Learn To Be

Learn To Be (LTB) brings free, 1-on-1, online tutoring to underserved youth around the United States.

COVID-19 wreaked havoc on our education system in 2020. The 30 million underserved youth in our country suffered the most. LTB rose to the challenge and provided tutoring for thousands of underserved students. However, we have the potential to do much more with the right support. 

Here are two reasons I’m applying:

Ability to Scale

We hosted ~2,000 hours of tutoring in 2019 and ~20,000 hours of tutoring in 2020 with no paid staff! This year, we’re on pace for over 50,000 hours with the help of our new paid employee. 

We currently have 7,000 tutors and 80 partners. With the right support, we can continue to grow and level the playing field for students who need it most. 

Elevate Prize Alignment

We recently hired our first paid employee, but demand is greater than she can support. This funding would allow us to hire additional staff. Beyond that, we need brand awareness so that more families, partners, and potential evangelists know about us. The brand amplification and connections from the Elevate team can drive more scale for our organization.  

Throughout my career in science and education, I’ve sought to improve the lives of others. As a software engineer at a healthcare startup, Scanwell Health, I’ve helped build diagnostic tests for malaria, kidney disease, and urinary tract infections. Now, I’m working on an at-home COVID-19 test to increase testing access in the community. 

Beyond my day job, I’ve served as Executive Director and led the technology efforts for LTB since 2008. I co-founded LTB after tutoring in a local underserved community left me wanting to do more. My motivations have now evolved into a moral obligation to use my privilege to fight for educational equity for marginalized communities, including homeless youth, foster youth, and others living in poverty. COVID-19 has further exacerbated broad inequities in our society, and I’m determined to fight them during my day job and with LTB. 

My LTB work has helped students be the first in their families to go to college, forged relationships between tutors and students thousands of miles apart, and has introduced me to a new generation of change-makers. 

As we grow, I hope to steer this new generation towards social justice, grounded in fairness and equity. 

There are 30 million underserved youth around the United States, including ~400,000 foster youth, ~700,000 homeless youth, and ~22 million receiving free or reduced-price lunch. These students often struggle with daily turmoil, which trickles into their education. These compounding barriers can hurt their ability to unlock their full potential. LTB exists to ensure that this doesn’t happen. 

LTB is a 501c3 nonprofit providing free, 1-on-1, online tutoring to underserved youth in grades K-12. We pair them with volunteer tutors in our online classroom and they work 1-3 times per week on what the student needs help with. 

We find our students through individual families and partner organizations. Parents, guardians, or partner administrators fill out an enrollment form on behalf of the student. 

I’ve built automation on our website that turns these applications into student profiles and shares them with our tutors. Tutors then self-select a student they feel well equipped to help. Connected tutors and students host tutoring sessions in the LTB online classroom, based on their schedules. This process continues and is what allows us to scale our reach.

Tutor-student pairs often form a long-lasting relationship that strongly contributes to the student’s improved grades and confidence.

At first glance, online tutoring isn’t an innovative idea. Brick-and-mortar tutoring organizations abound. But a few years ago, I found a model that scales and brings more to the table. Here’s how:

Scaling through Automation

Few organizations work at the same scale as LTB because they often connect students with tutors manually. I’ve built automation throughout our website to connect tutors and students without staff intervention. This automation enabled us to host ~20,000 hours of tutoring in 2020, with no paid staff.

Partnership Focus

In addition to connecting individual students with tutors, we’ve built a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for our partners so that we can reach larger audiences. Partners can easily onboard students and connect them with existing LTB tutors or with their own tutors. They have access to our online classroom and survey data that is captured after each session. 

Machine Learning 

I’ve built machine learning models in our platform to objectively measure whether students have mastered math concepts after their tutoring sessions. Our tutoring also encompasses other major K-12 subjects. With additional funding, we plan to build similar machine learning models for each tutoring subject, which will facilitate collection of new success metrics.

Increasing Academic Success

Post-tutoring surveys completed by parents have shown an average increase of 16% on test scores and 1.5 points in GPA. We’re working with our partners to gather official school grades to better measure our tutoring efficacy.

Building Relationships and Increasing Confidence 

LTB is more than a report card! Recently a mother told us, “As a nurse working during the pandemic, it was very difficult to see my 5th grade son struggle with his reading… LTB connected him with his amazing tutor who has done a phenomenal job helping him strengthen his weaknesses… She is patient, kind, and pushes him to be great. He is comfortable and enjoys his tutoring sessions, which helped him find the confidence he was missing.”

You’re invited to examine more survey responses like this from our tutors and students!  

Mentoring the Next Generation

I recently instituted an LTB “Junior Board of Directors,” a 1-year program for a diverse group of high school and college tutors to get involved in philanthropy, learn about social enterprise, and drive impact for LTB. 

The relationships we’re fostering and the confidence our students and tutors are building will have a lasting impact on their future success.