Dent Education

We have extreme and rising innovation inequality. All humans can create change, yet systemic racism disempowers millions of youth of color. Students lose 90% of their creative capacity during school (Lego), and in Baltimore, over 20% of youth ages 16-24 are disconnected from work/school, 79% of whom are black (JOTF). As we experience unprecedented and rapid advances in technology, we will increasingly rely on humans to be creative, empathetic, and adaptable to change in leveraging technology to advance society. We run paid internship programs for Baltimore high schoolers to leverage technology to create, invent, and start their own ventures. Students also connect with a diverse, powerful network, receive support in designing their post-high school pathways, and experience "I Can Make a Dent". More importantly, they learned Dent Mindsets - based in design thinking - that enable them to participate in the digital workforce, achieve upward mobility, and live with agency. 

Students lose 90% of their creative capacity during school (Lego), and in Baltimore, over 20% of youth ages 16-24 are disconnected from work/school, 79% of whom are black (JOTF). Only 67% of Baltimore City high schoolers will graduate (and only 8% of current high schoolers will earn a college degree). There are 80,000 students in Baltimore City Public Schools, of which 21,000 are in high school. Over 40% of children live in poverty (Census Bureau) and with 1/3 of Baltimorean households of color having zero net worth, social mobility is stunted (Prosperity Now). Many City schools don’t even have A/C, heating, or working water fountains, nonetheless quality 21st century education. 

Young people in our city, though, are resourceful, resilient, and hustle hard. When students have an identity project, such as building their venture at Dent, 90% graduate compared to 58% without a similar passion (DeLuca). The problem is that many youth don’t have access to engaging, transformative, and valuable experiences, are disconnected from inspiring role models of color and powerful networks of support, and don’t have an opportunity pipeline to a brighter future of agency. That is what we are building at Dent.

We define our target student as under-resourced, high-potential youth. We work solely with high school students who live in Baltimore City and attend Baltimore City Public Schools. We look for students who display passion, are coachable, hustle, and display eagerness to grow (not academic performance). We pitched 2,354 students and personally interviewed 379 from 20 schools in 2020. As we’ve grown from 8 to 120 students, youth voice and agency have been paramount to our development of engaging, valuable programs. We not only have a Youth Advisory Board that guides us on everything from recruitment, to program design, to budgeting, to the language we use, but we have 3 student interns who work a total of 30 hours a week, and are fundamentally creating the change they want represented at Dent. The demand for our programs has only grown so rapidly because our students return to their schools as our champions (50% of students return for a 2nd summer), genuinely eager to share their own transformation and recruit other students. We ensure our programs are truly valuable by partnering with Johns Hopkins to measure impact and by ensuring the mindset shifts translate to academic performance and career opportunities. 

Dent’s mission is to promote equity by empowering under-resourced youth to discover and develop their innate creative potential to shape the world around them. Cohorts of high-potential, under-resourced students, guided by coaches & a mentor network, build their own business or social enterprise through a 150 hour paid summer internship called Bet on Baltimore. 120 Denters will earn a total of $165,000 this summer, not even including the profits their ventures earn.

We spark a life trajectory shift that begins with a “I can make a Dent” mindset shift through experiential learning in Bet on Baltimore that encourages students to dream big. It continues with a program pipeline of increasing intensity from 8th-12th including a business incubator, after-school programs, travel experiences, and support for college or career paths up to 6 years post-high school. We push students out of the classroom to engage community, identify needs, leverage design thinking for creative solutions, prototype real products, iterate through failure, and actually launch ventures. 

In our 6 Bet on Baltimore tracks, students learn to leverage technology to build something that never existed and then have the epiphany that the world is malleable and they can make a dent. This looks like students creating physical products with laser cutters, wood working, or sewing. Other students will create with a keyboard and mouse, whether it be mastering Adobe Creative Suite, learning to build websites, or prototyping mobile apps. In Recording Studio, students learn audio engineering and production, and will create songs and podcasts to amplify voices, send a message they think the world needs to hear, or inspire action. 

Some students, like Liz with TALA Charms, are continuing their venture, others have secured internships at media production or technology startups through Dent connections, and several have written about their innovation and entrepreneurial journey in their college essays. Denters in college are becoming active in technology and entrepreneurship groups on campus.

By leveraging technology to create solutions and launch ventures, a student believes "I Can." However, to actualize that catalyzed potential to a trajectory shift in life, network and pathways are invaluable, which is why each student will meet at least 25 entrepreneurs and leaders of color from their community through Bet on Baltimore and why we have partnered with over 50 local organizations to provide pathways for opportunity beyond Dent programs.

Organizations teach entrepreneurship (WeThrive or NFTE), design thinking (Design for Change), and making (MakerEd); we integrate all three. Others are low-touch (2 hrs/week), we run intensive (150+ hours) experiences that push students beyond mere exposure to tools or techniques. Furthermore, no program we know of economically empowers students through paid internships - students will have earned $365,000+ at Dent after this summer. Our definition of “making” goes beyond traditional fabrication to include everything from graphic design and animation, to music and podcast production, to coding and website development.

Denters' final product is not just a business plan, it’s a launched venture and a mindset shift. Our experiential learning ingrains students with the Dent mindsets. 

We connect students with mentors and entrepreneurs of color who reinforce the lessons they learn in our program, serve as role models that look like them (so they actually believe that tech and entrepreneurship are viable pathways), and become their essential network of support. We also run innovation workshops for business leaders, professionals, and entrepreneurs across the globe, not only to fund our student programs, but more importantly, to connect our students with these companies who are seeking precisely the type of thinking they are developing in our programs. 

We keep cohorts small and co-create curriculum with trained, passionate coaches. Finally, at the core of all we do is a social justice, asset-based lens to youth development -- our students are the experts of their experience, so they co-create with us.

You can see our Theory of Change here. 

All of our programs are a means to and end, to develop the Dent Mindsets within our students. We imagine that if you read them, not only will they resonate with you, but you will agree that these are crucial for the 21st century economy and that individuals who exemplify them will be able to create change externally, as well as a better life for themselves.

You can see a summary of our 2018 Impact Study done by the Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education here, with the full report linked. The 2019 full report is available here.

This document leverages other research to illustrate that the Dent Mindsets learned in our programs does indeed lead to longer-term outcomes in terms academics, career, and earning. 

We are currently serving 120 students and have served over 200 in total (this is defined by our threshold of engagement of 150+ contact hours in Dent programs. If you reduce it to 3+ hours, we have served over 2,000 students).

We will be serving an additional 250 students over the next year and 2,000 in the next 5 years (150+ contact hours). 

To get the transformation and true mindset shift we seek, we strongly believe that it takes deep personal relationships and sustained engagement, which inherently is not easily scalable to the millions. However, we have intentionally decided to invest deeply in fewer students to make these tangible, transformational changes. However, as we build on our core programming, we plan to expand to other models of impact such as training teachers to bring such experiences to their classrooms, being more of a connector between industry and students (so impact is created in parallel but not through programs we develop and operate), releasing content online, and establishing new hubs of concentrated program (replicate what we are doing in Baltimore in other communities). The model and approach is similar to that of universities like MIT and Stanford -- there are very few students who get the in-depth, full-time experience, but that investment yields exponential results (look at their individual trajectories, as well as the value created by their graduates), and in addition, we want to develop other avenues of creating similar impact outside of that core student group. 

Everything we do is all about people; we can have the best curriculum on paper, but it all depends on who is delivering that experience to students, what type of culture and environment they build, and how the personally connect with young people that will determine if it is a successful and valuable experience. We have been fortunate to build a movement of educators, designers, and entrepreneurs who have loved their experience of coaching with Dent, who then take their learnings back to their classroom and continue to support their Denters beyond our programs. To continue to scale the high-touch programs, we will need to continue building our network of educators and coaches. These coaches are not just people who get and embody the Dent Mindsets (or are makers, innovators, technologists, and entrepreneurs themselves), but they need to be able to connect with our students (predominantly low-income, black youth) in a genuine, meaningful way that inspires trust and collaboration. It is a lot of work to find and train such a team, which is a crucial limiting factor to scale. We will also need to develop key partnerships in industry to actualize the impact beyond Dent programs into career opportunities and trajectories. Lastly, we will need to invest in organizational building which will require significant capital.

We have learned, at a relatively small scale, how to do things well. Our work is community based, not designed for hyper-scale. We want to stay true to this and scale through replication -- continue to invest in community and relationships, but by building out similar hubs in different places. In Baltimore, we have learned the "ingredients and recipe" to create the change we envisioned, and we are now better poised to find and develop that in other places. As we continue to operationalize our programming, our executive team will have the time to focus more on newer strategic initiatives, from partnering with industry, to expanding earned revenue programming, to launching new sites and building the broader Dent network.

All activities previously described are in the US.

3 full-time staff

3 student interns (part-time)

33 program staff for our 5-week Bet on Baltimore summer internship (20 Coaches, 10 college-aged or high school graduate Fellows, & 3 Site Supervisors)

Some  Bet on Baltimore coaches will continue working with their students to support the growth of the student ventures in our school-year incubator

2 contractors

Co-Founder/CEO Rajan co-invented an innovative baby incubator in a Stanford class project and turned it into a real company right after graduating as an undergraduate engineer (Embrace). Embrace has earned global recognitions and saved the lives of over 300,000 babies across 30+ developing countries. In building an organization rooted in design thinking and social impact, he learned what it takes to build such a culture and train others. He returned to Stanford for his MBA with a mission to start Dent. This time, he learned from his professors and coaches how Stanford builds curricula, programs, and a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. He has run design thinking programs for students, business executives, non-profits, and government leaders in over 17 countries. 

Director of Programs Micky uses his strategic decision-making and relationship-building experience as University of Texas at Austin Student Body Vice President to build over 150 partnerships for Dent. As a social entrepreneur with a focus on innovation and equity, he has co-founded the Improve UT Challenge, Texas for Expanding Opportunity, and the Social Entrepreneurship Learning Lab. He’s launched new programs Dent including our business incubator, and Made@Dent, where students worked at a Dent-run business.

Our core team has expertise in Baltimore City education, youth development, and program management, which has enabled us to build capacity and structure. Most importantly, our Dent coaches represent our students and are local entrepreneurs, educators, makers, and innovators who can guide students through their journey at Dent.

We are partnering with 20 local schools to recruit both students and coaches. We partner with 10 local makerspaces, technology hubs, co-working spaces, and universities to serve as sites for our programs. This not only provides students with access to, but inspires them and create connections between our youth and the innovators of today. We also partner with over 50 local organizations to source student projects, serve as content experts for students in topics like gun violence or homelessness, recruit speakers, and offer post-program opportunities to our students. We have partnered with a local organization, Innovation Works, to connect our students not only to local entrepreneurs, but to get access to funding and support as budding entrepreneurs themselves. 

To develop our curriculum in many different forms of making, we're partnering with other local organizations to create new tracks in Bet on Baltimore. This includes Believe in Music for our Recording Studio, Code in the Schools for Web Design, and Digital Harbor Foundation for a Startup Garage track focused on 3D printing.

We provide programs for Baltimore City high schoolers, and reach them through partnerships with local schools. We partner with local sites to host and run our programs, and recruit and train coaches to lead cohorts of students through our programs. 

Our funding primarily comes from grants, awards, and individual donations, though about 15% of our budget is supported through earned revenue programs as our CEO runs design and innovation workshops for companies, professionals, entrepreneurs, NGOs, and government leaders across the globe. With expanded resources and capacity, we hope to grow this portion of our revenue, as it also comes along with the potential to create broader connections and opportunities for our students. 

A copy of our BMC can be found here.

We plan to expand our fundraising, which has historically been concentrated in Baltimore. Not only will we seek support of foundations and institutions beyond the city, we aim to have a more targeted approach for individuals to engage and support our work. A primary source of earned revenue that will be expanded is that of the design and innovation consulting/workshops we do. Though we currently only do a few of these a year (due to time constraints), we are paid up to $20,000 for a 2-day workshop, and if we were able to spend more time building out this business, we will be able to grow our capacity and programs, while also creating more connections between students and professionals. As we expand our delivery method to include train-the-trainer model and teacher professional development, we can also scale our impact (through a lower-touch medium) while also earning revenue. Lastly, we have explored running programs for students and families who can afford to pay, in order to subsidize the programming for our primary target of under-resourced and marginalized students. 

In our first few years, we have focused on building effective programs for students that engage them and truly develop the Dent Mindsets, which we've shown we've been able to do. Now, we have momentum and are a known institution within Baltimore City. Strategically, we want to continue to build and grow these programs, but will be focusing more on the "Pathways" part of our impact model, connecting them with networks and industry partners that enable them to take the skills and mindsets they've developed and translate them into career opportunities. Being a part of the Digital Workforce and ServiceNow networks will enable us to develop those key partnerships, and will also give companies access to recruit and support, in an inclusive way, the next generation of innovators, makers, and leaders. In addition, the funding will help us grow our team and capacity to build programs, keep up with student demand, and expand our offerings. 

Currently, people who visit our programs are floored when they speak with our students and see what they are building. However, we have not been great at sharing these stories more broadly, which is essential to re-frame the narrative of Baltimore City and our youth, which the Challenge could help us do in a powerful way. Lastly, as we plan to replicate our model and approach in other cities, the network will enable us with the key relationships and partnerships to find local leaders, develop talent, and scale to new cities.

• Companies seeking to mentor and hire diverse, talented youth
• Partners who can help provide technology and curriculum related design, making, and entrepreneurship
• Organizations who may want to be our clients for design, creativity, and innovation workshops
• Partners who can help us replicate and scale our programs and model in new geographies