Creative Learners Movement

Create a movement of Creative Learners, where students focus on learning through doing, where they become owners of their own education and learning experiences, by creating and environment where students, learning, creation, and innovation comes first, where what it matters is what you do with what you know.

Several organizations are working in creating platforms to democratize high quality information and learning.  Platforms as Scratch, EdX, Coursera, and Khan Academy are some examples of these wonderful resources.  However, it has been found that young people from underserved communities haven’t had the opportunity to engage to this platforms or don’t use them at all.  Similarly, Adafruit, Littlebits, Lego, are impressive tools of learning for creation and innovation, but they are significant expensive for the low-income student.

As our social and economical environment continues growing rapidly, it won’t longer matter where are you from, which schools did you go, what will matter is what you do with the things you know, how you use your resources to learn the things you need to tackle the new challenges coming ahead. We need to move from the traditional educational system to a learning-oriented system that is focused in the interests of the students and help them to shape their own learning and educational experience, schools now should be facilitators, teaching the student how to learn, open opportunities for learning by doing, where the students can develop grit, creativity, critical thinking, and start solving problems that matters to them.

There is no better time, to bring people, specially young people from underserved communities, to the front line of learning, all they need is access to the resources, guides and mentors who believe in them, who teach them how to learn the things they need as they discover and pursue their own interests. 

To start playing as soon as possible, in our first initiative we will focus in understanding how can we implement the high quality platforms and tools, to the hands of people that need them the most by using existing resources and infrastructure.

We are aim to solve the access to knowledge gap, although the high quality platforms are open to everyone, a lot of people, students, schools, don’t use them.  It is not enough to open the resources to everyone, is not enough to have them in just some schools, or some social economical backgrounds. To really democratize high quality knowledge and learning, and therefore creation and innovation, we need to work hard in the inclusion of all the communities, especially the ones that are foreign to this way of thinking. 

We believe in the power of a person believing in you because we have lived it. The team, we all grow up in challenging environments, Rosinda Fuentes, grow up in Juchitlan, Oaxaca, a place where access to high quality education is rare. Fernanda Lugo, grow up in a neighborhood close to “La Merced” in Mexico City, an environment highly surrounded by drugs, and prostitution. Flor Aguilar was constantly discouraged to pursue a career in STEM. How do we arrive here?  because someone believed in our potential, and gave us the resources we needed to go forward. 

The impact our of solution will be in the long run, communities that traditionally have low access to opportunities to innovate, will be become a source of creativity and innovation by their own people through the years.

We aim to target communities where young people usually don't go to college, become parents at very young age and are at high risk of being involved in illegal activities.

We will follow them to be sure they have the tools they need to succeed. We will deploy our solution with help of the local communities as community centers, and schools.

We will track their progress through the year with an platform we will create. - Have more that 1000 students engage in our program by the end of 2018

We will track their progress through the year with an platform we will create. - 100 teachers trained to be guides

We will track their progress through the year with an platform we will create. - Integrate 20 different schools in Mexico, and USA by the end of 2018

We are going for the long run, a student, a teacher, a institution at the time, we are still part of the communities we want to work for, our families, friends, children of our friends live there, we know the strengths and challenges of these communities.  We have a taste of the two worlds, the one with abundance of opportunities and high quality knowledge while we pursue our doctoral studies, and the one where your opportunities go to a different direction as for example selling drugs. We know how to create the bridge because we are part of both worlds.

As we are in the concept stage, we plan to create our solution with the people who are going to use it, in order to have a successful implementation the involvement of the community is fundamental, to create opportunities for them, we need to create the opportunities with them, to create real change.  We will focus our solution heavily in Community and technology, physical community will never be replaced, and we will help them to organize with the creation of technology.

We will work close with the communities we are targeting, and they will be part of the creation of the solution. Every community is different, some will have access to resources that others not, we will study every community particularly to find the best way for them to access to our solution.

We plan to look for grand funding for different institutions interested in the same goals, and find ways to be sustainable in our own. 

Our mentorship will be mostly made by volunteers that are studying or working in the industry of the interests of the students.

Our more significant challenge will be winning the students, teachers, and institutions to engage, and implement our solution. Change is difficult, and requires time, and resources. Many institutions have not implemented new methodologies into their curriculum because many reasons, they are underfunded, they do not see direct benefit in their evaluations, teachers are over worked with their activities of the day to day, but we believe mostly, it is because or they don’t know about these resources, or they just haven’t seen yet how by bringing learning-oriented systems to their schools, could improve drastically their life of their students.  

We want to be part of the solve community, because we believe you really care about finding solutions to important challenging problems of the world, as we also do. We believe that there is not better open-minded community with whom we could work, that supports each other to succeed.  Solve has access to high quality resources, and by being part of your community we could be sure that these resources are also reachable to all young people, specially from underserved communities where access to creativity and innovation is difficult to get.  

We don’t have any formal partners, but we have a wonderful relationship with the Faculty of Engineering at UNAM in Mexico, they could help us to start our pilot.  Moreover, we are looking for collaborations in the Providence-Boston, Brown University, and Solve could help us to launch our pilots there.  

As we are starting, we don’t have any competitors.