Forefront Chatbots

In 2016, Black workers held 10% of “good jobs”, those that pay family-sustaining earnings, and Latino workers held 13% in comparison to Caucasian workers who held 77%. Without equitable access to “good jobs”, we leave young People of Color (POC) behind. Forefront is democratizing access to jobs for young POC through low-barrier, flexible technology that allows them to gain new skills, build social capital and identify a stable career path that they love - all through the power of texting and AI. 

The reality of the digital gap includes lack of access to internet and hardware for young POC and extends to environments that aren’t safe or conducive to productivity. By providing asynchronous work-based learning opportunities, we allow youth to pursue meaningful careers that help them achieve upward mobility.

Youth across the country (and soon around the world) can text/message our bots like Carmen AI for 24/7/365 career support. 

Prior to COVID-19, the New York young adult unemployment rate was 20.7% for 16 to 19-year-olds and 11.6% for 20 to 24-year-olds. This is a troubling statistic particularly for those whose survival relies heavily on employment. As a result of the pandemic, one-third of 18 to 24-year-olds lost their jobs, which is higher than the city’s job loss rate of 26%. 

Young people remain vulnerable. Those born between 1996-2010, also known as Generation Z (Gen-Z), are now the most racially and ethnically diverse group, with 48% of them being people of color. 

Workforce development and skill-training programs are critical in closing the gap for underserved populations and increase their chances of landing better jobs. However, the transition to remote teaching and learning is not meeting all of Gen-Z’s needs and will negatively impact their educational and career progress. Early work experience and access to resources for young people are critical. If schools, youth nonprofits, and employers do not have the culturally relevant virtual tools in place to prepare young adults to enter an increasingly competitive labor market, an entire generation will be left behind. 

*JobsFirstNYC Working Paper

Forefront provides career training, meaningful employment, and social capital - powered by chatbots and text-messaging. Think of us as the Alexa or Siri for the education and workforce ecosystem. Our chatbots, like Carmen and Lee, provide personalized and culturally-relevant training and resources via text or online messaging meeting young people where they are - anywhere, anytime. We are a low-commitment, low-barrier virtual solution for young people, especially underserved populations, who are already overwhelmed with socio-emotional stress.

In early March we launched our Beta platform, Carmen AI. Carmen helps young people navigate the job search from mock interviews to cover letters via a text-message conversation. Carmen speaks both Spanish and English and understands cultural references. We have success stories like the one of Maria's, a first-generation college student, who was unsure how to approach her desired career as a museum curator in the midst of the COVID shut-downs. Carmen connected her to a start-up internship that combined her passion for the arts with diversity & inclusion in tech. Regina continues to reach out to Carmen for advice, sometimes at 1:00 AM. 

Forefront is committed to ensuring youth of color have equitable access to education and career resources. By 2025, 65% of jobs in the U.S. will require some postsecondary education, training, or credential – up from 28% of jobs in the 1970s. To be successful, we will prepare our youth for the modern workforce, equipping them with everything they need to thrive in their chosen sector. 

We seek to increase training quality, job placement, wages, retention, and promotion rates. Our accessible technology looks to support the socio-emotional wellbeing and sense of belonging for youth of color. Leveraging ever-evolving AI and remaining flexible is at the core of this success. Our overall vision is to create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable labor market where workplaces and schools are spaces where youth of color feel seen, heard, and valued. 

Success is Black and Latinx youth having access to all they need to enter and succeed in a highly competitive, and traditionally difficult job market, with the click of a button. The creation of access, financial mobility, and representation for communities of color will be beneficial to society as a whole leading to an increase of diversity in cross-sector U.S. leadership.

The post-COVID job market is expected to be extremely competitive, leaving young people of color behind. This is not a new challenge, nationwide, Black and Latinx are 3 to 6 times more likely to be disconnected than their peers.

Our chatbots enable young people to make informed decisions about which pathways and jobs best suit them, including the opportunity to explore non-degree pathways to employment. We also increase access to high-quality skill-building and training opportunities. Our approach will shape the interactions that youth of color have with the hiring process, and add a level of transparency, flexibility, and fairness. 

Full-Time: 3 

Contractors: 1 

Interns (20-30 hours): 1-2 during Winter and Spring (4 - 6  during the Summer)

In 2013, I co-founded Forefront as a first-year student at Babson College and committed my entire professional career to it. Forefront started as a diversity training consultancy facilitating in-person implicit bias training and dialogues about race and gender. The work was important, necessary, and fruitful, but required a mixture of deeply personal and emotional labor and consistent and rigorous client acquisition work. At our capacity burn out was unavoidable but giving up was never an option, so we evolved to keep the dream alive. We pivoted to provide programs for youth of color, realizing we could have the same impact at an earlier stage of workforce development. DEI is at the center of our work, and we walk the talk internally from our hiring practices to fostering an equitable culture. We hire young people to help us build our platform and content, as their input is crucial to our impact. 

The career exploration and development space for K-12 and postsecondary education is part of a massive workforce development ecosystem. Our technology-based model complements, augments, and optimizes existing initiatives across city and state lines for scale and bigger impact. We see our role as a collaborator with tech-oriented projects that have geographic focus, and/or high-touch curriculum like Unite LA and YouthForce NOLA who provide geographic-based state of the art job readiness programs for young adults. We identify key players like Nepris, Couragion, and World of Work, all K-12 tech platforms that provide industry exposure and access to role models. 

Our unique contribution to this ecosystem lies at the core of our focus: providing 1-1 personalized career coaching paired with socio-emotional support - critical to youth of color success. This unique contribution that the ecosystem currently lacks positions us perfectly for success and scale in collaboration with this constellation of workforce development initiatives. 

The pandemic is causing young adults to face greater competition for jobs, internships, and work-based learning. For example, Martin, who feared his associate degree from a community college might limit his career options in tech, was connected to mentors in companies like Twilio and Facebook and receives career readiness advice regularly. A tool like Carmen AI can help bridge the gap by providing personalized resources to even the playing field. AI, like the job market, is ever-evolving. 

AI is a growing trend helping us automate and optimize time-consuming manual processes. AI is helping us collect data that allows us to deliver personalized services. Conversational AI, in particular, uses messaging apps, speech-based assistants, and chatbots to communicate digitally at scale. 7 out of 10 Gen-Zs prefer to interact mostly by messages than in person. We are taking advantage of a proven technology used in customer service and bringing it to the education and workforce space where social anxiety is prominent and virtual access is rampant. 

During the COVID crisis, organizations that work with youth had to transition their initiatives online overnight. They’ve had to become experts in new areas like physical and mental health, remote work, and virtual learning. This is challenging and strenuous work for individuals who have work responsibilities scheduled 9-5 and additional duties at home. AI can help bridge this knowledge, time, and digital gap as the world transitions to virtual work life.

By leveraging the same technology that tells us where the best ravioli in St. Louis is to help our young people get coaching and support, we help bridge the gap to map in-demand skills and careers for young adults, as they get ready to enter an ultra competitive labor market. 

We use chatbots in our online stores to reach customer service or with our banks to get our updated financial balance. We use bots when we call our airlines to reschedule a flight or track our suitcases. Conversational AI is making our everyday lives more efficient; it is time we use it to close real inequities in our communities around education and employment. 

When this vision is realized, we will have created a world where youth of color have equal access to social capital and meaningful employment. This means no more wealth gap where white households have 13 times the wealth of Black households and 10 times that of Latino households. The path to higher wages and financial freedom will stretch ripple effects beyond the “traditional” workforce and would create a more fair criminal justice system where one in three black males born today (and one in 6 Latino males) would go to work, and not prison. 

The ripples effects of young POC’s access to health benefits and coverage, as a result of employment, would seep deeper into the healthcare system, creating a world in which Black pregnant women do not fear the death of their child at birth (current infant mortality rate of Black mothers is 11 per 1,000 live births, double that of Whites). It would also mean less POC people died of COVID-19, because they had proper treatment, access to health care, and vaccines. The ripple effects are endless because employment paired with social capital is the key to financial freedom, healthcare access, housing, food, education, and much more. 

By January 2022, we will have supported at least 5,000 young POC from low-income backgrounds, with 80% of them landing a good job within 6-months of using our platform. At least 75% of our young people will be connected to 1-1 mentor relationships across multiple industries. 100% of our young people will receive at least 60 minutes of career support, which is more than the standard 20 minutes of support a student receives in our public schools during their entire education. 

Community benefit will be demonstrated through the impact on young people like Michael, who shared the following from his experience with our Carmen AI: "As someone looking to start a new career in Software Engineering, Carmen AI has been a huge blessing. Carmen has helped me improve my resume and LinkedIn profiles, prepare for interviews, and has even done some networking on my behalf by introducing me to new contacts in my desired field. Thanks to her, I got my first internship, and hopefully soon she'll help me land my first job!  I'm grateful for her help with advancing my career prospects.”

In the next five years, we can reach millions with personalized career support powered by chatbots and text-messaging. To measure impact, we will track access to meaningful employment within 6 months of receiving support from our platform as well as the number of mentoring hours provided and the number of referrals received to expand social capital. Identifying correlations to job placement, access and opportunity are critical. 

Raising capital as an Afro-Latina CEO is statistically challenging. Lack of capital hinders technical development, and given that we are using AI, we are as strong as our data and ability to interpret it. There are also limitations in the human capital side of things, if we don't have the capital to cover staff salaries and expansion. 

Having said this, we are a lean and resilient team that is able to build win-win relationships with our partners. We know how to allocate resources and get things done. Historically, we haven't let these barriers get in the way, and that won't change anytime soon. 

As a product of teenage love, my early childhood consisted of separation and abandonment. Like many children of immigrants, I was left at the care of my grandparents while my mother pursued a better life and opportunity in the United States. At the age of 11, I reunited with my mother in St. Louis and joined my new family - a stepfather and younger brother. At 14, after only speaking English for three years, I represented Missouri in the National Spelling Bee. I was featured in the media as ‘Immigrant of the Day’ while simultaneously receiving xenophobic comments telling me to “go back to my country”. I learned early on that I was in a box and that my lived experiences, while very real to me, to some were stigmas. This realization shaped my commitment to creating a world in which every young person feels seen, heard, and valued. Resilience and adaptability are part of my DNA. 

Fellowships, competitions, accelerators focused on underrepresented founders have been a great resource for our team, and we are so grateful to the funders who have been there with us since day 1. There are also mentors and advisors who have been life-changing for us, and we are excited to build more relationships with leaders in this network. At the end of the day, entrepreneurs of color need sponsors who will champion them and get them in the room, and this is why so important for us to join communities like this one. 

To measure engagement, we will use indicators like number of active minutes in our platform, number of interactions with our career specialists, number of messages sent to our bots, and net promoter score. To measure impact, we will track access to meaningful employment within 6 months of receiving support from our platform as well as the number of mentoring hours provided and the number of referrals received to expand social capital. Identifying correlations to job placement, access and opportunity will be critical at this stage.

Additionally, we will evaluate student intention to pursue an in-demand/mid-to-high wage occupation pre- and post- intervention. Lastly, we will measure the % of students that agree our platform is a helpful way to learn and practice important job skills, and connect to mentors and employment. This includes indicators like the aggregate total income students receive due to our support and the training dollars saved. 

As first-generation college students, we sought to create a better future and obtain prestigious jobs. However, through our internships in top companies, we began to feel like we did not belong.

Yulkendy: In July of 2016, while working in a Boston consulting firm, I found out about Alton Sterling. I started to cry at the office, but I had no one to talk to as the only black person there. There was no outlet for me to talk about what I was feeling.

 Josuel: While at Goldman, I would come back to work on Mondays and listen to my colleagues tell stories about their weekends at the Hamptons while I spent mine in Corona, Queens. I felt isolated on Wall Street as a low-income Dominican male.

We both "dropped out" of Corporate America when we should not have to. Forefront is our way of designing the workplaces we needed ourselves when our only dream was to advance in the corporate sector and give back to our immigrant families who are often left out of the American Dream.

Our Lead Engineer, Clynton Caines, joined us full-time this January and is excited to be part of the team due to his own experiences as a Black engineer trying to advance in the tech sector. 

Between our current AI tech-centered initiative and the previous diversity training work with over 20 clients including Boston Public Schools (BPS) and SAP we have seen a range of impact. With BPS, our programming led to three times the increase in confidence levels of Black and Latinx 11th and 12th graders. One affirmed: “It helped me see how much of a voice I had”. One of our anchor clients SAP worked with us for two years and our contract scaled to five cities (Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle). Employees of color in our programs report a four times increase in their sense of belonging at work. One of the employees shared, “I feel more confident at being able to engage with my managers on self-advocacy & finding ways to voice my needs to the organization.” Here is a video with additional testimonials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbP51TOcxqI. 

This year we are focusing on the launch of the Forefront Fellowship and piloting our sales. The Forefront Fellowship (FF) is an 8-week virtual program accessible to 100 low-income students in community college who identify as Black and/or Latinx. Fellows will have access to our platform, corporate partner mentors and a ‘learning from home’ kit that includes a mobile hotspot and iPad. 

We have identified programmatic, social impact and financial milestones as we focus on two core activities, piloting sales and the Inaugural Forefront Fellowship (FF). Our FF milestones include the launch of the application in January 2021, the recruitment of 100 fellows, and the engagement of employers in our ecosystem as sponsors (investing $25k - $75k). 

Beyond the FF, we license our software to organizations (employers, schools, and nonprofit organizations) that conduct programs for our demographic of young people. We provide a plug-and-play chatbot including a custom name, avatar, and script, giving us the ability to turn any educational and career development curriculum into a seamless, mobile, virtual learning experience. For our pilots, we aim to identify 7-10 early customers as initial case studies. 

Our Social Impact milestones consist of increasing youth served from 100 young POC to 1,000 young POC. We aim to achieve a job placement rate of 90% and create 1,100 mentor relationships through the FF. Our greatest financial milestone is meeting our revenue goal of $250,000 through securing 10 paid pilots by the end of 2021 and launching the Forefront Fellowship model. 

We are a for-profit social impact company, which means our customers are the main driver of our sustainability. We are piloting a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, which would allow us to scale with the numbers of users in our platform on a monthly or annual basis. 

The Forefront Fellowship (FF) allows us to have an anchor revenue driver as well as massive community impact, since we can grow from 100 Fellows to a 1,000, and soon after 5,000 or more, since it is a completely virtual program run over text-message and other messaging platforms. As we grow, we can incentivize bigger sponsorship dollars. Through the FF, we can also attract philanthropic donations which increases our pool of potential partners. 

Last but not least, we will continue to apply for grants which allows us to expand our capacity and grow as a team. We might potentially raise a seed round between $750k - $1M if we are able to achieve $12,000 in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) in 2021. 

Forefront has received financial support in different ranges: 

• $50,000 and higher: Techstars Impact by Cox Enterprises, OHUB,  and Arch Grants 

• $20,000-$40,000: Camelback Ventures, Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital Pitch Competition, and 757 Accelerate.

• $1,000-$15,000: Resolution Project, First Act Fund, 4.0 Schools, India Ideas Business Competition, Anita Borg Institute, Babson BETA Competition, Smarter in the City, Peace First, and Titan Generator.

We’ve received organizational support from LearnLaunch & ETS, Village Capital, and Nasdaq Milestone Makers and recognition from The Clinton Global Initiative and 2019 Fast Company World Changing Idea.

We are raising $100k-$250k in additional capital for product development and staff salaries by Q1 of 2021. We prefer a traditional grant vehicle, but we are open to convertible note or straight equity. With this Future of Work Challenge, we would be able to utilize the funding to serve up to an anticipated 1 million displaced workers through a validation pilot. This is a huge opportunity for our team to test our intervention for massive impact, learn from experts in the innovative US Workforce Board, and accelerate our product development. 

Our company's current burnrate is at $15k per month. This totals to $180,000 in estimated expenses for 2021. 

We are excited by organizations such as Morgridge Family Foundation, New Profit, and MIT Solve who are intentionally looking to fund more underrepresented founders. Capital is a significant barrier for our team. We don't have access to a family & friends round, so a $100,000 grant from this competition would allow us to bridge the gap. We are also really good at maximizing capital, so this investment will take us a long way in our product development. 

The wrap around support and specialized network of experts is crucial. We are mission and impact first, and these challenges around the future of work are urgent and timely. We are applying to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US challenge, because we will get to build relationships with amazing and intelligent people that really care about solving these problems. We are sponges, and we are able to adapt and learn quickly, and that's why this is really a great platform for out team. 

We are most excited to work together on the validation pilots and monitoring /evaluation piece. We realize that a combination of powerful impact metrics and a sustainable business model are the key to success. We look forward to partnering with the core team, other Challenge Winners, and the network of coaches and advisors to build a robust pilot plan that sets the foundation for massive scale. 

We are complementing a vast ecosystem of workforce development initiatives (Summer Youth Employment Program), nonprofits (YearUp), and youth programs (Boys & Girls Clubs), who are already doing great work to support young people around the clock. Our technology simply helps them do their job efficiently while making sure that they are catering to every type of young person. Additionally, this approach is creating access and bringing forth trailblazing, tech-forward initiatives to sectors that were hesitant or have been known to be slower in their transition to tech.