened When Oregon Automatically Registered Its New Voters, Washington Post
When you apply for a drivers license in Oregon, you’re now automatically registered to vote. State officials say the DMV program — the nation’s first opt-out law — is the simplest way to bolster voter rolls and keep addresses up-to-date — important in a state that votes by mail. So far, in the first week, four times as many new voters signed up as the Beaver State used to register in a month. It remains to be seen whether they actually cast a ballot.
This Police Department Stops Disputes Before They Turn Deadly, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
It’s a rule of thumb for criminologists that crime spikes in the summer: not only are more people outside, but heated arguments also sometimes lead to violence. In Rochester, N.Y., beat cops now track tiffs across the city and send a summary of the dispute to a central database, where analysts can predict which are most likely to escalate. While this predictive policing may sound like a real-life “Minority Report,” law enforcement’s seven-month-old strategy appears promising and is being looked at by other departments nationally, including Milwaukee.
After Rehab, This Valuable App Keeps Drinkers and Drug Abusers Sober, New York Times
A former addict walks out of rehab and is suddenly bombarded by temptations: old drinking buddies, familiar haunts, relief from stress and anxiety. A mobile app, A-Chess, checks in throughout the day to help alcoholics avoid the bottle. It’s pre-loaded with high-risk locations like bars and liquor stores the person frequented. When nearby, the app automatically sends a message, “Are you sure you want to be here?” and alerts other contacts the patient has pre-programmed, like his sponsor or a family member. Along with virtual counseling and other smartphone apps, these modern tools are helping with the hardest part of getting clean: staying that way.
The Cross-Country Road Trip with Stops to Volunteer Along the Way
Bland Hoke was planning a road trip from New York to his new home in Wyoming. But rather than stopping along the way to check out tourist spots and famous landmarks, the designer enlisted two friends to help him create urban workshops to innovate solutions to local problems.
With the help of filmmaker William Novak and the anonymous artist behind the Rotten Apple hacking project, Hoke documented what he accomplished along the way in a film called “Drive.”
“We looked for groups who are working on ways to improve urban environments, and decided to try to work with them on really short creative projects,” Hoke tells Fast Company. “We reached out to people in different cities and tried to more or less chart a line that went from New York to Wyoming.”
To mark the beginning of the journey, Hoke and his two friends began in New York City, working with hacktivists at Learn Do Share to transform old bike racks into chairs as well as fire hydrants into chess games on the street.
As they headed west, the three stopped in Detroit where they coordinated a project with Sit On It Detroit, a local grassroots group that outfits bus stops with built-in mini libraries.
“We helped them come up with a new bench,” Hoke says. “They told us they started with nothing, no design background, just high school shop class. We helped push the project a little bit further.”
While in the Midwest, Hoke breezed through Chicago and met up with Cooperation Operation, a nonprofit that turns vacant land into educational and empowerment projects, to help create a community posting board out of scraps that had been thrown away. The group also worked their way through Milwaukee, as well as an impromptu stop in Omaha to help kids on an art project.
“Sometimes you can plan these journeys, and take a bunch of time and try to make it perfect, but sometimes serendipity is the best thing,” he says.
Hoke partially funded the project through a Kickstarter project initially intended for Softwalks, an urban intervention for construction sites. Due to city regulation and permit challenges, Softwalks was unable to launch successfully, which is why Hoke used the funding for “Drive” instead.
“I could have just packed up the car, drove, and got to where I was going,” Hoke explains. “But we had the chance to do a creative project. I think it’s wonderful to travel across the country and find like-minded people who are working on really interesting projects.”
Hopefully “Drive” will inspire more Americans to take on a more creative way of road-tripping.
MORE: 7 Key Drivers to Turn Social Innovation into Success
How the Bard is Helping Veterans in Milwaukee
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate theater professor Bill Watson had a notion that engaging with the works of William Shakespeare would help veterans cope with the problems they faced reintegrating into society, including PTSD. After all, in several of his plays, the Bard captured the conflicted, powerful feelings of warriors both in the midst of battle and after the fighting stopped.
So a year and a half ago, with the help of his professional actor wife, Nancy Smith-Watson, and Jim Tasse, an adjunct theater professor, Bill started Feast of Crispian, an organization that guides veterans in performing Shakespeare through methods uniquely tailored to their needs.
Feast of Crispian began working with veterans who were receiving treatment for substance abuse issues, PTSD and other problems at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. So far, the group has held nine weekend-long workshops for veterans that start with the selection of selecting passages from Shakespeare that have roles for two veterans with plenty of conflict, vivid emotions, and only short lines of dialogue so not to trip up the beginning actors.
“We really get right into it Friday night,” Smith-Watson tells Meg Jones of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creating a sense of group dynamic, asking them to connect with everyone else in the group really quickly. We’ve been floored at how much that works, that by the end of the first night we have 12 to 18 people who came in saying, ‘I came to check this out but I probably won’t be back tomorrow.’ Yet we rarely lose anyone. They give up a whole weekend to do the work.”
On Saturday and Sunday, they cast the scenes and professional actors work with the veterans to get them expressing the emotions Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago, yet still speak to the vets’ experiences. The actors define archaic words and feed the veterans their lines as they perform so they don’t have to worry about memorizing. On Sunday afternoon, the vets give a performance that’s open to the public.
Jeff Peterson, a Navy veteran who played the role of Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” in the group’s most recent performance, tells Jones, “It’s an emotional experience like no other treatment. This is something I look forward to. I don’t want it to end.”
Marine Corps veteran John Buck, who portrayed Caliban in a scene from “The Tempest,” agrees. “I consider it theater therapy. It gets veterans to open up about their problems,” he says. “You see veterans slowly opening up throughout the weekend.”
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide
Meet The Councils Putting Local Food on Tables Nationwide
It goes without saying that America is a melting pot of different cultures, customs and people. Traveling from one state to another or one region to another can be like entering a new country. But for all of our differences, we’re united by one thing: Our love of food.
And although the type of food varies by state, we all want access to the best — which, for many, means local food. But for others, that isn’t a viable option due to the lack of access or inability to afford it.
That’s where food policy councils come in. A phenomenon found in every state in the country, these conglomerates of stakeholders work to create policies and laws to help develop the economic, environmental and social infrastructure needed in a local food system.
Of all of the councils in the county, Sustainable Cities Collective recently highlighted their top six champion councils. Here’s a look at a few of these pioneers.
1. Knoxville-Knox County Food Policy Council, Knoxville, Tenn.
This group got things started back in 1982, as the first food policy council in the world. It was created by a government law, and when first recruiting members, it had three main criteria: “ties to government, working knowledge of food industry and experience in neighborhood and consumer advocacy.”
Since then, it’s definitely proved its worth. In order to make grocery stores more available to its citizens, it expanded the city and county bus routes and mapped out the local grocery stores. It also worked in the schools, expanding breakfast and lunch programs for students. Local food projects such as farmer’s markets and community gardens have been supported by the council as well.
The Council hasn’t stopped there, though. In addition, it has worked to pass ordinances to ease the local food movement, such as allowing residents to grow hens on their property.
2. Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition, Cleveland, Ohio
In 2007, the Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition popped up. Their focus has been on legislation, as well as creating and operating food programs.
So far, the coalition boasts Urban Garden District Zoning and Farm Animals and Bees legislation and an Urban Agriculture Overlay District Zoning policy on its list of accomplishments. And that’s just at the legal level.
As far as programming, the coalition is working to make farmer’s markets more accessible for low-income residents. Farmer’s markets now accept EBT (electronic benefit transfer) and SNAP as payment. Further, under Produce Perks, customers who use EBT at the market can get up to a $10 match on what they purchase.
Additional resources for residents include community food assessments and guidebooks such as Local Food Guide and Cleveland’s Healthy Food Guidelines.
3. Milwaukee Food Council, Milwaukee, Wis.
The Milwaukee Food Council is another group focused on policy and programming. It’s responsible for the 2010 honey ordinance allowing residents to keep bees and the 2011 eggs ordinance giving people the ability to grow chickens for eggs.
In addition to partnering with many local groups, it works with the University of Wisconsin Extension and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with which it created the Milwaukee Urban Agriculture Audit that finds the possible legal barriers to urban agriculture.
And through its Healthy Food Access Work Group, it works to make local food accessible to low-income residents through incentives and programs.
To check out the other top councils, click here.
MORE: How Salvaging the Food in Your Own Backyard Can Help Your Community and the Environment
An Inventor to Help Other Inventors
If you’ve ever been struck with a million-dollar idea, you’re probably not alone. Most of us have likely had that burst of thought—but pushed it aside given the difficulty of transforming an idea into an actual product or service. After all, where would you begin?
Enter Inventalator, a new online web platform dedicated to helping inventors turn their ideas into physical products. The Milwaukee-based company was developed by Cody Skonard, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Skonard started the company with the intention to combine all phases of the invention process into one website, as well as enable inventors to form connections and receive feedback from the consumers to improve their idea.
The process is simple: Inventors first submit their ideas onto the website. From there, site users vote on the inventions based on whether they would buy the product or not. If a product receives 50 votes within a month, it is moved to the Inventalator “engine.” In this area, the site users and inventors are able to interact with one another. Users also offer suggestions and improvements on the product so it can be more appealing to the general public. Finally, when the product is ready to be developed, Inventalator connects the inventor with manufacturers, product licensors and distributors, getting them contracts as well.
Inventalator is not the only site for inventors but it has two distinguishing characteristics. First, it’s a “market intelligence platform,” meaning that instead of producing the product itself, it supplies inventors with all of the resources to develop the product. It is a one-stop site for the inventor’s needs. Second, the inventor keeps the property rights.
Although the inventor keeps the property rights, the service is not free. There’s a $10 initial fee to submit an idea as well as a 1-2% fee for site transactions and a 3-5% commission fee for crowdfunding campaigns.
In addition, Skonard is currently working on developing a production software tool. The program would work like a fake stock market where site users can invest fake money in answers to inventors’ questions. Like the stock market, the user can cash out when it wants and earn rewards for the site.
So far, Inventalator has been active for three months and has amassed 275 users. By connecting inventors with consumers, Inventalator has streamlined the process and made the inventions more accessible to both parties. With little to lose, it might be time to submit that idea—after all, it could be the next great American invention.
MORE: Want A Stake in Your Neighborhood’s Next Development?
This Non-Profit Is Teaching Immigrants Much More Than Just Language
The Burmese Immigration Project is a nonprofit organization in Milwaukee that helps new arrivals from Myanmar learn English and settle in to their new lives. As volunteer coordinator Becca Schulz explains in this video, people fleeing ethnic conflict in Burma often end up in places they’d never imagined—like Wisconsin. The 35 volunteers in the Burmese Immigration Project use English immersion to teach immigrants the language, and provide kids with tutors twice a week to help with homework. Another part of their mission is introducing the kids to American culture—so the Burmese Immigration Project takes the kids to Brewers games and the zoo, and throws parties for their families to experience Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Halloween.
Wisconsin Has a Seriously Cheesy Idea. And It’s Going to Save the State a Fortune
A couple of facts most people know about Wisconsin: it’s got a lot of snow and a lot of cheese. So it was just a matter of time before the two things would converge. In Milwaukee, which averages about 50 in. of snow each winter, a pilot program now has workers spreading cheese brine — a superabundant byproduct of the cheese-making process — on icy roadways. The idea is to combine the salty liquid with traditional rock salt to thaw frozen roads; the brine helps rock salt stick, leading to less salt bouncing or washing off roads, and ultimately shrinking costs and reducing pollution.
MORE: Wisconsin’s other upcycling breakthrough: a hydroelectric renaissance.
Granted, it’s a mildly stinky solution, but it’s already proven successful in some of the state’s smaller localities. In Polk County, near Wisconsin’s northwest border, officials estimate that they saved almost $40,000 in rock salt costs in 2009, the year they started using cheese brine on the highways. Recycling the dairy waste also reduces the costs of hauling it and processing it at waste-treatment plants — huge expenses, considering that Wisconsin produced 2.7 billion lbs. of cheese in 2012. So far, no one’s complained about any scent of mozzarella or provolone on the ground, though it would seem a small price to pay for a state of proud cheeseheads.