so today we're going to be talking about everyday entrepreneurs who are reimagining education in new and different ways outside of traditional learning environments my name is meredith olsen and i lead an organization called the vela education fund vela exists to invest in everyday entrepreneurs in people in community leaders educators families parents who are reimagining education and they are doing so in ways that are permissionless so what does that mean bayla invests in finding permissionless innovators and then elevating their stories so that more and more people can see what's happening on the ground what does that mean so permissionless innovation in education means innovating in a way where you are offering solutions and services without requiring the blessing of anyone not from public officials not from funders not from those in power but you're offering solutions and services that meet the needs of families and kids in their context meeting their values and priorities in the way that you as an entrepreneur know best so this is beautiful work it's life-giving work to date vela has invested in more than 1300 grants to everyday entrepreneurs all across this country and here's the good news it's not concentrated in one place this work is happening in all 50 states it's happening in three u.s territories it's happening in rural suburban and urban environments it's happening across all of our our beautiful diversity of socio-economic diversity of racial and ethnic diversity so we are seeing a movement of people who are authentically meeting the needs of kids wherever they are so this is something we should all be proud of and i i know we have we have our vela community of entrepreneurs represented today i would love if you are the recipient of a velo award please stand up and and let's let's see you in our so i'm delighted to be joined here today by damari dickinson by kyle gamba and by kim kent three of our beautiful vela innovators who are permissionless who are fearless and who are meeting the needs of kids so i'd love to hear from each of you tell us about yourself tell us a little bit about your role in education your story what brings you here today so damari let's start with you okay hey y'all i am damari dickinson i'm here from piscatawayland which is also known as frederick maryland um like many of you i'm sure i wear a lot of different hats so let me see which one we can bring to the table today um i am a mom of four so my kids range in age from six to twenty got that right and i'm an unschooler i've been in education arena for 20 years and has been on our unschooling journey for about four years now i started in education as a high school teacher in maryland moved up to new york to teach with uncommon schools to teach middle school came back down to the dmv to become an instructional coach with friendship public charter schools and then became director of math for their baltimore campuses and then started my entrepreneurial journey as an ed consultant so basically working with different school districts with different education companies and teachers and school leaders and have been doing that for about 10 years now i'm also a math tutor because i still love the babies and i need that interaction but most of my time now is spent in parent coaching so i've started on my personal conscious parenting decolonization journey so now i work with other parents to help them really decolonize their parenting what that means is that they're thinking about how systems of oppression are showing up and how they interact with themselves with the world but also with their kids and then helping them with community support and tools to divest from those systems to really co-create relationships with their kids that are built on joy love and liberation so that is the work that i'm doing through bayla and that i'm most passionate about right now and i'm gonna pass the mic to kyle um good afternoon everybody my name is kyle gamba um and i think my journey started as a non-education non-traditional person and got into education a little bit late in life um followed one of these non-traditional pathways into a classroom did that for about seven years and became the principal very quickly of a low-performing high poverty school in denver and really it was through community partners and amazing people that we kind of turned the school around and we passed some 75 other schools and it was great great great but what i saw was our kids still weren't succeeding had the chance to be a principal at um international school in monterey mexico for three years which was amazing and great because i was the one probably learning the most very similar to my journey is kind of like i'm always the person in the classroom learning the most which is i think interesting came back to denver was a principal school called denver center for international studies and this was really the moment when i would walk into middle school classrooms and if it was exciting i would sit down and i had to gauge and if it was boring which unfortunately was it was more often than not i was the only person that had the power in the school to walk away from that classroom and that was when it really kind of struck me like middle school amazing people especially the teachers working really really hard kids really really amazing but i think the model was really really terrible and so it's been a year um working with community and kind of just really trying to develop what was without a dream school and we came up with this idea called la luz and la luz is a school we currently just have 12 families it's a micro school which again was a very new concept for me coming from a big district and we have 12 latino families from southwest denver that decided that this seems better than the current system and we spent the first six weeks just outdoors hiking around colorado these kids hiked over 100 miles in some 20 hikes they spent the you know we did some camping and they had the most amazing time and really kind of kind of came together we spent six weeks at the denver zoo in other words every single day at the denver zoo the denver zoo was our classroom and so the point of this journey is that i think we should be learning in the community learning through authentic experiences and i think the smartest thing we did when we created a school was get rid of the actual school so yeah excited to tell you more passing it over to kim hi everybody my name is kim kant and um i'm the director of extend homeschool tutorial i am a mom of six this person so from that standpoint i'm a parent i am also an educator in terms of being a teacher or really we call them tutors in our tutorial and before kids i spent a number of years in special ed litigation and we were representing the school system so i saw the good the bad and the ugly of what was going on and so when it came time for me to have kids i started looking around because i knew i did not want my kids and what was available at that time for public ed and then the more i looked the more i realize that you know there's got to be something better there's got to be a better way and i spent the good part of about 10 years in a classical homeschool tutorial and even in that there were some things that were good about that there are some things that were not so good and about five years ago we launched this homeschool tutorial and in maryland it's a different kind of system because with the tutorial what we were able to do is provide the bread and butter the science the english the math the social studies and um then we this year we extended into high school so now we're doing the four core and more and we're we're an amazing community that exists to support other homeschoolers by giving them opportunities to have some classes to get some of those core things done but at the same time we're a huge community and we do a lot of things together we do life together we support one another we help each other um in terms of if it's a if it's a um a seminar that we're going to do to help the kids you know if you want to go to college if you want to do something different if you want to look at something like a trade school but our main focus really is to help these families build an educational program that works for them and works for their kids and it's not the school and it's not really a market school either we're something very different we're kind of an amalgam of all of that but it's been our joy to do this for so many families so so at vela vela invests not only capital to support each of these organizations and we do that on a trust basis meaning we apply almost zero preconditions and we don't apply any oversight criteria so we trust that entrepreneurs know what's best for their families what's best for their kids and they're closest to understanding those values and priorities within their communities we do ask we ask vela entrepreneurs and innovators to come alongside us to help us better understand what those values and priorities are and our community responds and they respond with gusto and so we conduct focus groups we have live virtual calls we conduct surveys and we receive tremendous feedback on what's motivating entrepreneurs in this space so what we've heard is that what's motivating vela entrepreneurs is very different than what's motivating our traditional education system so i'd like for you to hear what motivates us so what motivates you and so maybe we'll we'll start with kim this time what motivates you to reimagine learning so as always at the end of the day it's always the kids so what are we doing this for we're doing this for our children for the next generation and so what motivates us specifically is when we see kids that come in that maybe they don't like math they don't like the schools they don't like where they are and then they come into our community and we get so many just countless reports from the parents and from the kids themselves how now they love learning and now they're discovering a new a new side of themselves and and that's what it's all about i mean that's ultimately when it comes down to it we're here for these kids we're here for these families and we're here to do something different and better that really meets those families where they are meets those kids where they are so that they can not only survive but they can thrive and they can be excellent so it's all about them yeah it's a great question and and i think just having been in the system as a school leader for over a decade i just saw that it wasn't working and so i really really wanted to try something different a huge piece of this for me was going home at the end of the day and seeing my three kids and i knew that they were kind of getting what they needed but at the school that i was at they weren't getting what they were needing and so it really was kind of an equity issue more than anything my kids have had loads of opportunities to um travel and summer camp and and do all these things that a lot of my students at college view elementary didn't have the opportunity to do and i just definitely that that was a huge motivator for me in terms of like how can we make sure we're providing kids with the same opportunities and access and it was a really big deal and so when we decided who did we want to work with we specifically focused it was great i was able to go back to the elementary school in which i was a principal our first family came from that elementary school and really just kind of trying to work with that family to do something different i'm equally motivated by the fact that i just don't think middle school is a great model i mean i really i have yet to have a conversation with someone anyone all of us we all probably 99 of us share the same experience parents are just saying get through it the bar is so low for middle school you guys like really yeah i don't think we can do much worse and the other thing i would just say is i i don't think that maybe what we're learning in middle school is critical i i don't know how many of you know what a quadratic equation is yeah but i'm guessing very few of you right and so the math is now right wait a minute i'm just saying i'm sitting with some educators but in general none of us really know and so um again really motivated by the fact that i i think there's way more important things than the academic piece and so how do we provide authentic experiences for kids to learn and then how do we really work on people you know young people in particular becoming better humans like that to me is like what i think we need to do and in all honesty think about it middle school was all about just becoming a better human we may not be having the problems we're having today yes ditto that's why i wanted to go last night because i knew everybody say all the amazing stuff um so that is a really good question i think right now what continues to motivate me is this idea of liberation um so our journey for my family started when my sons because they're in the middle uh when my oldest son was six and i would have to register him for school and being in schools every day at that point seeing what happens to little black boys like mine who are very excited very uh social very smart i knew what would happen to them right and they would probably get labeled they would get treated you know asked to conform and to be uncomfortable to make other adults comfortable and i just couldn't in good conscience send them into that environment so i knew that i wanted them to be able to be free to be themselves not that they had to hold it until they got home but throughout their day they're able to show up oh i thought i was like an alarm but they're able to show up as their true authentic selves right and like what does it take for them to be able to do that to have these environments but also i had to shift a lot as a parent to get to that point where i could let them be free where i could create an environment where they felt safe and comfortable to do that so being able to work with other parents to say like hey if this is what you want for your kids here are some things like with your mindset that need to shift here are some tools that you need to learn how to implement to be able to create this environment where they can be free and in turn we get to be free as well so that idea of liberation is kind of what started the journey but it's what continues to fuel my journey if i can interject something too that you just both said too there's something amazing that happens when you can give kids opportunities that they probably don't necessarily would they certainly aren't going to get them in the traditional setting right but you've got an opportunity especially when you go outside of that to provide them with even more opportunities that they could not have even imagined and that helps them in terms of their discovery i have a son my oldest son who's now 22 would have been gotten that label of you know he can't really sit still and so he never went into school we just it just it wasn't going to be in the cards for him but now i'm looking at him and going i'm so glad that we did what we did because he is thriving he is kicking button taking names i'm just saying but but that wouldn't have happened had we gone into a traditional setting so being able to do this and being able to meet these kids where they are and help them discover themselves my goodness we're we're have the possibility really of creating the next leaders and i i guarantee you they're not going to come from the traditional setting they're just not so sorry if i offended anybody with that so this is incredible so we're seeing we are seeing people and we're seeing this in every community unconstrained to follow to follow their truth to develop creative solutions to liberate children to find and discover their true selves so that they can live a life of meaning and purpose on their terms right i mean this is what this is all about and and i have to ask because we we get this question frequently because you're not subject to oversight from public entities you're not subject to the all of the accountability and assessment requirements that follow and so some would say you know what therefore this work is not rigorous therefore these students might not be receiving a quality education how do you respond to that how do you define success and how do you measure it for the families and the children that are in your care y'all better answer because y'all know i'm like this all right go ahead somebody answer before i do um y'all all my answers are going to go back to this idea of decolonizing right and i think that the way that the system is designed is for there to be this hierarchy to say we have to know how to rank people to just to prove who deserves to get what and to justify why not giving certain people is okay so once we remove that idea we have to think about so what does success really mean so for me with the work that i do with parents yes there are times when i have to submit you know certain numbers to show what's happening but it's really about the transformations in their lives so building these relationships and hearing the stories that come out after our sessions when they're like oh my gosh i made it through this week and i didn't beat my child one time right like i no longer feel like i have to control everything i'm working on win-win solutions with my kid so hearing these stories and seeing how lives are being transformed for us is way more important than saying oh 35 of students increase their test score you know like okay that's great but we are focused on this buzzword right like the whole child okay sure people say that but they don't really mean that right they mean the whole child that we can measure but we're thinking about like people as people as humans and how their lives are impacted um through this work so being in relationships so that we can hear these stories you know i get dms every day about things that are happening in the families with the families that i'm working with they're sharing their stories they're bringing their family members to the sessions bringing their friends to the session to say hey we're trying something new and here's how it's working for our families so actually being able to see to hear them be able to speak to the things that they're doing differently is what success looks like for us i think it's a great question and there's some tension for me because i am coming from my public school system where this was you know the the only bar was how the kids did on the state test it didn't matter how it felt when you walked in the building but i would say what's how i've been measuring success and if there's any parent in here you know this we set out very very early to kind of say when kids get in the car with their moms dads aunts uncles grandma grandpa whoever somebody that loves them that's picking them up and we all do this how was your day fine what'd you learn nothing and the goal was to really get beyond fine and nothing and and as silly as it sound that was our measurement of success and what was great is we did some interviews with i interviewed all our families um halfway through the year lots of conversations in between there but this was our formal this was me measuring to see if this was working or not and i was so excited that 12 out of the 12 families we have said my kid gets in the car and i almost can't shut him up because you've done all these amazing things and so they're telling you all about the day and it's really just amazing and so what i have is i have 12 families that are incredibly happy because their kids are happy and their kids are happy because their kids are out and they're engaged and so yes i have tension because are we making sure that kids are reading and writing and playing with numbers and doing all the things they need to and the answer is yes and could it be better sure and at the end of the day i have families that are happy and kids that are happy and so that to me is the ultimate success and see and i would piggyback on all of that right because we do have the happy families and we have the other thing i will say though is that i all i also have 18 years of doing this so the proof is in the pudding the proof is in these kids who are going off and going to colleges of their choice we have kids who are athletes who are going on scholarship to where they want to go we have kids who are okay so when you were talking about the excellence thing i'm going yeah and the kids that are coming out of our classes right now our second and third graders are outperforming high schoolers in english and grammar language arts our kids that we have that are we are prepping them so that when they're by their junior's new year they are enrolling in the local community college and they are blowing theirs those classes out the window because number one we've taught them how to learn loving learn love learning love learning and love writing and we've we've been able to unlock that in them i will also i got to just share this with you all of mine as i was walking onto the plane to come down here i get this text from my daughter all right my daughter who is 17 years old and took her first vocal lesson she's been a vocal lesson at the community college last year she told me in this text that she got a 14 500 scholarship from towson university now she's home schooled from day one she has never taken the s.a.t she has never taken the act she's never taken the psat don't tell me that it doesn't work it works and it works because i've got and my my daughter is one of hundreds of kids that i can point to and say you know what this works they are excellent at what they do and and you want to talk about measurements they're doing it they're doing it and they're excelling and they are winning so again don't tell me it doesn't work it works the proof is in the pudding there so so it is happening and here's the question can it happen for more kids and can it happen for more families so something we hear a lot you have been delivering unconventional education in unconventional settings for many years before the pandemic when the pandemic struck maybe three to four percent of the school age population was receiving their education in an unconventional way that skyrocketed to nearly a hundred percent overnight and now as things become more quote back to normal we hear that unconventional education maybe it'll go away right maybe this trend is over maybe things are just going to go back to the way things used to be what say you absolutely not absolutely not no y'all ness i'll answer less absolutely not but go ahead i mean i feel like once you get a taste of freedom it's really hard to go back and let someone control you so there are a lot of kids who had this freedom during the pandemic whether they were in you know this virtual learning where the teacher wasn't over them all day or they were in you know they shifted to non-traditional education methods they got to see what it was like to have more control and it's really hard for them to go back and say okay now i want you to control me so i think that a lot of teachers are now feeling that like oh my gosh it's so much harder to to deal with my kids right i can't control my kids the way that i used to be able to because now they're questioning what this dynamic even is like what are we doing here like why do i need you i didn't need you last year what's happening um so i think that a lot of people are have seen that there is an alternative and while i'm not saying that this is what it is for everyone that this is going to work for everyone i believe that it is an option and should be an option and that you know it's something that the kids have this choice so my children you know we are on schoolers and they decided they wanted to go to school it's their choice they lasted for all of two months because they went and they are like oh wait a minute wait this is my oldest son his exact words this is a waste of my time like i have to sit here and wait for someone i i know what to do but i can't move on because my teacher will get mad at me so it's it's the way and i mean i loved his teachers they were great and i went to observe with my coaching hat on and i was like there is nothing that i would tell this teacher to do differently than what she's doing right now but she's just not able with with the confines of the system to give him what he needs and he knew that and so this is an opportunity for kids to lead their own learning to really just decide what it looks like for them to learn in a way that feels good for them and once they're exposed to that it's like i said it's just really hard to go back yeah and you guys i agree i i just think it's about choice and options i mean again i think most of us can agree middle school is not a great option and so we need to have more variety more choices and so i'm just a huge proponent of throughout the education system let's have a lot more choice that looks a lot more like this and then let's really let parents and kids decide what's going to work for them and so any time i'm not scared of charter schools i'm not scared of private schools i'm not scared of it home schools i'm not scared of any of these schools because i think they all have their place and at the end of the day we as a society are going to decide what's really really important and when there are amazing home schools that are providing or homeschool-esque or whatever i don't put anyone in a box right providing these amazing opportunities then we're going to decide what we want but i just i'm like a huge proponent of pushing pushing pushing on the system that we know doesn't serve kids well especially kids of color and so how can we by modeling push that system forward so that's what i'm so excited about we right it's not going anywhere folks i mean if anything what the pandemic really showed obviously it showed some deficits i'm going to use that word in the traditional system but what it also allowed was some parents now that were forced really you know we became a nation of homeschoolers at that point but what happened was it for some it opened up their eyes to say oh i i can do this and oh this this isn't what i thought it was so now maybe and so we ended up in that process empowering some people so for us to think that it's going to go away it's not if anything i think it's going to grow even more because people's the veils that veils are coming off people are opening up in their eyes and they're saying wait a second i can do this and the opportunities are there when we provide the opportunities they'll happen so something that i love about i love about the vela community is that you know each of you is completely independent you are self-determined you are autonomous you're making your own decisions but we've seen a tremendous amount of collaboration and humility a desire to learn a desire to improve and a desire to learn from others talk a little bit about about your community how do you interact with your community i love my bela family anybody else want to go first um so it i think it part of why this community feels so good for me is because it was scary to do this right to jump out and say i have this job that's paying me real well but it doesn't feel good to me right the things that i'm doing are no longer aligned with who i say i am as a person and i realized i was getting really really good and getting paid good money to teach other people how to be good at causing harm to kids and that didn't sit well with me but i had a family i'm like i still need to get paid right so it's scary to be able to to walk away from something that you know doesn't feel good for something that's uncertain but to see other people who are doing it and to be able to connect with them and to see like their success and okay you guys are doing this this is safe and to have support of an organization who's like look we know that this is different we want it to be different so we're not going to ask we're not going to make you try to fit into this box way that other people might so there are you know we have phone calls with vela community members i've actually partnered with some organizations to do work with their parents we have interaction on social media where we're always like hey we're doing this hey there's there's this opportunity hey i have a question about this so it's a really connected community that i feel like we all get each other and we're all in our own little ways working towards this same goal of look let's have as many options as we can i send people to baylor school so i have clients who are in california i'm like oh i got somebody for you out there oh you're in florida i know somebody down there who's doing some amazing things so because we are all always sharing the network just continues to grow and now it's easier to kind of say like oh wait you can connect with this person are you you like surfing i've got somebody down in florida for you um yeah so it's just amazing to be surrounded by like-minded folks who are are on the same mission as you are yeah i would just say you can't do it alone and so having the team is really really important for me just in terms of community the thing that's been so so helpful is it's the families and so again the families were the ones that said we want to do something like this the families were the ones who actually interviewed the educators and were the ones who selected their educators the families are consistently interviewed and we go back to them and say what is it that you want what is it that you want what is it that you want um and so to me what's fun coming from a traditional system where i know we say we talk to families i know we send inter we send surveys home we do a lot of surveys right we send surveys home it's not the same and i can say like i still have to get much much better at it i was actually with two moms just two days ago um in my house and we were having a sense of how's it going meeting um talking about our staffing needs for next year and they just reminded me like we haven't all been together in a little while and this is unacceptable and i kind of thought dang it like you know you think you're really doing this great job and you know we got these families and we're doing everything and they even reminded me like no like we need to be together even more often so um i think the advantage of being small and nimble is we have this ability to work with families at such a more intimate level and really kind of get to know them and their families and so that's the part that i think has been so powerful when i think about community and i would say for us we we literally have a village it's so crazy we have 123 families which is crazy but listen but here's the thing we we created and hopefully this will help somebody out there but we use group me and that group me is on fire with hey so like we're going to go do this and so hey we're going to do this does anybody know about this and so there's this continuous collaboration going on not just for us you know running the program right but amongst the families themselves and guys when that happens it is beautiful i mean that is just that is it that is the thing when you have all of these incredible families that are coming together the common goal we want to educate our kids together and then we're going to share we're sharing in the resources my seventh grader like they got a little they made their own group me it's like hey can we all go to the jump part together i mean but that's they're doing life together how awesome is that right and so that to me that's the family that's the community that's the village and in that you're supporting one another you're helping one another you're encouraging one another oh man i had a really stinky day yeah me too you know and it's okay for you to believe on one another but then you come together and you clean each other up and then you keep on moving forward so yeah well i'd like to thank each of you can we give a round of applause for our innovators and i'd like to open up the discussion to let's have a dialogue let's have some questions we would love to to interact with you um i believe there's an app where questions are submitted if that is not currently operational let's um let's just stand and great question okay so the question was how did each of the three innovators who are with us today learn about vela get involved and get connected oh yeah yeah okay so i can say for us we were already up and running um we we got an email from hslda saying hey we have a grant and this is probably the start of the pandemic saying we have this you know meet the moment grant and at that time um if y'all can and y'all can i'm sure y'all can remember when the pandemic hit like everything shut down and so for us one of the big things that we felt our kids needed and they wanted was the sports program and we were like can can we maybe apply to to do a little you know faith and fitness program and just like have our kids coming together and they can do pe and because there was good there was no pe happening because literally everything shut down but we knew the kids needed to be outside we knew the kids needed to come together we knew that they just they needed an outlet and so that's how we found vela um and so we were probably in year three ish going on because this is year five for us now yeah when we found you guys so we're so grateful um it's a great question because at the time i had absolutely so it was just me i don't recommend that i i i recommend the co-founder model as opposed to the founder model um and it was just and it was just me and someone said you know you should probably do this because what you need is you need some money to try and do some piloting um and so with the money the vela gave us we were able to do some piloting and then also some events with families that in a sense turned into recruitment um and so i would say it was critical um and and again like i don't know if you heard the numbers she said but there's over 1300 there's over 1300 people just like us that are like hey please can we have some money and so that was the part that i think i continue to be impressed about in terms of the community yeah i had absolutely i had no job i'd left a district and was just trying to do this on my own and so that money was you know super critical to be able to start um talking with families and then also doing piloting with kids so it was great so i heard about baylor through another organization 4.0 schools um i had done a pilot with 4.0 schools and then ended up with vela so one of the things that i will say is that vela's not an organization that makes you feel like it has to be this big huge grand idea that's already been proven in all these situations it's like you have a really great idea and you need some support we believe in you um so i know that when applying for funding that can be one of the things like is my idea good enough like is this big enough and when you hear like we're running this with 12 families right and that is awesome and there are so many amazing grantees who are doing you know smaller sized um work within their community and it is good enough yes question yeah what happens next okay so the question is what happens next how do we prepare for the next step in college or career for for the people coming out of programs i don't know that we need to prepare the learners oh great question yes how do we prepare how do we prepare the environment for for this newfound freedom right i think we have i i honestly i think we already have when we when we are empowering these kids to operate in their gifts to do what they love right that door is going to open for them my son right who's the one i was saying was not going to he has opportunities right now he's getting ready to come out of the art institute of virginia beach and he has opportunities beyond what i can imagine and some of them i will tell you are self-created opportunities so one of the beauty that happens when you get outside of that that norm is that it fosters that creativity and now these kids are thinking i'm going to be an entrepreneur so guess what i don't have to prepare you necessarily because i'm i'm i'm creating the business i'm creating and i'm building something that now i'm going to be able to you know meet a need in my community because of what i've done so it's i think i think sometimes we have to kind of shift our thinking do we need to prepare them for anything no if anything i'm saying you all need to get ready for them because they're coming and they're going to do great things and they are doing great things so yeah i i think the challenge for me is this idea of it's not necessarily about the academic piece but it's the what i might say are the all the other skills that kids need to have to be successful in the world and so um i really hope we kind of get to a point where institutions of higher learning or whatever it is can see that this kid is coming out and and they may not have in a sense the the academic skill but they sure have the the grit and the perseverance and this ability to advocate for themselves because i mean these are the skills that we actually really want and so um yeah i don't know i mean it's a great question and just you know how do we get people to kind of shift but i mean i really hope it's it's more about kids coming forth and saying like hey i know how i best learn and i know how i learn and so you know let me let me tell you institution how i learn um so that you can kind of meet my needs it would be my hope we'll see and i think it would be and i also think that people who are in these positions to make the decisions need to be having these conversations and so i think sharing these stories like oh i heard about this homeschool kid who got 14 000 scholarships maybe we need to look into what's happening with these homeschool skids and if there's any barriers to our entrance process that might stop this kid from being accepted to this institution right or people who are in hr who are saying look we keep asking for this high school diploma but then what if kids are homeschooled like what are the actual skills that we want these kids to come in and might they get these skills other places than in school right and so i think when we're in these positions and in these rooms or sitting at tables where with people who are making these decisions having the conversations to push their thinking to say well what else might be true like what else can can we look at to really get what we want to get um for this position or for this student or for this this job or for this funding and i don't also i don't want to say i don't think it's that this is a great student this is a great kid who's got these skills and they may not i think they can and they are academically excellent because i see that the and the reason they're academically excellent is because they've been in an environment that has unlocked that love for them and now they can totally excel so to me it's not an either or an or it's an and it's an ad so following up on on the the requirements for what happens next right i you've been through this kim um you've been through this tomorrow how hard is it to go through that college admissions process or through that hr and hiring process when you when you have a child who has been schooled in a non-traditional way it depends am i the only one's got graduates okay so i'm the only i've graduated three so far homeschooling you know um so it really depends a lot of times it does depend on the institution um and so we actually just finished in our community doing this homeschooling through high school um seminar that we did for the kids and for the parents and we showed them they said if for example you have an athlete and they want to go into the acc this is what the acc is going to require they're going to require i got to say that they're going to require ispn numbers they're going to require course descriptions and require all of that and so we help them to prepare and we tell them starting if you know you've got a kid that's an athlete start in ninth grade writing down those those books that you're using writing down just make up and do a course description a lot of those the the if you go on amazon and find a book that description of the book is exactly what you can use um and then there's some again it always it depends on where they want to go and that's where you really are talking to your kids saying so what do you want to do and they'll tell you what they want to do and then listen and then also for some of the institutions i can tell you nicole green who's who i co did this thing with her daughter specifically sought out test optional schools and y'all know there are a lot of schools nowadays that are going test optional utilize that capitalize on that right they really only need a transcript you can make up your own you're making up your own transcript because you're educating your child right and so it's not so so people that think oh is this herculean thing it's really not it's really not what we try to do i know as it as um as a village and as a community is that we try to take all that mystery away and help the parents to be able to do this in such a way that they're going to be able to help their kids partner with their kids to achieve the dreams that their kids have yes i think that partnership is what's so important because so a lot of times as kids are going through school once they graduate it's like okay now what do you want to do and what are these ideas but in our situations it's like they are learning about this as they go along so if i realize that my son is really into animals and we are partnering with you know vets in our area who if he continues on this path like that's a job opportunity so it's not like oh i get all these skills and then maybe i'll use it this way but it's like i'm i'm living my life and i'm pursuing what i'm interested in and i'm building these relationships and connections with these people so there are so many stories in our you know homeschooling communities about kids who like they were gamers and they created this game and then someone found them and now they paid them 25 000 for this app and then they hired them because they're living in these spaces where they're working with their interests and so by that they're meeting the people who have these opportunities or know of opportunities for them to continue these skills like and actually get paid for it this is beautiful i mean everything we're talking about is helping helping people find their talents and interests so that they can match them to opportunities so leaning leaning into what they love the most and becoming excellent at it i'd like to ask are there are there any other questions yes yes this is a great question so so the question is you know how do we amplify the voices of people who are experiencing trauma who are part of these learning environments what's what's your experience here compassion is number one i think that's compassion there's a lot of trauma out there and i feel like the pandemic really exposed a lot of that um and then the next thing is is can we as a community partner them with resources um we just okay so in my in our community we had a parent that said hey i have this person who is willing to do a workshop it's like a six-week workshop on on how to meet kids of trauma and how to me how to how to really work with them and meet them and and and help them heal and so that's something that again that can happen within the community there are many resources but it really is sometimes a matter of just connecting folks with those resources but again it does begin with compassion it begins with awareness and begins with the desire to help those kids heal i would just say being small so helpful because we're the same way we get to we get to partner with community organizations all the time and so that part is just so helpful um and the other thing about being small is i think we know everyone in the room and so there isn't the mystery uh of a large school or a large school district i mean so so i just think the beauty of being small really does allow you to know kids and families and we have this ability to pivot when we need so so that's the thing that i think i get most excited about is just how nimble we are this is what most of my work is so for me it's really about helping parents recognize their trauma and how that shows up in their relationships with their kids but also having that that space and that compassion but that grace as their kids are going through things to recognize like this is something that you know should not have to be just dealt with but how do we create space for them to not only voice their whatever that is that they're dealing with but also to heal so there's a lot of healing work a lot of restoration you know we repair after we cause harm so having conversations with parents about what that looks like what that feels like how to move through that for them but also to pass those skills on to their kids so that they're able to recognize when they cause harm what that looks like feels like sounds like to other people and how they can repair that harm that's all a part of the work that we do with parents and with our students yes that was willing to down even uh um sure so so this is a great question so the question is is you know we see this beautiful work we see it mobilizing and growing how do we then connect it to the policy space how do we influence and advocate within the policy space so i will say that this is a question that's near and dear to our hearts at the vela education fund we are a 501c3 charitable organization and so our work is is investing on the programmatic side that said we are encouraged when we see favorable policies emerging and we see it happening increasingly across our country so things like policies that will enable students to maybe have part of their education inside a traditional environment and part of their education outside of traditional environments policies that will credential what happens in the out of school time right policies that liberalize how much time like their seat time requirements in a traditional classroom so if you allow more flexibility and freedom then you can allow education to be to be unbundled and then rebundled in new and different ways right and and to do that in a way that's responsive to to to the desires of of kids and their families who are are also self-directing so we see that um that there are questions around you know funding we spend a lot of money on education in the united states we really do so is there potential for that funding to be liberalized for it to be modernized to be more reflective of the way that we live today such that if you are unbundling and rebundling education that there's sufficient funds available to support all of these different opportunities so we see this as as ripe for possibility we we call on and hope that our policymakers will be more open-minded and more creative just as we've seen our innovators being so open-minded creative and fearless but i will say this so availa we believe that education needs to be transformed right and how can you do that well you can do that in system you can transform you can do that out of system you can transform but when you look at systems in general it is very rare that they will transform themselves without the emergence of alternatives that shine a light and show the way and so we are hoping that you know we've got this network of 1300 right who are doing just that they are shining a light they are showing the way they are offering they are this distributed web of local sort of organically grown locally responsive education innovators together they can accomplish anything but it's going to be this this effort of small independent folks who are doing it on the ground that gets us there so we want to see the policy environment become more favorable we think it will but it won't happen unless there's support for the folks who are doing amazing things yes um so as i was listening to you all talk about the types of experiences that you were creating for children and for parents one of the things that you know kept coming up in my mind is that you all are cultivating children's identity as learners identity as readers which is very different from i read or i learned because of some external force or assignment or whatever it is and so i mean i know the work that i do with barbershop books you know we're intentionally thinking about how do we cultivate the reading identity of children but i would love to hear a little bit about if or how identity and not identity and just you know i'm a certain ethnicity or something like that but identity as a learner how has that shaped the content and the kind of instructional strategies that you all have used so i'm an unschooling mom right which means we don't have a set curriculum so all of the learning that takes place is shaped by my learners it's shaped by my kids so that their identity is continuing to develop and they get to learn based on what is showing up for them and their interest in that moment so right now my youngest daughter is into well all my kids are gamers right so they're all gaming but she is now into like fashion and clothes so she plays a lot of games where she's creating different characters and she's creating their designs and she's cutting up clothes in the house which you know had to let that go because i'm like really but i'm just watching that develop and it's not me saying oh you like this so now go do these things but i'm watching and i'm seeing how can i support and as as this is developing it's the same thing with my other kids so i think it's that that shift from me thinking especially as an educator this was really hard for me to let go of but me thinking that i had to give them their identity right like oh i know what it is i figured out you showed me this one thing and now you are this type of learner or this type of kid so i'm going to put you on this path to do all of these things to make you be great at this thing versus keep showing me what you need moment to moment and i can come alongside you and see how i can support that which means i don't have to be in control all the time which is not what we are often praised for as educators right like how well can you control these kids and get them to do what you want to do to be able to let that go and say you have the autonomy to develop how you see fit and i can support you in that it's a totally different dynamic um yeah yeah i don't think i can answer that better than that um and for me um the big thing i'm trying to make sure we're instilling in our kids along with identity because i mean i do think this idea of so they're all latino kids and i think that's really important that they kind of understand that um but really to me it's it's um character and this idea of really having a growth mindset on the character strength and so um really be an asset based on your strengths and so in other words if these are your strengths let's make sure that you're utilizing those strengths to go forth and conquer the world as opposed to being like cool here are all your strengths let's work on these bottom five yeah i say forget the bottom five who cares about the bottom five you're never going to improve the bottom okay in general we don't focus on on our bottom five so much is let's really utilize our strengths um to change the world and so that's been something that's been really fun to kind of sit down with kids and say cool what do you think your strengths are and then as a community great hey community what do we all think his strengths are great like man you've got a ton of strengths how are you going to use those tomorrow to be more successful and i think if you were going to talk about and i'm going to bring it almost down a little bit further into the weeds for lack of a better word if we're talking about literature for example right it's exposure right it's exposing them because maybe they've never heard of phantom total which is like a halloween that's a book all because but they never heard about it and then and then like we had one kid that read and he was not now he loves reading well how did that start because he was exposed to a book that made him laugh out loud every time he opened up the page and now he's like i want to do this more so i think that's a part of it as well and so for us like for like for our ela classes that we've always incorporated literature in there and we want to give them a diversity of books that they're looking looking at every quarter and it's from authors you know so that they're seeing you know african-american art authors they're they're they're reading you know latino artists they're really they're reading a whole they're reading many different things and then they're going to latch on to something that they love and then they get to choose the end quarter project and it's like it's what you do do something with it that you love and they'll and they and allowing them that creativity to kind of do with it what they want to express it the way they want to express it so yeah i mean if we believe if we truly believe in change from the bottom up versus centrally determined from the top down that means believing in people that means believing that every every person every child every student has a gift and we've got to come alongside and empower them to find their gift and pursue it on their terms versus solving for the student and telling them what they need to be and that's a big shift that's a that's a mind shift it's a mind shift as it relates to education it's a mind shift as it relates to philanthropy and so we've got to accept that people are truly talented and we're here to enable them i think you just said something that was awesome um telling them and letting them know that they're truly talented i think what happens is that sometimes we're not you know your words are powerful and when you tell a kid that they're an awesome reader and that they're amazing if they're excellent then they'll start to believe it and then they'll start to act that out so i think it's you're speaking that into them and then you're letting them kind of just oh i really am pretty amazing you know and and i think a lot of that comes out of what we tell the kids so i agree yes um i'd love to know what bayla and um organizations are doing in terms of helping and veil of funding programs that speak more towards the betterment of teachers i mean if the pandemic and so my heart really goes out to teachers in the sense that you know come to conferences come to all these pds great question so so the question is what is veyla doing to support teachers through this through this effort how does our support help teachers and how how are you engaged in helping teachers and um what we have found so velas vela invests on a trust basis meaning that we invest um it's it's essentially fast cash grants to applicants and so our investment criteria are relatively limited we essentially need to know what applicants would like to do with the funding how are they going to reimagine learning in non-traditional ways so that it's consistent with the charitable purpose however beyond that it's wide open it's almost entirely unrestricted and so what we've seen we do ask some questions when applicants complete their form we ask them you know how do you identify yourself as an entrepreneur as an educator as a family as a community member and about 30 percent of vela grantees actually identify first primarily as teachers so we support a lot of folks who you know at their core they see themselves as educators now what they do with the funding is um it follows what their goals are right and so we give just a lot of latitude and a lot of freedom to accomplish those goals oh one minute so i can't get kicked out so i personally i still because i have been in this education space and i've trained a lot of teachers so i still am friends with them and i'm sharing my story and being honest and saying if you know that what you are doing every single day is not bringing you joy and it's harming kids it's not helping kids you don't have to do that so i am pointing a lot of people to other opportunities to say hey that thing that you know you really want to do but someone is stopping you from doing it there's a way to do this thing and there are funding opportunities that are that will allow you to wake up and enjoy what you're doing and not feeling like you're wasting your time or that you can't be well because you have to make sure that you're doing these things that you're not even sure are really helping the kids in the long run so i'm like right see and i'm with her yeah i'm kind of i'm with her on that one and so i'm glad we only have a minute so they don't totally kick us out of here but the price see and so my heart goes out to you my heart really does and and the reason it does is because i'm gonna say this and i can't clean it up because the system is broken and you are doing your very best in a system that is not working it's hard it's hard so what do you do with that come on over here and help us build this other yeah from the ground okay so so this um this closes our our session i'd like to invite everyone to a vela education fund happy hour tonight it's from five until seven there's a flyer at your seat if you didn't receive a flyer there there will be some at the back uh it's at a place called upstairs on caroline um i'd like for our vela team members to all wave [Music] come talk to us and feel free to visit www.velaedfun.org sign up for our newsletter you will be the first to know when grant windows which are opening frequently when they are open and you can apply so thank you for joining us today [Music]