FirstRoot

FirstRoot promotes economic equality by teaching financial literacy and civics through a secure, standards-compliant, scalable software platform and integrated curriculum that supports students doing Participatory Budgeting.

Participatory Budgeting is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school. Endorsed by the United Nations and used by communities around the world, PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Students experience true agency and stewardship over their futures, learning through their own experiences how money really works.

Data from completed PB projects show that students make surprisingly good choices, usually investing in school infrastructure and more equitable educational opportunities for their peers. 

Our BHAG is to get $1K (or more!) into 1M schools globally and discover what happens when kids are in control of $1B+. 

Economic inequality creates substantial harm: the more unequal the society, the worse it performs on numerous dimensions of health and well-being[1]. The U.S. is among the world's most unequal countries - but many developed countries are not much better. 

One root cause of economic inequality is financial illiteracy. A second is the deterioration of trust in democratic institutions [2]. 

To address these problems we must teach financial literacy and civics as life skills that prepare youth for a productive life in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, existing approaches to teaching these life skills are ineffective because they are primarily based on the “drill and kill” model of fact-driven education.

An effective framework for teaching life skills is based on three components:

• Knowledge: an understanding of concepts
• Skills: abilities that enable students to make decisions
• Dispositions: an understanding of goals and attitudes that drive decision-making

Our solution provides this framework while supporting students making real change in their school. 

[1] The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger 

[2] The Republic is (Still) at Risk—and Civics is Part of the Solution (Tufts University)

FirstRoot is a software platform that supports schools in implementing Participatory Budgeting programs. It consists of an online platform and two associated curriculum, one targeting financial literacy and the other civics. 

The program is managed by a teacher, with funding of $2,000 to $10,000 provided by the principal, the school district, the PTA, or a corporate partner. 

As the students decide how to invest the money they learn important lessons about financial literacy, design thinking, and civics.

It is a lot of fun and the students make surprisingly good choices. The experience also gives them tools they can use as they work on improving their own finances, such as saving for college or understanding a budget.

The process of PB is well known. We have created our own software platform and curriculum.

Key aspects of our solution:

• Gorgeous UX and UI. 
• No AI hype. Read Failure to Disrupt - we align with Justin Reich.
• No Gamification. We know from self-determination theory that intrinsic motivation creates the best student outcomes.
• Teachers are special stakeholders, so we treat them with care with a curriculum co-developed with teachers that strives for right balance between prescriptive advice and generative structure.

Research shows that economic equality benefits all members of a society, regardless of socioeconomic status (“The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger” by Wilksinson and Pickett).  

Our target population are schools dealing with the greatest levels of educational inequity. In the U.S., the quality of a school varies greatly by the tax base of the neighborhood. For low-income and minority students, this glaring inequity reinforces the idea minorities are not worthy of the same kinds of educational opportunities as students in more affluent communities, especially in critical 'life skills' such as financial literacy.

To understand their needs, we rely on a combination of personal experience, qualitative market research, extensive usability testing, and thorough beta testing.

Personal experience: FirstRoot was founded by Luke Hohmann, a philanthropist and serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience producing Participatory Budgeting programs in the public and private sector.

In the public sector, Mr. Hohmann has produced a variety of in-person and online PB programs for cities and schools. Here is one example of this work.

https://tinyurl.com/y8caeync

In the private sector, Mr. Hohmann was Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc., an enterprise collaboration platform that enabled global enterprises to use Participatory Budgeting in portfolio and product management. Conteneo helped companies such as Accenture, BMW, Cisco, eBay, GBG Group, Salesforce, RELX Group, PayU, Transamerica, and Salesforce administer more than $3B through Participatory Budgeting.

Qualitative Research: To ensure that we're building a solution that meets the needs of students, teachers, and parents, we have conducted surveys and interviews with teachers, parents, and students. We have also collaborated with notable leaders in the global Participatory Budgeting community, such as the Participatory Budgeting Project, to identify and share emerging best practices.

We conduct extensive usability tests, including tests with autistic and visually impaired students, on multiple devices. These tests have ensured that our solution meets the needs of target users, inclusive of low-cost hardware, such as Chromebooks.

We are in the midst of extensive pilots in multiple locations that ensure we’re designing a solution that meets the needs of our customers while also providing support for ESL and other special needs students. 

PB increases engagement by putting students at the center of learning: Students generate, refine, vote, and implement proposals.

Our app can be used in remote, hybrid, and in-person, in school and at home. Our free family edition supports families in using PB to do such things as plan a family vacation. 

We know how to build standards compliant, secure, scalable, and high-performance applications. We expect that our app will be used in low-bandwidth environments and low-cost computers. 

We have integrated several technologies to promote safety, such as Amazon Image Rekognition services to identify and automatically quarantine potentially offensive images.

As of 24-Apr-2021 we have completed one pilot with Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS) in Indianapolis. 

We have three active pilots: PPHS, Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, CA and The Academy of American Studies in Queens, NY. All pilots are progressing well and should be completed in May. 

We are planning pilots for summer school and in the Southern Hemisphere, notably India and Australia.

While Participatory Budgeting is well known outside the U.S., it is still novel within the U.S. Moreover, U.S. PB programs are typically in-person, which makes them tedious and costly, substantially inhibiting broader adoption. 

Our Phase 1 innovation is the creation of gorgeous, scalable, well-designed, standards compliant platform with an integrated curriculum. This will change the market by enabling any school to quickly and easily create a PB cycle for one or more classrooms or the entire school. As Phase 1 progresses, we will create a network of schools and youth leaders.

Our Phase 2 innovation will leverage this network to enable multi-school PB programs. Imagine each of the 641 high schools in MA producing a PB program with a $10K budget, for an aggregate budget of $6.4M. Our Phase 2 innovation enable youth to jointly fund programs of their choosing with larger budgets and greater impact. 

Currently, we are piloting in 5 schools, serving approximately 3,000 students.

Our key milestone in the next 12 months will be serving 100 schools, enabling at least 25,000 students to determine how to invest at least $200,000 by the end of the 2021-2022 school year.

In five years FirstRoot will have transformed how financial literacy and civics are being taught in schools around the world. We will have implemented Participatory Budgeting programs in more than 2,000 U.S. and 5,000 global schools, enabling at least 10,000,000 students to invest $100M in schools.

We have not initiated tracking or measurement of our outcome or impact goals. We are still piloting our solution and preparing for our broader launch. We plan to initiate tracking outcomes (which do require the establishment of a baseline measurement) in the 2021-2022 U.S. school year. 

Full-time employees: 1

Part-time contractors: 4

Full-time contractors: 7

Full-time interns: 1

Part-time interns: 3

FirstRoot was founded by Luke Hohmann, a serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience producing Participatory Budgeting (PB) programs in the public and private sector.

In the public sector, Mr. Hohmann has produced a variety of in-person and online PB programs for cities around the world. Examples of his work in San José, CA can found in these videos:

https://tinyurl.com/y8caeync

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y76kBDTu3po

http://d3decides.com/

Mr. Hohmann has produced in-person PB programs for Sunnyvale Middle School in Sunnyvale, CA and through FirstRoot with several high schools. 

In the private sector, Mr. Hohmann was Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc., an enterprise collaboration platform that enabled corporations to use Participatory Budgeting in portfolio and product management. Conteneo helped companies such as  Accenture, BMW, Cisco, eBay, Salesforce, RELX Group, PayU, and Transamerica, more than $3B through Participatory Budgeting. Conteneo was acquired by Scaled Agile, Inc. in 2019.

Mr. Hohmann is a global executive with a perspective formed from working for companies around the world. 

The product manager for this endeavor is Clint Gossett. Clint has extensive experience in the payments industry, having worked in product management, user experience, and customer support for Visa and Verifone.

Our development organization is global, with contributors from India, Mexico, Europe, and the U.S. This global team helps ensure that we are incorporating multiple perspectives in all our work.

Most importantly, we are guided by design thinking and customer feedback. We listen to our students and teachers and adjust to meet their needs. 

Our approach to DEAI is based BOTH on the students and communities we server AND our internal team. 

Diversity: All students are welcome to participate in PB programs, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, language, culture, national origin, religious commitments, age, (dis)ability status, and political perspective. 
 
Equity: Many expressions of equity focus on physical attributes, such as skin color, or lifestyle choices. While vital to address, school programs often fail to consider the deep, structural inequities associated with money, economics and class. In PB, each student, regardless of socioeconomic status has a voice. In today’s United States, this kind of equality is almost impossible to achieve. 

Accessibility: FirstRoot is committed to maintaining the dignity and independence of people with disabilities. That includes ensuring that students, teachers, and school administrators have easy access to our programs, removing barriers to accessibility and meeting needs promptly in accordance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines. In addition, FirstRoot voluntarily complies with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, Level AA (“WCAG-2.0 AA”). 

Inclusion: School PB programs provide an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to children that different perspectives are welcomed, that respectful deliberation and dialog create better outcomes for everyone. Ultimately, PB produces authentic diversity experiences that improve the community.

We extend these practices to our internal team, promoting an environment that creates opportunity for all.

We believe that MIT Solve can help us in the following areas:

• Regulatory Compliance: Global EdTech solutions must comply with a complex set of regulations. We seek to comply with all applicable regulations in every region we operate. MIT Solve and MIT Solve Partners would provide valuable guidance. 
• Cultural Inclusion: While Participatory Budgeting is a global movement endorsed by the UN, we want to make sure that our solution is honoring local customs and needs. MIT Solve and MIT Solve Partners would provide valuable guidance. 
• Measuring Impact: Measuring outputs is easy. Measuring outcomes is harder. Measuring impact is the hardest. While we have some ideas on how to measure impact, we know that MIT Solve would be an invaluable ally in helping is develop how we measure impact. 

• Financial: While our Founder, Luke Hohmann, is an experienced B2B SaaS entrepreneur, he bootstrapped his last company, funding most of the development of the company through pre-orders of software and services from his B2B customers. This approach won't work with schools and we could use mentoring assistance in framing our opportunity to investors. 
• Legal & Regulatory: We seek assistance as described above. 
• Monitoring & Evaluation: We seek assistance as described above.

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: We can support their efforts to engage communities by giving them access to a platform that can engage children and their communities in how to manage grants.
• Patrick J. McGovern: We seek their guidance in helping us determine how the data generated by students can be used to improve the community.
• Innospark: We seek their guidance in exploring how the integration of AI technologies can create a more robust and scalable solution. For example, could AI help students explore the evaluation of the impact of their proposals?

In the U.S. we have created, often without realizing it, massive educational inequity. Simply put, the quality of a school varies greatly by the tax base of the neighborhood. For low-income and minority students, this glaring inequity reinforces the idea minorities are not worthy of the same kinds of educational opportunities as students in more affluent communities, especially in critical 'life skills' such as financial literacy.

This inequity is often reinforced by the programs designed to reduce it. Well-meaning and typically affluent people who are not teachers introduce programs based on their own experience but largely irrelevant to poor and minority students. They teach unbanked students to balance a checkbook, or they calculate the return on investments the students could never imagine making.

Our proposal champions a different approach: put real money in the hands of students, treat every student equally, trust that they will make good investments, and support them in the process. This is Participatory Budgeting, a process that teaches the 5 C's of modern education: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and civics. Students experience true agency and stewardship over their futures, learning through their own experiences how money really works.

We commit that 70% of any money received from the ASA prize would be given directly to schools through the FirstRoot School Fund to fund Participatory Budgeting. The remaining 30% would be used to cover costs associated with the software and for providing technical assistance.