StartUp NYCHA

The problem we are addressing is the education and opportunity disparity that disproportionately affects low-income youth, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities. Systemic underinvestments in education systems, outdated curricula, and unequal technology access are core to this challenge. This underinvestment further compounds, leading to uneven access to mentors, entrepreneurial education, and paid work-based learning opportunities. As a consequence, BIPOC youth suffer at both community and national levels, which impacts their access to highly-skilled, better-paying employment opportunities in their futures.

Current education systems fail to adequately teach students evolving digital skills, and even when taught, they are expected to be practiced in off-school settings that require necessary devices and internet connectivity. The Pew Research Center reports that 15% of U.S. households with school-age children do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, with low-income families and Black and Hispanic households being disproportionately affected. A recent report by the National Skills Coalition shows that in 2023, 92% of jobs across every industry analyzed in the U.S. require digital skills - a number that will continue to grow. Workers who qualify for jobs requiring even one digital skill can earn an average of 23% more than those in jobs with no digital skills. Thus, it’s imperative to equip BIPOC students with the digital literacy and skills required to enter the future job market and elevate their future communities.

Another crucial aspect widening the opportunity gap for BIPOC youth is the lack of access to mentors and entrepreneurial education. Lack of access to entrepreneurial education, capital and networking opportunities greatly hinder BIPOC communities, who comprise <30% of the entrepreneurial workforce in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the majority of skills that employers are hiring for—such as leadership, critical thinking, teamwork, and creativity—are not adequately developed from school alone, with employers reporting that less than 25% of recent graduates are qualified for entry-level roles. Work-based learning opportunities are crucial in preparing students for entry-level roles, and also expose students to professional networking opportunities which will help propel their careers later on. These opportunities typically come from schools offering partnership programs with companies, or students’ network-based connections. We see this system failure especially for our students of color,  with 1 in 3 BIPOC students nationally attending schools termed “dropout factories”, where graduation rates are below 60%.  

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, apprenticeship programs can lead to careers that pay an average of $70,000 annually, yet the participation of BIPOC youth in such programs is significantly lower than their white counterparts, leaving them disadvantaged when entering the job market. Our work focuses on rectifying the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx youth in apprenticeships and work-based learning opportunities, as well as equipping them with the necessary digital skills and literacy which are critical for securing higher-paying jobs. By doing so, we hope to challenge and change the systemic barriers that have long hindered equal educational and professional opportunities for BIPOC communities.

Our Platform in Action for Solar Training at Red Hook, Brooklyn/ Co-designing for StartUp NYCHA at Fulton Houses / Youth Entrepreneurship at Comp Sci High in the Bronx:

We develop and deliver curricular programs and educational technology to create access to social entrepreneurial education for underestimated communities. 

Through Startup NYCHA, we offer a cohort-based business incubator, access to our gamified learning platform (Journey), business development services, and mentorship. NYCHA residents acquire the knowledge and resources to launch their own companies or cooperatives, secure internship and employment opportunities, and launch community-based projects that address local social and environmental challenges.

During our pilot program at Fulton Houses and Chelsea Elliot Houses, we received over 60 sign ups from NYCHA residents and recruited our first cohort of thirty NYCHA entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurs traveling from all four boroughs every Saturday to develop their business ventures.  Our cohort is 95% women of color, and we have a waitlist of rising entrepreneurs who are eager to join the next workshop.

Recognizing the impact of gentrification and the rising costs of living in New York, Cambio firmly believes in the importance of co-designing entrepreneurship programs alongside NYCHA residents to place their economic inclusion at the forefront. Our 6-month program aims to bolster digital and financial literacy, offer personalized coaching from expert instructors and business practitioners, and expand participants' skill sets in a practical, work-based setting, while they incubate their business ideas. Our accelerator curriculum culminates in a business pitch competition for additional resources and seed funding to launch their business, and dovetails well with existing programs in the NYCHA ecosystem, such as the Business Pathways program by Opportunity NYCHA and REES, and NYC Boss Up.

At Cambio Labs, our vision is to make social entrepreneurial education accessible and transformative, so that regardless of zip code or income level, residents can access economic opportunity, business ownership, and the tools of innovation.  We want to equip future leaders with the tools to forge their own paths to prosperity and self-sufficiency, and to become creators of solutions to challenges in their communities. In the next ten years, we hope to build an integral bridge for underestimated youth and adults to move from classrooms to workplaces to the forefront of innovation and social change.

At Cambio Labs, we recognize the formidable challenges faced by the nearly 300,000 working-age residents of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), where economic adversity is a prevailing reality. A telling statistic from 2019 reveals that only 42% of these individuals derived income from employment, with an average annual earning of slightly over $27,000. The COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified these hardships, particularly in sectors such as retail, hotels, and food services—industries that employ many within the NYCHA community.

Despite a resilient entrepreneurial spirit among NYCHA residents, they confront considerable barriers that hinder their path to business ownership. The lack of accessible capital, insufficient savings or networks to support business startups, sparse formal business training and support, and the fear of increased housing costs or the potential loss of government benefits collectively stifle entrepreneurial endeavors. This is underscored by the fact that, before the pandemic, less than 1% of NYCHA residents reported income from business activities, illustrating a significant gap between potential and realized business ownership.

Moreover, the support services currently available to aspiring entrepreneurs within NYCHA are inadequate. City-run initiatives reach only a small fraction of residents, and existing programs like Business Pathways, despite their promise, are under-resourced and not sufficiently widespread. Many residents are compelled to operate informal or unregistered businesses out of necessity, which consequently marginalizes them from formal economic systems and denies them access to essential resources that could facilitate business growth.

To truly harness the entrepreneurial potential of NYCHA residents, we aim to provide targeted support services and advocate for systemic policy changes. These initiatives must aim to enhance access to entrepreneurial education, simplify the process of business formalization, and work with policymakers to revise policies that currently deter residents from augmenting their income through entrepreneurship. Without these critical interventions, the vast untapped potential within NYCHA will remain largely unexplored, perpetuating the economic disparities that plague New York City and other urban centers. At Cambio Labs, we are committed to creating an ecosystem where affordable housing and entrepreneurship can become powerful ingredients in creating more equitable cities by empowering residents with the tools of innovation; technology; 

In reflecting on Cambio Labs’ commitment to diversifying the entrepreneurial landscape and providing culturally competent curricula, all full-time staff identify as BIPOC, the majority of Cambio Labs’ board members are Latinx, and Cambio Labs is Latinx-founded by and continues to be Latinx-led. For programs like StartUp NYCHA, our lead instructor grew up at NYCHA and is a housing social entrepreneur.

A bit about our core team: 

Growing up, Cambio Labs founder, Sebastián Martín, witnessed the hurdles his Latinx immigrant parents faced as BIPOC entrepreneurs. Upon launching his own social ventures, he realized neither the education nor entrepreneurship ecosystem was designed to prepare and empower social innovators in communities of color. 

For his first social venture, he decided to leverage the power of direct trade to empower local indigenous cooperatives in his mother’s country, Bolivia, and began exporting and retailing their coffee in Shanghai. By eliminating the traditional chain of intermediaries – who often absorb a large portion of profits – this approach allowed farmers to retain a greater share of the value they produced.

The challenges he faced during this 8-year venture made Sebastian recognize the scarcity of resources, mentorship, and second chances for entrepreneurs of color, and the failure of traditional education systems to adequately prepare students. He began teaching social entrepreneurship at universities, and, as the social innovation lead at a high school in New York, he realized that solutions available for delivering social entrepreneurship education for BIPOC youth were being delivered piecemeal with few coordinated resources, and within a system steeped in inequity. To address the issue, including the lack of coaching and mentorship in BIPOC communities by BIPOC coaches and mentors, he leveraged user-centered, liberatory design to create technology platforms and learning experiences that equip youth for 21st social challenges and employment. Through work-based learning solutions, he wants young social entrepreneurs to thrive in ways that our conventional high school infrastructure does not permit. To date, Cambio Labs has served over 230 young social entrepreneurs. 

Michelle Maluwetig, as the Director of Organizational Development, brings extensive experience as a business educator and advocate for underrepresented entrepreneurs. As a business educator and microfinance officer, she has worked diligently for migrant entrepreneurs to gain access to capital, information and networks for underestimated and underserved communities and she works in partnership and institutional capacity building at Cambio to bring these resources to entrepreneurs, sooner, as early as middle school. She has extensive experience working with the latinx community from her work at the Organization of American States; the Latino Economic Development Center, and El Centro de la Raza.

Sarah Zou, in her role as a Product Strategist at Cambio Labs, brings a wealth of experience in digital strategy, product operations, and technical management, aligning perfectly with the project's goals. Her multilingual abilities and experience in multicultural settings are invaluable assets for a project focused on diverse BIPOC communities. Sarah's agile, data-driven approach, combined with her background in science and MBA, equips her to effectively navigate the complexities of emerging education, technology, and social entrepreneurship. Her track record in creating effective team processes and ensuring psychological safety makes her an essential member of the team, capable of leading the project team towards a socially impactful, innovative solution. 

Since Cambio Labs’ launch in 2021, we have delivered business training for 401 BIPOC youth and adults across 25 social innovation programs.

Our participants have conceptualized and presented 102 innovative social businesses, with 92% reporting marked improvements in key skills like public speaking, innovation, and teamwork. In just two years, Cambio Labs has secured $106,798 in stipends, with 80% of their participants being beneficiaries, underscoring their commitment to rewarding effort and fostering growth.

84% of our income is from program revenue. In the last year, demand for our programs has doubled.  

Cambio Labs collaborates closely with community partners to develop all of its programs, from our digital learning platform, Journey, our flagship Social Entrepreneurship Program, to StartUp NYCHA.

We use an iterative process, where community feedback is actively invited and integrated into programming.  In the case of Startup NYCHA, we were invited to present at Tenement Association Meetings, tabled at 4 NYCHA Community Events and received 60+ Sign Ups for Startup NYCHA, expressing interest in the program. Intergenerational demand is there with ~ 20 youth and ~40 adults signed up.

We have received community support from residents, tenement leaders, and REES. We have received funding from the West Side Community Fund and support about funding and resources from the Department of Strategy and Innovation at NYCHA to help kick off this initiative.

Sustainable Growth and Resource Management

As a team with only three full-time teammates, we have managed to attain results that have led to a doubling in demand for our programming in our first two years, and we hope that we would benefit from MIT Solve's expertise in identifying and securing resources to allow us to continue to deliver and enhance efficient programmatic customization and grow our team.

Staff Expansion and Recruitment

We would like our programs to continue to be delivered by culturally competent instructors from the community. We would benefit from support in strategic recruitment and curricular experts to be able to customize our curricula more efficiently for each community's need and budget. Numerous instructors have also sought full-time vs contractor positions and we would love to have the capacity to offer competitive salaries with benefits.

Capacity Building for Grant Writing and Fundraising

Most of our funding has come from sales and partnerships; and currently less than 14% of our revenue comes from grants.  We would benefit tremendously in guidance in identifying potential partners and funding sources that align with our values and mission. This may include grant writing assistance, network building, board development and strategies for maintaining program integrity while expanding accessibility.

Data and Impact Evaluation 

We would like to provide enhanced data and feedback to our participants and instructors to support their business development journey and portfolio.  We would also like to make more data-informed decisions and monitor our impact. We would like support in developing a robust and efficient data capture program on our platform.

Financial Management 

Expert advice on nonprofit financial management, including true cost accounting, budget projection, and customized pricing strategies would be welcome. We have been tracking our income and expenses manually and we would like to build a financial model that helps us keep track of our capacity and growth.

Most importantly, we welcome thought partners in finetuning our theory of change and the opportunity to be part of a community seeking to create enduring, transformative change for generations to come.

Our strategy begins with co-designing our programming with our partners according to their needs; from short workshops to multi-semester social entrepreneurship programs. Our clients are education leaders at community-based organizations who also see work-based learning opportunities as a means to empower BIPOC Youth.

By co-designing with community leaders, from fostering an ecosystem of social innovation in public housing communities through our program Startup NYCHA to our progressive curriculum from middle school to high school at Prep for Prep, we ensure our programs are responsive and aligned with the specific needs and goals of the communities we work with. This is also an integral part of the program we teach; our students are encouraged to test their assumptions, while they build digital prototypes of their solutions, and foster long-term skills in leadership, critical thinking, and teamwork, which are essential for bridging the opportunity gap in high-paying employment sectors.

Our programs are unique in their integration of gamification and real-world challenges, exemplified by our 'gemstone' system on the digital learning platform we designed called Journey, which encourages active learning and engagement. These gemstones, earned through various team and individual challenges, can be redeemed for mentoring sessions with our network of experienced professionals, providing invaluable guidance and networking opportunities often inaccessible to BIPOC youth. All programs culminate in a pitch competition, judged by seasoned entrepreneurs and business leaders, offering participants not only a platform to showcase their ventures but also a stepping stone to real-world opportunities. This setup aligns with our goal of rectifying the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx youth in apprenticeships and professional networks, as highlighted by the U.S. Department of Labor's findings on the positive impact of apprenticeship programs on career prospects.

Furthermore, our commitment to inclusivity and empowerment extends beyond program completion. We actively involve our alumni as paid mentors and co-facilitators, creating a sustainable cycle of learning and growth within the community. This approach not only equips participants with immediate skills and opportunities but also fosters a supportive ecosystem that continues to nurture their growth and advancement. By doing so, Cambio Labs is not just providing a temporary solution; we are contributing to a broader movement towards equitable educational and professional opportunities, challenging systemic barriers that have long hindered the progress of BIPOC communities.

In simple terms, Cambio Labs aims to address critical infrastructure gaps for underestimated entrepreneurs at NYCHA to thrive:

The digital divide that impacts BIPOC communities most: We leverage engaging customized digitized platforms where they can see multimedia content that highlights entrepreneurs of color, while also providing leadership and mentorship through in-person highly interactive design thinking tools.  We make sure they're able to pitch their prototypes through no-code solutions; lean startup methodology; and through learning how artificial intelligence can be used to offset resource limitations, garner research, and provide a sounding board for new ideas.

Equity is central to Cambio Labs' mission, empowering BIPOC low income people through access to social entrepreneurship skills and technology. Our curriculum and theory of change is designed to level the playing field for underserved innovators.

We are building an equitable innovation infrastructure - publicly accessible resources, programming, and technology that can create access to entrepreneurship, business development opportunities, and employment pathways for all.

By focusing on the needs of students and entrepreneurs of color, we address historic and systemic inequities by making educational and entrepreneurial opportunities accessible to our most underserved communities. Our leadership reflects this commitment to equity, actively recruiting BIPOC coaches and ensuring our content highlights entrepreneurs of color. 

The majority of our social entrepreneurship and green workforce programs are also paid opportunities for youth and adult participants, addressing financial barriers for entrepreneurship, and working class families that need to choose between professional development and paid work opportunities.

Most importantly, through our StartUp NYCHA, we want to see entrepreneurs plugged into a path of business launching; so we will be measuring number of mentorship relationships created, number of businesses funded, and number of businesses created.

However, we are also measuring the development of key competencies in social entrepreneurship among BIPOC youth and adults. These competencies include problem-solving, critical thinking, adaptability, communication skills, teamwork, collaboration, emotional intelligence, ethical decision-making, continuous learning, creativity, time management, community engagement, and tech aptitude. Each of these skills is crucial for the participants to not only thrive in their entrepreneurial endeavors but also to effectively contribute to societal change. To measure the success and impact of their Social Entrepreneurship Program, Cambio Labs employs a robust set of indicators that reflect these diverse competencies, ensuring a holistic assessment of participant readiness and skill acquisition.

To track progress towards these goals, Cambio Labs implements a comprehensive multi-methods approach to evaluation. This includes pre- and post-program surveys to gauge changes in self-assessed competencies, mid-program focus groups for qualitative feedback on the learning experience, and peer evaluations within venture groups to assess teamwork dynamics. Additionally, Cambio Labs utilizes design challenges on their gamified platform, Journey, where participants' application of skills can be observed and assessed in real time. This structured feedback mechanism allows for immediate adjustments and fosters a responsive learning environment.

Moreover, at the conclusion of the program, external judges evaluate participant business ideas against a rigorous set of criteria, providing an objective measure of how well participants have integrated and applied their learning. This final evaluation not only assesses individual participant outcomes but also serves as a critical indicator of the program’s overall effectiveness in preparing participants for real-world entrepreneurial challenges.

Cambio Labs' approach to impact measurement is both dynamic and participant-focused, involving continuous data collection and analysis to inform program improvements. This ongoing evaluation process ensures that Cambio Labs not only achieves its immediate educational goals but also contributes to long-term community and economic development by empowering participants with the skills needed to create sustainable ventures and engage effectively in their communities.

Journey is a dynamic online learning platform we built that features multimedia lessons, prompts, and team-based challenges to help participants launch their ventures. As they progress, users earn “gemstones” that can be exchanged for prizes, workshops, and services provided by our corporate and global partners and volunteers. The platform also provides access to mentorship programs, job opportunities, and other resources, making it a gateway to a broader ecosystem of support for participants. 

Please find a demo here.

Here is a demo of our platform: 

3-full time teammates, 1 part-time full-stack engineer, 6-7 contracted instructors, and around 15-20 paid interns and volunteers through various partnerships at any given moment.

Since July 2021, we are going into our third year this summer.

In reflecting on Cambio Labs’ commitment to diversifying the entrepreneurial landscape and providing culturally competent curricula, all full-time staff identify as BIPOC, the majority of Cambio Labs’ board members are Latinx, and Cambio Labs is Latinx-founded by and continues to be Latinx-led.

Our work is about changing the narrative around entrepreneurship to reflect BIPOC entrepreneurs'' contributions and potential.  Here is a testimonial from Comp Sci High in the Bronx about our ethos: