Kinfolk - Augmented Reality Archive

2020 sparked the beginning of a reinvigorated movement for civil rights in the United States.  As a country, we witnessed the start of long-overdue conversations about for whom and by whom this country was built.  Major corporations, foundations, and institutions started to shift their budgetary priorities, new legislation was introduced, eurocentric curriculum was challenged, problematic emblems/products were banned and racist statues started to fall.  Movers & Shakers recognize that centuries of systemic racism cannot be reversed overnight.

We started as an informal collective of artists, activists, and creative technologists in April 2017.  Our intention was to advocate for the removal of racist monuments in New York City.  To that end, we started hosting teach-ins and performance pieces throughout various sites in New York City.  The goal of the demonstrations was to educate the public about the sins of specific figures who were embedded into New York’s landscape and to apply pressure on Mayor de Blasio’s 2017 Monuments commission to remove their monuments. The problem we were tackling was the lack of diverse representation of narratives in our monuments nationwide. We believe that the key to our society’s preparedness for meaningful steps toward racial equity lies in the undoing of the centuries-long dehumanization process that lies at the core of our country’s collective narratives.  In short, we need new stories.  We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to reimagine an equitable world. The answers exist in our ancestral archive.  

Through our experiments with public space, historical narratives, and augmented reality, we quickly realized the potential of augmented reality as a tool to garner attention, condense information from more formal texts that most people don’t read, and deliver an educational message through an engaging immersive technology (similar to the effect of how schoolhouse rock was an effective tool to teach children civics concepts in the late 20th century). 

Our app wasn’t just an effective tool for engaging with history in public spaces, but also in educational spaces. We discovered that we had created a potential solution for the lack of diverse narratives in the classroom as well; a solution that provided fun and interactive ways for students to engage with ideas around race and history; a way to increase students' comfort around these ideas, promoting conversation, and instilling confidence. Beyond the increases in student engagement by having a gamified tool to learn about Black history in the classroom, this solution can also address obstacles to social-emotional learning within the classroom. For Black and Brown students, learning about Black history in a fun way in the classroom creates a relevant connection between them and the educational content, something that has been sorely lacking from our educational institutions (and I know this from personal experience). For white students and non-Black or Brown POC, this solution offers a way to provide exposure to a diverse set of narratives, fostering empathy and understanding of people from different backgrounds and cultures; this is a crucial step in our nation's search for racial equity and justice. And we are not anywhere close to finishing that search. It actually seems as though we are moving backward in regards to the equitable teaching of the history of America. There is a national crisis where states are banning students from learning about Black History, deeming anything associated with Black history as “Critical Race Theory”. This speaks to the pressing need to address the ways that students are learning about race in America and provide them with a fun, interactive, and empowering way to learn those things

As an organization, we see two macro obstacles to the realization of our goal. The first is an organized, well-resourced, and active resistance to this new civil rights movement.  Prominent examples include the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) at the macro (federal senators introducing legislation, state legislatures discussing & in some cases banning it) and micro-levels (school boards and parents advocating for the abolition of CRT), a resurgence of voter suppression tactics that disproportionately target black & brown communities, and state governments taking active measures to further whitewash history curriculum standards. We’ve already experienced this with a school district in North Carolina that barred schools in their district from using our app, despite vocal teacher support, because the board thought that our content was too divisive. That could not be farther from the truth; our content is rooted in uplifting Black stories that have been pushed to the fringes of society, creating a safe digital space to learn about the important achievements and lives of people of color around the world.

The second obstacle is the preexisting interconnected network of eurocentric curriculum standards, dominant media narratives, one-sided perspectives in cultural institutions, holidays that romanticize white supremacy, and racist statues that reinforce the inequitable foundations, practices, laws, and social constructs of American society. 

Just as the climate change movement required decades of consistent grassroots education to get the country to understand its consequences and potential solutions, we anticipate that overcoming the aforementioned obstacles will take at least a generation of consistent education.

Movers & Shakers’ mission is to use art and emerging technologies to uproot oppressive systems and reimagine and rebuild an equitable future. Our vision is to create a world where art and emerging technologies increase the impact and accessibility of underrepresented Black and Brown histories. Those stories will inspire and empower the next generation to create an equitable future. 

We have five core approaches that drive our partnerships, work, and impact:

1. We educate the next generation by unearthing false and underrepresented histories, specifically as they relate to Black and Brown narratives.

2. We use augmented reality to write Black and Brown narratives into American curricula, both inside and outside of traditional school systems.

3. We use immersive technology to challenge the inequitable distribution of monuments, and other symbols of inequity and injustice.

4. We empower communities to collaborate, not only in telling underrepresented stories but also in mobilizing and advocating for equity and justice in various issue areas.

5. We center our work on dismantling an anti-black lens, which ultimately impacts and dismantles systemic injustice for all people.

Our solution through these approaches is a combination of our AR tech platform and our grassroots community engagement. Our AR tech platform is called Kinfolk, an augmented reality archive of Black and Brown history. We see Kinfolk as a foundational platform for students across the country to have meaningful conversations around the scope of racial equity. Kinfolk has the potential to be a foundational layer that lies in between our physical and digital worlds; a space for our collective memory. It can be a place where people experience the connections between the past, present, and future. We are looking to build out this digital archive and use it as the vehicle to unearth these narratives in public spaces and classrooms across America. We see a future where this educational information is available immersively in our public spaces. We can bring this to life with Kinfolk. 

Currently, our archive has 15 digital monuments of Black and Brown historical figures. Each historical figure is represented as an augmented reality monument that anyone can digitally place in their classroom/home, or in a public space. Each monument is paired with archival information and curriculum so that students can deep dive into the lives of these figures. 

In January of 2022, we received 1.8 Million dollars from The Mellon Foundation to scale Kinfolk. We will populate Kinfolk with 100 augmented reality monuments (of Black and Brown icons, social movements, moments in time) and extensive archival materials related to each figure over the next two years. As a part of our community engagement strategy, we will host 10 public events nationwide to both spread awareness about Kinfolk and contribute to the national conversation on the necessity of recontextualizing our country’s monuments and collective stories in public space. Our first event is planned for Juneteenth 2022, in LA in collaboration with For Freedoms and the LA Music Center. Our goal for these events is to engage with communities on a deeper level to create long-lasting impact. As a tech non-profit, we are looking for Kinfolk to be a community-driven platform that highlights the voices of communities, empowering them to tell their story in a new way. 

Our events will be centered around uplifting community stories through Kinfolk. Our intention is to take up space in civic environments that have historically excluded communities of color. Additionally, the centering of joy is an affirmation of the necessity for Black and Brown citizens to live freely and thrive, not only to take up public space when engaging in protest. The educational efforts of the Kinfolk app and all reparations work are intended to shift real-life conditions towards a more liberated future. The community event will be an embodiment of that possible future through artistic expression and education in civic space.

With the help of this grant, we will be able to add robust standards-aligned curriculum built on top of the historical figures we have in our Kinfolk archive. We can create educational experiences around our archive that brings learning from inside to outside of the classroom through the activation of history in the real world using geolocation, storytelling, art that stimulates movement (similar to Pokemon Go) within and across public spaces. We have worked with a few schools already with our current version of Kinfolk, and they have all expressed interest in using future iterations of our platform to facilitate field trips using the app.

Our platform is designed and built for Black and Brown students in low-income communities. Our focus is on getting the technology of tomorrow into the hands of students who usually get left behind. We aim to build educational experiences that will create a sense of feeling and belonging among the Black and Brown student populations.

Target Population:

• Black and Brown high school students between the ages of 14 and 18.

• Teachers at the high school level can use the archive content to bolster their curriculum

• People who are into social justice, advocacy, history, art, and technology.

Our app and curriculum deliberately foster personal connections between historical figures like Denmark Vesey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry Belafonte, and students. Not only do we connect users to extension materials (podcasts, books, songs, other media content) that further explore our figures, the Kinfolk app is an auditory, visual, and kinesthetic experience. We seek to create safe digital spaces that are made warm and supportive via intentional features like in-app music, a warm aesthetic, and routine-setting tutorials that provide a sense of predictability. Our curriculum has historically enhanced the app experience. We utilize an arts-integration and personalized learning approach to creating opportunities to assess students. Kinfolk users respond to open-ended questions and prompt that promote divergent thinking from anywhere. 

Our app is also about facilitating meaningful connections between users. Our curriculum will highlight opportunities for students to share their ideas and to react to one another in structured environments set up to be spaces of mindfulness and positive interactions.  

Positive, consistent relationships with others are critical to social-emotional development. School is sometimes the only stable and structured environment that children can depend on. While building a safe and supportive environment at school is important, not all students have the luxury of physically reporting to school every day. Kinfolk serves students who are sick of traditional methods of learning/ white-washed history. It is also for students who struggle to connect with people at their school for a wide array of reasons.

Sometimes students are chronically absent due to homelessness, illness, at-home responsibilities. While we believe every student should be in school, we recognize that there are factors that affect students and their families every day. Kinfolk exists because we truly believe that every student deserves access to a quality history education. With the pandemic, we saw ways that varied learning models (remote, hybrid) can benefit different families based on their unique needs.

Using their phones, students can access our platform from school, at home, or in the public spaces in between. While our archive is public, we actively raising money to build the infrastructure that allows students to log in to our learning platform to save their progress toward learning these underrepresented histories

Since 2017, Movers & Shakers has lived powerfully at the intersection of technology, activism, social justice, advocacy, and education. Through the commitment of a talented team of founding staff, our organization has been nimble and responsive to the social and political climate resulting from the global pandemic and racial reckoning. We have been vocal leaders in the NYC arts and technology scene after our residencies at New Inc (New Museum) and Eyebeam. Movers & Shakers has successfully secured partnerships that have been instrumental in developing innovative products, Kinfolk and our other product UNSUNG, and moving its work forward. This has been key for our sustainability as a company. Overall, we have raised 4.5 million dollars for our edtech products, including a recent grant from The Mellon Foundation of 1.8 million dollars. Our ability to raise funds at this scale has us positioned to be able to create an equitable next-generation tech platform. 

We have already created an in-classroom AR experience, UNSUNG, which has a reach of 300,000 students through the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program. UNSUNG consists of AR learning experiences called “Storyboxes”. These storyboxes contain 4 interactive historical scenes that students can collaboratively explore. Every scene includes historic media, puzzles, and interactions with inspired historic figures. Each interaction allows students to synthesize information, analyze primary source documents, interpret their meaning, and prove their own thesis to respond to historically-responsive Document Based Questions and hit common core standards. Our work with UNSUNG is going to heavily inform how we add a curricular component to our Kinfolk app. 

Our CEO idris brewster has been working at the intersection of arts and technology since 2015. He previously worked at Google NYC as one of the first hires at Code Next, a makerspace within Google NYC that provides free STEAM education for Black and Brown high schoolers from all over the city. The success of Movers and Shakers allowed for him to quit his job at Google and work at Movers and Shakers full time. 

Our CSO Micah MIlner is one of the premiere VR artists in the field. He is one of the most active VR painters in the world, spending more than 10,000 hours creating in a headset. He has partnered with brands including Adobe, Pantone, Facebook, and Google along with non-profit organizations such as the Malala Fund. He is leading our product efforts and art production pipeline so that we can create state of the art content at a large scale.

Our COO Jasmine Maze just joined our team in December. Before joining Movers and Shakers, Jasmine was the principal of the Cleveland High School for Digital Arts, where they engage, prepare, and challenge students through graphic design, video game design, recording arts, and film. With 10+ years of high level experience in education, Jasmine is perfectly suited to lead our efforts to grow our educational team and get Kinfolk into the classroom.  With expertise in personalized learning, extended day models, mastery/ competency-based learning, arts-integration, year-long calendar schools, and project-based learning, she led schools and coached others in the pursuit of equitable education for all.

We are applying to Solve because of the growth stage that we are in. We have been working at the intersection of arts, technology, and education for 5 years now, and we have finally hit our stride with our vision for our tech platform and company as a whole. The monetary support is not what is important to us with this grant; we have raised 4.5 million dollars over 5 years, including a 1.5 million dollar grant that we received in January 2022 to scale up our Kinfolk app. What we are in need of is mentorship and coaching from experts to guide us through the process of scaling the platform as a tech-non-profit. The other two accelerators we have been a part of have been extremely beneficial in putting us into spaces with leaders who are focused on social impact. That is the reason MIT solve is exciting for us; we will be able to receive advice around impact strategy and measurement from leaders in the space. As a tech non-profit, we possess start-up characteristics of both a tech company and a nonprofit organization. This equates to rapid scaffolding of infrastructure and developing programs and activities, while also envisioning and building future innovation. Such dynamic growth can be exciting but also exhausting with a small team. To avoid burnout and overextension, we need constant assessment and grounding from our network of advisors that will support creating a sustainable organization with a focused understanding of mission, vision, and impact goals and activities. It is especially important considering that we are building something that does not really exist, and so having a network of advisors and peers that can help us figure out how we can find a product-market fit for our next-gen archive.  Mover & Shakers is where history, technology, education, and equity collide to create a powerful impact in our communities. We invite you to join us through partnership and investment of time, resources, thought leadership, and community building.

Our use of augmented reality provides fun and engaging ways to interact with historical information. For most of human history, we have only had static ways to engage with information (stone monuments, textbooks, archives). Even though we are moving faster than ever into the future, our institutions are not catching up with the times. A lot of schools around the country have iPad or Laptop programs but are still not using the technology to its full potential. Our solution brings learning 20 years into the future, providing an accessible and interactive way for students to approach learning that meets them where they are in terms of the informational intake. When students are outside of the classroom, they are engaging with information in a very visual manner: Fortnite, TikTok, Facetime, Minecraft, etc. But when they are at school, they are not being engaged in the same way. This is a detriment to student engagement. According to statistics, about 80 percent of students are more likely to attend a class that uses augmented reality. About 72 percent of these are excited to participate, while 70 percent of students claimed the AR improved their learning experience and escalated their pace of getting a grasp on the subject. AR in the classroom also contributes substantially to the sensory development of students. With books, students are merely using their ability to see to engage with information through text. During lectures, it is a combination of hearing, sight, and understanding. However, AR introduces the ability to feel into the equation. The medium of AR creates a sense of excitement and curiosity unlike other mediums, and it often uses multiple senses at once. AR creates a learning environment that is appealing to students from all different kinds of learning styles, thus, improving the overall performance of students in terms of senses.

Furthermore, the introduction of AR allows us to include gamification in the classroom setting. Our platform enables students to direct their own learning experiences. When they’re learning things they actually want to learn and care more about what they’re doing, students tend to exhibit greater engagement levels and, ultimately, achieve greater results. We are building a platform that takes students into another world and incorporates the curriculum into the interactions within the world. This allows students to explore the learning environment on their own, forcing them to make their own connections with the content. According to another study, 65% of people are visual learners and 80% of learners say they would be more productive if their school was more like a video game. 

At Movers and Shakers, we have a two-pronged approach to educating the next generation: within the classroom and outside of the classroom. Not many edtech tools are able to focus on both in classroom learning and outside of the classroom learning. We are using a grassroots method of building relationships with schools and community groups around the country to see how we can use Kinfolk to facilitate learning in public space, bringing knowledge of value outside the walls of institutions and to the students in their own communities. This provides ways for students to contextualize the content they are learning in schools with the real world. We take historical content and bring it into the present. Making this content relevant for students in the present day shapes how they think about the future, and allows us to move towards that future in an equitable way. Beyond that, we are looking to engage with students and teachers and bring them in as creators of content for the app that everyone can experience. By going into Black and Brown communities and getting them involved in building out the future of the archive together, we are actively building Black and Brown voices into the fabric of the future.

Our impact goals are all about increasing accessibility, building community, and continuously getting better at how we serve communities. 

By the end of the year, Movers and Shakers will:

• bring 16 underrepresented narratives and 3 signature monuments to 2100+ new users through immersive technology

• triple our community impact by hosting 3 Kinfolk National Tour events for 800+ attendees 

• partner with local black and brown businesses across 3 different cities that are frequently visited by folks in need of a community-based archive: students, educators, lawyers, archivists, artists, activists, etc. 

• refine our internal systems that will enhance our overall growth by increasing traceable growth metrics by 20%.

• Create a standards-based, competency-aligned curriculum rooted in our 100+ community archive that brings learning from inside to outside of the classroom through the activation of history in the real world using geolocation, storytelling, art that stimulates movement (similar to Pokemon Go) within and across public spaces. 

• identify a community governance structure with our platform that enables communal decision-making and purchases in 10+ cities on Discord. 

• continue to push the needle forward on the national conversation around critical race theory, representation, and monuments/public space through supportive partnerships with 1500+ schools. 

By 2026, Movers and Shakers will 

• bring underrepresented narratives to over 100K users with representation across all 50 states

• build an AR Metaverse social impact platform rooted in a Black and Brown archive that can provide an interactive tool that gives people a say and ownership to do social change in 10+ cities

In order to measure progress toward our impact goals, we need to understand the needs, behaviors, and motivations of the community. We are doing so through sending members of our team to communities that we are going to engage with and do community interviews as a way to collect and uplift stories from the community. We are using surveys and other methodologies designed for feedback in order to guide us in our goal of creating long-lasting impact through a technology platform. In the classroom, we are using qualitative student surveys before and after they engage with our app. Our goal with those surveys is to assess any changes in perspective, empathy and self-identity after using our app. On the tech side, we are building out a robust data pipeline to measure the engagement of students and teachers within the app. We have built out a teacher dashboard that allows teachers to receive real-time feedback on how their students are performing on an individual level. Teachers have told us that this allows them to create more personalized learning experiences for their students in future lessons. 

• Monitoring key performance indicators

  • Total RSVPs/ QR Code scans to our events

  • Total Announcement Views

  • Total Reacts

  • Total Comments

  • Total Monuments Placed

  • Total Biography Views

  • Total Shares

  • Average Time on Page

  • Total Resulting Downloads

  • Total Sessions

  • Avg Unique Page Views

  • Session Duration

  • Bounce percentage

  • Students Reached

Access is our guiding light for decision-making. We radically seek to improve accessibility to unheard stories, to agency, to technologies, and to information. We further value A.C.C.E.S.S. We authentically value our community. We root ourselves in the nature of our collaborations, looking to empower diverse, inclusive storytelling and design innovative solutions. Our organization’s long term vision is to make underrepresented histories available to everyone in the world to catalyze change and movement toward racial equity. We are building out Kinfolk as a community-driven archive where we are engaging with communities across America to figure out what narratives they want to see lifted, and then provide our AR platform as a way to reimagine public spaces that are inclusive of narratives and monuments that are important to the community. 

Theory of Change 1-If we incentivize contributions to the archive and create ways for community members to contribute to our platform, then we can empower communities to collaborate. 

Theory of Change 2-If we create digital content about underrepresented histories and work with community groups to spark conversations around representation, history, and social activism through community-oriented events, workshops, art shows, talks, etc., then we can create a community archive platform that gives marginalized communities power over their collective memories and narratives.

Theory of Change 3-If we build augmented reality content that speaks to marginalized communities and provide a trusted digital public space with a geolocative layer that communities can use for collective memory, commemoration, and public art, we begin to challenge the inequitable distribution of monuments.  

Theory of Change 4- If we use geolocation to activate public spaces, provide learning opportunities for students in the real world to bring knowledge of value outside the walls of institutions and to the people, then we use augmented reality to write Black and Brown narratives into American curricula and create sustained engagement with Black and Brown histories in communities, schools, public space and cultural institutions across the country.

Theory of Change 5- If we make digital creation easier to access and we create a curriculum for our content that is accessible to teachers, students and the general public then we bridge the digital divide and usher in a new creative class of Black and Brown digital creators.

Augmented reality (AR) is the core technology that powers our solution. AR allows people to superimpose digital content onto the real world through their phone camera. A common application of augmented reality is instagram/snapchat face filters. There are two kinds of augmented reality that we as Movers and Shakers engage with: surface detection and geolocation. Our app Kinfolk currently uses surface detection. Users can point their camera at any surface in the immediate environment, like a table or floor, and place the augmented reality content on that surface. This allows us to make digital content appear as though it is in the room with you. The content becomes the anchor for the learning experience, which incentives students to explore and move around the space. 

Now that we have received enough funds to scale up Kinfolk, we are adding geolocation features to our app. Geolocation AR is a functionality that allows us to place digital content at physical locations. Think Pokemon Go for history. We can make augmented reality monuments appear at any longitude and latitude in the world! This is the power of augmented reality. This digital AR layer exists throughout the world that is virtually untapped. Augmented reality acts as the bridge between the physical world and the digital world. We can use that digital world to unearth narratives from Black and Brown communities that have been hidden; making them accessible to anyone through a cell phone. We are aiming to use the power of geolocation AR to populate our app with these hidden narratives and create a gamified curriculum that encourages students to engage with the educational content in the real world, similar to how they would engage with Pokemon in Pokemon Go. 

Movers and Shakers views diversity, equity and inclusion as a core part of our identity. The company was founded by two Black men, and now our leadership team (4 people) is 75% Black and 25% White and consists of 3 men and one woman. 

Here are the diversity numbers for our organization as a whole:

Gender

• Man - 50%

• Woman - 30%

• Non-Binary - 20%

Race/Ethnicity

• Black - 30%

• Asian - 40%

• Latinx - 20%

• White - 10%

Our approach moving forward is to focus on hiring diverse employees, prioritizing hires from POC communities. In our line of work, it is important that our employees come from diverse backgrounds, represent the communities we serve, and are passionate about our mission. Without that, our engagements with communities will be inauthentic.

Beyond our internal structures, our work is to engage with Black and Brown communities and use our tech platform to uplift the narratives that are important to them and create exciting ways for students to learn about these histories. The inclusion of these voices is very much a core part of how we are envisioning, ideating, and executing our mission. The idea of incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity is an interesting question for us because it is already the essence of who we are. 

We have used a traditional philanthropic model to date. Our funding has come entirely from institutional grants, we are working towards including corporate partners and local businesses along with individual donors, grassroots campaigns, and the crypto community. In the next two years, we plan to start selling our curriculum to schools to generate revenue and allow us to end reliance on grant support

We anticipate spending 3 million next year and 6 million the following, mostly coming from philanthropy. Our goal is to have 1500 schools paying for our curriculum by 2024 at an average cost of 6k per school bringing our revenue to 9 million per year and profit to 3 million within two years.

We set goals to double our funding each year with the goal of and have done so every year since 2018 so we know we have the propensity to raise enough money to reach the tipping point. We currently have a free product being distributed to all VILS schools through our partnership with Verizon. It's receiving rave reviews and being heavily featured on their platform, though this product will always remain free it's been a highly successful proof of concept for a for purchase product to follow.