The Indigo Project

Sheri Smith, founder and CEO of the Indigo Project, graduated from American with a B.A. in International Studies and holds an M.A. from Georgetown in Communication. In college, Sheri interned for Vital Voices, an initiative started by Hillary Clinton. Here Sheri recognized her passion for helping people find their voice. When she shifted her career focus to consulting, Sheri saw the benefits of clients working in their zone of genius. As a result, she founded Indigo with the vision of ushering in an education system that shifts away from standardization to one that empowers students to ultimately find work they love.

Indigo’s mission is to empower the intrinsic genius already existing within each individual through our core values of self-awareness, empathy, and freedom. We are committed to solving the problem of a one-size-fits-all education system that perpetuates systemic racism and is favorably inclined toward those with wealth. The Indigo Project seeks to place the value in education on the worth of every individual and change the mindsets of educators and students so they know they are far more than a GPA or SAT score. By leveraging the most advanced human data available and combining it with artificial intelligence, we are building the student responsive education system of the future.  We believe Indigo can elevate humanity by shifting mindsets around human value and redefining success beyond money and power with the emergence of new data.

Indigo targets the over 15M high school and 20M college students in the US, supporting the education to career pipeline. The cost of K-12 spending per student has increased 200% since 1970 with very little increase in outcomes, leaving space for a new paradigm to emerge for driving student success.

Current statistics paint a bleak picture of post-graduation success, especially for students of color and low socioeconomic backgrounds.  Only 18% of high-poverty high school graduates achieved a four-year degree compared to 52% of those with low poverty rates. Of those that do graduate, their prospects only worsen, with only 50% of graduates obtaining jobs on par with their level of education and only 1/3 of US workers reporting being engaged in their job.

Despite the skyrocketing cost of tuition, students are not better prepared for the workplace. 90% of seniors thought they were competent in professionalism and work ethic, but only about 43% of employers agreed. Industries are frustrated with the lack of preparedness and the inability to find the right employees, especially those with hard and professional skills.

Our current education system does not meet the needs of today’s students. Students must be at the center of meaningful change. The Indigo Education Company puts students first, providing a suite of cloud-based tools that enables educators to truly differentiate instruction and personalize learning. Indigo’s whole-school, whole-student program supports success, retention, social emotional health, and career readiness in middle schools, high schools, and higher education, as well as workforce development programs for adult learners.

Indigo’s foundational product, the Indigo Assessment, measures behaviors, motivators, social emotional (SEL) perceptions, and career-ready skills for students and educators. IndigoActivate, our online career mapping software, guides students through their Assessment results to chart their future. IndigoDiscover, our AI-enabled platform, empowers educators and administrators with actionable insights on every learner. Our newest platform, the IndigoPathways App, finds new career tracks and related education opportunities that are personalized to support an expeditious and inexpensive pathway to a rewarding career.

Indigo has worked with over 100,000 people in 17 states. We are committed to at least 50% of our students coming from low-income, underserved communities.

We can best describe Indigo's impact by telling the story of one of the thousands of students whose lives are changed as a result of Indigo's product suite and the educators who use it.

One student named "Jaylin" was at risk of dropping out of high school but  became a confident college-accepted senior after working with Indigo. When Jaylin entered an inner-city high school we partner with, she was reading at a 5th grade level, had been horribly bullied, and barely spoke. We met with Jaylin in the middle of her senior year, and she could remember all four Indigo Assessment reports, how she changed, and how it contributed to a positive image of herself. Her teachers said that Indigo's report finally gave them the information they needed to begin engaging Jaylin and leveraging her strengths to bring her grades up and uncover her inner brilliance. Through Indigo's career mapping software process, Jaylin realized she was a social entrepreneur and was thrilled when accepted into ASU!

View more testimonials here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS0DDRJq9Sfb59cHWEwVafz1WMJ3fQQe_

Through this work, I have personally experienced and witnessed the power of elevating understanding of and between people. 

Some poignant examples:

• holding hands with a group of mentors from both sides of the “tracks” in rural Mississippi 
• listening to a Navajo elder talk about being beaten for the sake of “education”
• watching a wealthy college student in tears as she discovers her true self
• coaching a well-respected science teacher as he realizes that his job isn’t to change his students.

These people are the heart of what Indigo does and the experiences that elevate humanity.

Indigo was born out of a lifelong search to answer the question, “How can I and others feel fully alive?” I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of “aliveness,” though schools and companies call this “engagement.” Engagement with meaning and purpose is aliveness to me. In my work as a corporate coach, I saw various levels of engagement, but very few examples of aliveness.

In 2012, one of my executive clients told me that his teenage daughter could benefit from this type of coaching. “Why don’t you work with young people?” he told me. On the ride home, the idea of Indigo formed. To me, young people seemed to have the most to gain from self-awareness and empathy as a basis for choosing their life path. 

While focusing the education system on the individual rather than the “number” seemed like a worthy pursuit, the education field was intimidating. I kept wondering if it was possible to impact people's mindsets in such a painful system at scale? I didn't know the answer, and like many entrepreneurs, I just started the work. 7 years later, I'm fueled by purpose, closer to the answers, but there is still a lifetime of work ahead. 

I grew-up in rural Michigan where my father was a prison guard and my mother was a homemaker. One of my earliest memories was selling my doll because my 5-year-old brain thought she was valuable and the money would help my dad out. We spent a year on welfare and food stamps, moving on 5 occasions to live with various relatives until Dad found a job at a local prison. He didn’t like this job, but the prison’s work benefits were necessary and he felt trapped without a postsecondary degree. 

My mom told me that if I didn't want to end up working in a factory, I had to get straight As and get a scholarship. I was academically successful, but it meant stuffing myself inside of a box, stifling my creativity, curiosity and independence. I felt like an alien at school, dead inside, and unable to be my true self. 

The impetus for starting Indigo came from my childhood and young adult experiences. I deeply understand the paradox of how education is necessary for upward mobility and yet completely insufficient to becoming a confident, whole, adult person who believes they have purpose and a place in this world. 

From our years of R&D, we deeply understand the problem and needs of customers across the different verticals of K-12 students, parents, teachers, and education administrators.

We've product thoroughly tested in all these verticals and our #1 response is that Indigo is the best product our customers have seen of its kind.

With 20 years of interpreting and personally helping tens of thousands of people using many different types of assessments, I have an unreplicatable  knowledge base since most assessment experts are pigeon-holed in one or two sciences.

Customers who experience Indigo at a deep level become true believers.  We have an authenticity, passion, and purpose the other companies don’t possess.  As we scale, this will supercharge our brand quickly.

One of the hardest things about my work is meeting Navajo entrepreneurs or inner city kids with big dreams knowing that, it’s almost impossible, no matter how brilliant they are, to get ahead in our current society.  I also meet incredibly gifted educators with real solutions who have little power to transform their schools, much less the overall system.  

One particular example was writing and winning a grant for a school, but the district sent the money back because they couldn't be bothered to install the technology included in the funds. The principal called me crying, devastated by another blow to her vulnerable population. I called the superintendent, threatened going to the press, then alerted the state; it was months of fighting, but in the end, the kids got the grant! 

Because Indigo never pursues profit as a top priority, nor fits into anyone's box, from a business perspective we've had far more failures than successes. However, from an intrinsic perspective, every person who beats the odds stacked against them (with personal as well as financial challenges) is of immeasurable worth, no matter what the overall statistics say. This belief keeps me going.  

Leadership to me is becoming the change I want to see in the world. As a deeply empathetic person, I've always struggled with sensitivity and feel a deep sense of pain when I see the failures of American education.

One of the toughest places for empathy is STEM. I strive to be an example of an empathic, feminine leader especially when I'm around influencers in the engineering and technology space. In one of our partner engineering programs, Indigo data indicated that women were losing self-confidence, assertiveness and persuasiveness after 4 years in college, while men were gaining in all these areas. This was devastating to the program and they immediately made changes to support women. One of the male professors was most eager to increase his zero empathy score on Indigo. He and I worked together for only 2 years and were excited to see his score jump to 6 (out of 10). This professor is now a department head, champion of female engineers, and a leader to his peers. 

To learn more about my personal passion for the importance of Empathy in STEM, check out the talk I gave at CU Denver's Women in Engineering Symposium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-r85gj1hk&t=17s.

Currently Serving - 100,000

One Year - 200,000

5 Years - 1 million

Key partners and customers in each vertical include the following: 

1. 7-12: Indigo works with over 200 high schools. In California, Novato School District represents a model middle-sized, whole district implementation. Peak to Peak High School in Colorado is a top 100 public school in the U.S. News and World Report, representing high achieving, college-bound schools. Denver’s North High School is an anchor inner city school in the massive Denver Public Schools District, and we also work with several small charters and alternative education schools within the district. Phoenix Coding Academy and BioScience High, both in Arizona, represent high-need, diverse STEM focused schools. 

2. Higher Education: With over 20 universities already part of Indigo’s customer base, we expect that number to grow with the launch of our retention driven product in late 2020. Arizona State University Barrett Honors College uses Indigo for all their students and has started a center for personal development with Indigo featured in several classes. Several engineering programs use our suite of products including University of Denver, Grand Canyon University, University of Colorado, and University of California Irvine. The University of Kentucky is co-authoring a National Science Foundation grant with us this summer to conduct more research on our impact on increasing diversity and equity among engineering fields.

3. Entrepreneurship: Our ongoing six year long partnership with Venture for America, Andrew Yang’s organization, led to extensive research on developing entrepreneurs. We also work with other entrepreneurship programs like University of North Carolina’s Adams Apprenticeship program.