SPEAK Mentorship

Sy et al. (2011) “found that first-generation female college students had lower levels of emotional and informational support from their parents than their continuing-generation female college peers.” They suffer from poor social-emotional health as a result of limiting gendered expectations from multiple cultures, which cause a complete rejection of either culture and confusion of one's identity, hostility, and frustration (Inman, 2006; Patel & Gaw, 1996). SPEAK Mentorship provides a virtual mentorship solution which applies a unique approach to mentor matching, accurately matching mentees to culturally responsive career professionals who coach and guide them once a week online to achieve personal and professional goals. Through this supportive network to guide them through cultural barriers and situations personally and professionally, our immigrant females will become representative leaders, and we envision them empowering girls globally and economically, mobilizing global communities because of the strong ties they have to their countries of origin. 

Out of the more than 50 million U.S. students, 1 in 4 are of immigrant families. Immigrants and their children will make up 83% of the workforce population by 2050, and, if we do not develop this talent pipeline starting now, we will fail to meet even our 2030 workforce needs. However, because of barriers to access internships, such as long commutes, information gaps, the value in immediate income over unpaid internship experience, family caretaker responsibilities limiting on-site internship participation, these youth miss opportunities that lead to higher paying first jobs and critical career preparedness experiences. Additionally, girls from immigrant families are kept out of internships and economically mobilizing opportunities because of family obligations as secondary caretakers. The recommended average guidance counselor to student ratio in the U.S. is 1:250 but the average in most places exceeds this by a lot, reaching 1:650. Schools, therefore, cannot support this population's needs. As it is, 85% of internships are landed through networks; 45% through family networks. Immigrants, especially new immigrants, lack such networks that lead youth to internships that develop their potential. 

SPEAK Mentorship is a high impact scalable and sustainable virtual mentorship solution for young people who lack access and guidance towards careers. We empower youth to access their leadership potential through our unique approach to mentor matching, accurately matching youth to the right career professionals who virtually mentor students to achieve personal and professional goals. By partnering with schools and community based organizations to implement our Foundational Year, we reach high potential but high need students and match them with 3 career professionals in mentoring rounds of nine 45-minute virtual sessions each, for a total of 27 virtual mentoring sessions. Mentees walk away from the Foundational Year with a resume of skills and references in mentors they worked with to pursue internship opportunities in careers they are interested in. Through the use of technology, we have cultivated a growing network of over 250 career professionals around the nation and globally who can conveniently connect to mentor their mentees from anywhere. 

The average school counselor to student ratio in places like NYC and California is more than 1:600 while the recommended ratio is 1:250. “Between closed schools, social isolation, food scarcity and parental unemployment, the coronavirus pandemic has so destabilized kids' support systems that the result, counselors say, is genuinely traumatic…[but] counselors have lost one of the most powerful tools they had before schools closed: access.” (NPR, 2020) Because of COVID-19, we see now, more than ever, how vulnerable youth lack guidance and support outside of the physical spaces of school. These children need guidance to navigate their education, get critical social emotional support, and not add falling behind to all that they’re juggling. Our approach fills a critical gap in services schools, especially now, cannot provide but our virtual mentors can. Being away from friends and teachers, confined in small spaces with multiple generations of individuals, with parents and many of our students themselves serving as front line workers, suffering losses of family members, and not having space to practice English, has led mentees to connect to mentors seeking outside social connections and guidance. There is a desperate and timely need for SPEAK’s approach to mentoring immigrant youth. 

The idea of SPEAK came when I was working with schools to support students' academic development. Ashley received her first 80 on a middle school assignment. Her father, believing only excellence resulted in success, threatened Ashley with marriage in Guyana. Ashley and her mother came to my academic support center the next day, Ashley devastated and defeated; Ashley’s mother distraught that she could not emotionally support Ashley because women had no voice in their culture. I realized girls like Ashley need more than academic counseling to achieve their potential and schools alone can not support this critical development.

SPEAK Mentorship is a virtual mentorship solution that seamlessly connects culturally responsive career professionals to high needs and high potential youth. We bridge a critical curriculum gap in schools that overlooks the immigrant experience and the unique cultural experiences of our diverse students. We combine career and culture development through mentorship with professionals and a community that understands the immigrant experience, providing targeted support for immigrant students. We unite our community around the immigrant experience. At least one of the three mentors is matched on a cultural background to help increase ethnic identity development. By integrating technology into our programming, we are able to bring the strongest representation of diverse career professionals into the hands of our students, having an incredible impact on academic engagement and belonging. Our approach is very unique and why the Queens Executive Superintendent said we are unlike any other mentoring program he had come across -- that we were thoughtfully developed, with student and mentor accessibility and outcomes in mind.

We are also described as innovative and necessary by Dean Angie Kamath of CUNY, and are partnering to support their workforce development programs and DREAMERS through our accessible and targeted programming.

For our first solution, we've (proudly) cobbled together tools to coordinate, deliver, and monitor mentoring. Google Forms to get baseline and feedback data. Kintone for identifying mentoring matches. Email to confirm mentor’s availability. Zapier to connect Google Form application responses to Kintone, automating mentor and mentee user profiles and to send out Google Calendar invites once mentoring matches and schedules have been confirmed. Zoom to conduct video mentoring sessions. 

We have been working with a dev shop to build our own platform but have not been able to get the funding necessary to complete the beta version of the platform to test. In order to scale, we need one streamlined UI. A teacher registers the school on the platform. Once payment is received, she/he creates student profiles. Students log in using the teacher provided credentials. Then they choose a mentor from a match list. Students enter the classroom via a videoconference room. Scheduled sessions are recorded for students and SPEAK team to review. We would have an NPS  rating after each session.

We've conducted nearly 1000 mentoring sessions and counting using our current tech stack. We've also seen that, as a result of COVID-19, mentoring programs have shifted to virtual approaches, including connecting through videoconferencing. We have been pioneering this solution, and that is why we have been serving as a consultant for MENTOR to help other organizations successfully shift to this new approach as a result of COVID-19. We are more necessary than ever, and had already proven our approach and need pre-COVID.

However, in order to achieve efficiency, we need to build an easy to use UI with the mentor match filters so students choose their own mentors and don’t require the speak support staff so that we can reach the 10840 students, 5420 mentors, across the 542 high schools in NYC, our primary market.

Mentees working with culturally responsive career professionals trained to be intentional mentors will encourage mentees' independent decision making, academic success and open doors to economically empowering opportunities like internships. 

We’ve served 108 mentees across 11 schools, conducting 1000 mentoring sessions and counting. By next year, we are looking to serve 10840 students in NYC of immigrant background. In 5 years, SPEAK Mentorship recognizes the critical need to counsel the over 12000000 under-served youth from immigrant families in public schools around the U.S.

For next year:

1. Build out the infrastructure and stabilize operations. This year I would like to hire 2 new full-time paid staff, fully fund current staff, and move into an office space. 2. Develop mobile technology that integrates the tech tools we currently use. We have identified the operational unit needed to support up to 150 students, but impact is limited. Our reach would be far greater once we develop our tech platform, lowering the cost to schools and districts and increasing the number of mentees we can support. 3. Build partnerships with district superintendents, principals, and community based organizations so that we can scale to more schools the following academic year. 

In 5 years:

We expect to expand services to youth globally, serving countries where immigrant communities and/or girls and women are especially vulnerable like the U.S., Australia, Dubai, South Asia, Ghana and Zambia. The latter two we had already been working with to implement our services, and did provide a workshop based program that introduced strong visible role models to vulnerable girls in 2018; but, because of lack of funding, we were not able to sustain this work and would like to considering the need and the success we had. We have mentors around the world, and know we can continue to recruit mentors globally to easily expand our services to other parts of the world. 

I am the only individual full time and this funding will help us build the urgent infrastructure we need to include full-time and part-time team members to meet demand. This, the inconsistent funding, inexperienced board, unclear understanding of the schools sales funnel, need for a CTO, and need to strengthen our partnerships to deliver services are key barriers. 

We must:

Get funding to support building the infrastructure and platform development.

We may experience ow adoption rate by schools because of lack of school staff time to implement the program. We will mitigate that by building an easy to use UI streamlining implementation. 

Student use of the platform is cumbersome at the moment. Building a better UX is a critical piece of achieving impact. If students can choose their own mentors and connect over one platform instead of through multiple tools, they will be more engaged. 

We plan on working with our alumni, who are still very engaged with SPEAK Mentorship, to test the workflow of the features, such as in-app messaging, videoconferencing, login, and matching process. 

We plan on strengthening existing partnerships and increasing the number of partnerships to deliver our services will help us meet our intended impact numbers.

I am the only full-time person with 2 part-time volunteer staff. We were looking to fully fund our team this year but, because of COVID, our funding has been greatly impacted and we will remain a volunteer team. This funding would be critical to getting SPEAK to the next stage and build the infrastructure needed to support growth. 

I am a solo founder based in NYC. My commitment to the cause because of lived experiences being a daughter of immigrants, over 15 years in the field bridging education for NYC families, and my search for practical solutions to achieve impact makes me uniquely suited to address this problem. 

I have 3 master’s degrees in education, behavior analysis, and an MBA. I'm a 2020 Points of Light Award recipient, 2019 L’Oreal Paris Woman of Worth, a 2019 Council of Urban Professionals (CUP) fellow, a Coro Leadership NY participant, and a New Leaders Council Executive Board member. 

With over 7 years of experience founding and developing an education startup, I've serving communities in 4 states through multiple academic programs. Program development/management and community development are two of my strongest skill sets related to this work. 

We brought on part time volunteer staff and board members by recruiting people who come from the community in that they identify as either woman or immigrant or both, and have a passion for serving youth. By working with professionals at Georgetown Hospital, Barclays, Boys and Girls Club, Stanford School of Education, and Ernst and Young, who dedicate their time to SPEAK, we are also building a pipeline for an incredible mentor network. We expect to be a team of 4 full time and part time paid staff in the next 12 months. With this fund, we will hire 2 program administrators and 2 additional support staff to help with mentor recruitment and training. 

We partner with schools, school districts and other community based organizations. Some include, Queens North and South Superintendents, Newark's Mentor Affiliate, NYC Mission Society. Queens North office has us serving under their new My Sister’s Keeper initiative due to a lack of girls focused programming. We have also been working with NYC Mission Society to serve their immigrant youth in the Bronx and are expanding this partnership this year. Partnerships with community based organizations, like NYC Mission Society, cultural organizations like SAALT, interest groups within corporations, and other nonprofits focused on female empowerment within different sectors, like WomenWerk, positively impact our success. Through these organizations, we are able to get a steady stream of mentors. This year, we have partnered with Multiplying Good's Students In Action program to more effectively increase student leadership and community service. 

Additionally, we began a pilot this summer through a partnership with IDEA Schools in Texas, consisting of 17 schools. We have also begun a partnership with CUNY, to serve their students across their 25 campuses who need structured mentorship to ensure they can leverage their CUNY degree to get onto the right career trajectory. 1 out 3 CUNY students is from an immigrant family and 1 out of 4 CUNY graduates enter into under-qualified positions, mostly in retail; CUNY needs help in providing support, especially to their DREAMERS. We expect to get funding from the NYC Workforce Development Fund that is especially looking for programs supporting CUNY's most vulnerable students to enter the workforce.

We are B2B and serve schools, school districts, and community based organizations. 

Only 20% of high school students are enrolled in schools with enough school counselors, resulting in 11 million high school students without enough counselors (ASCA, 2019). Students who saw their school counselor were more likely to apply for college, and with more time with their counselor they apply to the right school and receive the right information about financing their post-secondary education. 

SPEAK Mentorship recognizes the critical need to counsel under-served but high potential youth in these under-resourced schools with high immigrant populations, otherwise schools are at risk of failing their students, lowering their resources from the city and risking being shut down altogether. We assist schools in their counseling needs by matching this population of students, which has tremendous gaps in social support, to career professionals that deliver the information a school counselor would to adequately prepare them for life after high school. SPEAK will reach these students to get them 27 more hours of counseling than they are currently getting, resulting in a 10 percentage point increase in 4 year college going rate.Schools counselors can better manage bigger caseloads and schools show better student gains. 

Individual and board contributions totals and philanthropic grants, awards and in-kind contributions equal to approximately $350000 every year, which is enough to cover our expenses with room to invest in our future. As we grow, we have a calculated progression within our yearly budget of increased contributions and increased programs to maintain sustainability. As a result of COVID-19, we have experienced an increase in demand for our programs. With the increase of programs, we have realized we are unable to or will find it difficult to meet this demand with the current funding we have as we did not account for this. Heading into the next year, and future years, now that many have become aware of the benefits of our virtual program, interest in our programs have increased, which will help us remain financially stable. We are currently in the middle period of needing funding to meet demand as we wait for payments in the near future, which will then fund the expenses for the next fiscal year.

Solve will allow us to propel our idea forward. It will give us the community experience and expertise to build out the infrastructure, and also help us steer and test the development of the platform with users in the community. Solve can provide us with the critical support to grow our impact by multiple folds by next year, setting us up for success and to meet the leads we currently have, like a pilot through the Community Schools department under NYC DOE and IDEA public schools in Texas. We want to be ready to meet this demand with a prepared team, the right growth strategy, and the automation that will streamline operations for greater success. 

We have been working with a dev shop on building our platform. Therefore, we would like to continue this partnership to build our solution technology, until we can bring on the in-house software engineers.

We need to build partnerships with schools, school districts, and community based organizations to reach our target student population and deliver services directly. 

We need to partner with foundations like New York Women's Foundation and Patrina Foundation as well as corporate sponsors like JP Morgan that can financially support their mentors working with target schools. 

As a solo founder and new nonprofit founder, I have cultivated a working board but the members have very little board experience. We would like to work with Catchafire to now identify stronger board members for this next phase of growth.

We would benefit from a partnership with a media company that can help with more strategic marketing.

We would like to partner with MIT's IWER given their focus on the future of work. We know that without the development of immigrant youth to become workforce leaders, we won't meet our workforce needs by 2030. By 2050, this population will make up the majority of the workforce, and by partnering with IWER, we will be able to intentional in our programming and contribute to further research. We also would like to partner with the Gates Foundation, and believe our education and early workforce development service can easily be replicated in different regions of the world to target so many girls and women through the support of Solve partners in those regions. In NY, we would also like to partner with Eileen Fisher to impact girls and women in this region specifically. There are a lot of Solve members who we could partner with because of our focus on technology integrated solution supported the development of immigrant youth, especially girls, to connect them with diverse professionals that get us to a world where they are equal and contributing members of the workforce and society. 

We work with youth from immigrant families, which also includes those who identify as refugee youth. 

Our whole organization was built around the story of girls like Ashley being able to find her voice and access a better quality of life so she can meet her full potential and become workforce leaders. That is why we were also named SPEAK, because girls and women speaking up for themselves is a core organizational goal. We use technology to connect girls to culturally responsive women after learning from Ashley's story how, because I culturally represented her west Indian background being East Indian myself, I could be the visible role model for her that her mother could not be. 

Yes, we have a lot of STEM professionals in our mentor network already, and our short and structured mentoring rounds of 9 sessions to build the mentoring relationship before the continued unstructured mentoring relationship makes us a very desirable opportunity for a lot of career professionals. Using technology, we can connect these career professionals trained as SPEAK mentors to girls and women anywhere. We had already begun introducing our services to communities in Ghana and India in 2018, but, because of a lack of funding, were not able to sustain this work. Through Solve, we could really develop our solution, which we know would make an immense impact globally. 

Our approach starts with girls and women from immigrant families but we expect to expand to adult workforce development within the next 5 years. Using technology and the mentoring approach we have developed, we are building a necessary complement to formal education to prepare the next generation of diverse workforce leaders.