DreamWakers

DreamWakers connects classrooms to career role models over video chat because students can't BE what they can't SEE.

DreamWakers is a national 501(c)3 nonprofit that uses free video chat services to virtually connect diverse and dynamic leaders with students in high-need public school classrooms.

DreamWakers is committed to solving the following problem: Students from low-income families have much fewer opportunities to interact with professional role models than their wealthier peers. By the age of six, low-income students spend 1,300 fewer hours outside of their home than their affluent peers, which results in limited opportunities to experience museums, parks, and other cultural touchstones. It also results in very limited exposure to different careers and working professionals.

DreamWakers also seeks to increase the number of employers that create opportunities for their employees to interact with students while they are in the formative years of middle and high school. A staggering 2/3 of U.S. employers report having little to no interaction with classrooms, and 65% of today’s students will be employed in jobs that don’t yet exist. If young, underprivileged students aren’t exposed to the range of diverse and exciting and not-yet-defined career possibilities, how can they prepare for those kinds of careers? If they aren’t exposed to exceptional leaders shaping the industries of today, how can they be inspired to create the careers of tomorrow?

DreamWakers solution to the problems described above is to provide experiential learning opportunities for students who may not otherwise be exposed to or learn from diverse career role models. The goal of every DreamWakers flashchat is to add value to the classroom by helping students see the relationship between what they learn in school and the real world and increasing their interest in specific subjects; encouraging students to build their own personal vision; exposing students to new cultures and professional role models beyond their immediate surroundings; and enhancing students’ public speaking and critical thinking skills.

DreamWakers will change the world by connecting classrooms to careers and exposing more low-income students to a wide world of professional opportunities and role models.

DreamWakers' solution is innovative because it utilizes existing, easily-accessible video technology to reduce disparities in opportunity between low-income students and their wealthier peers.

DreamWakers leverages technology to create opportunities for working professionals to interact with our country’s historically underserved communities even if they live and work thousands of miles away from these communities. DreamWakers’ flashchats enable career professionals to share their personal stories with young people and provide advice about how students can create their own legacies, all without leaving their workplace.

In 12 months, DreamWakers hopes to reach classrooms in all 50 states across America and build capacity to scale internationally. We aim to have 10 additional corporate partnerships and 6 full time employees working to expand the breadth and depth of our programs. We aim to establish a classroom-to-speaker matching platform and a more comprehensive "virtual field trip" program, consisting of speakers guiding students around their workplaces and demonstrating tools or skills. Every year since our founding we have doubled the number of students served in the previous year; we aim to continue this trend for years to come.

In the next three to five years we aim to become a self-sustaining non-profit by growing our Corporate Partnership Program, and increase efficiency by implementing a new backend CRM platform to reduce the cost per intervention by 40%.

We will reach more classrooms through our Teacher Fellowship Program, which consists of teachers across the country who are leaders in their respective communities. We will retain the classrooms we serve by adjusting our services in response to user feedback. At the end of the 2018 academic year, teachers stated in a survey that they wanted the capacity to pick speakers themselves from an automated catalog. Our proposed new matching platform would provide this possibility for teachers, improving user satisfaction and motivating teachers to expand their use of our services and to recommend DreamWakers to other teachers in their network.

DreamWakers has served nearly 10,000 students across America in 40 states. All of the classrooms we service consist of a student body in which 50 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. After flashchats, students feel more confident in their public speaking abilities and report having exposure to careers professionals that was not available to them previously.

In the next year we expect to serve 12,000 students. Our services will consist of 600 flashchats. In 3 years, we anticipate serving 18,000 students. Our services will consist of 1200 flashchats. We anticipate these affects because they are consistent with our prior growth trends, as we have doubled the number of flashchats hosted each year since our founding. 

Co-founder Monica Gray Logothetis serves as CEO and specializes in partnerships and fundraising, scaling, and team management. Our team also consists of a finance and compliance specialist; An IT specialist, who helps navigate information technology and data analytics; A former guidance counselor, who manages educational outreach and teacher recruitment; and a marketing and social media specialist. 

DreamWakers creates revenue through our Corporate Partnership Program. These kinds of partnerships position us for long-term sustainability because they provide reliable financial backing for the day-to-day processes involved in creating flashchats and help provide salaries for our hardworking employees. Growth of our Corporate Partnership Program will generate growth and scalability for DreamWakers because it will allow us to hire more full-time employees and automate some of our processes currently performed manually.

We are applying to Solve in order to scale our efforts in our nation's most under-resourced fourth to twelfth grade classrooms. Specifically, we would like to empower Solve/MIT alumni around the world to virtually volunteer, sharing their passion and purpose with DreamWakers students across the country. For example, dynamic leaders from MIT research organizations, like the Research Laboratory of Electronics, could speak in STEM classrooms nationwide in a "Robotics, Computing, and Machine Learning" virtual series. 

One of the major barriers to DreamWakers' success is our lack of an automated classroom-to-speaker matching platform. DreamWakers takes every effort to match the perfect speaker to lesson plans or desired outcomes of teachers in the classrooms we serve, but to scale the reach of our services while sustaining the quality of our matching, we need Solve to help us create an online platform that allows teachers to look at a catalog of speakers, their bios, and availability. Utilizing this platform would free up our employees from setting up appointments manually.