Essential City

Human inequality is a problem of our lifetime.In America,socioeconomic inequality is racial inequality with the highest density of homeless individuals being people of color.In our current system,we treat homelessness as a permanent state in need of a permanent solution.When in fact,the largest contributions to homeless are from traumatic events like eviction,job loss, and financial hardship.This is a transitionary state in need of a supportive solution.The homeless population is our largest human capital opportunity for the future of our cities. 

We believe that resumes and traditional education models create a barrier of access. Essential City creates equitable pathways to become middle class. We simplify the education model for middle skill careers through blending deep technology,real world projects and an equitable pathway into on-the-job training programs.Knowing that middle skill careers are 49% of jobs in America and by 2025 will have 29% job scarcity,we have the opportunity to positively change lives. 

There are over 500,000 homeless individuals in America.Each homeless individual is costing cities about 44 Billion a year.Once a person is homeless, their Maslow's hierarchy of needs is unfulfilled creating more visible issues such drug abuse, crime, and incarceration.This rate is only exponentially growing with economic uncertainty, global pandemics, and acceleration of technology. 

In the first two years, our solution is tackling the homeless population through a holistic solution that focuses on being productive essential tax paying citizens of their cities.We do this by partnering with social workers, financial coaches, and subject matter experts in building a self contained employment program that's driven on the outcome of building a stable life and creating generational wealth. 

Government partners are focusing on solving the symptoms of homelessness by focusing on housing first permanent strategies.In the longterm, this solution does not focus on the core issue, the lack of economic opportunity.Utah was the champion of housing first strategies.It was recently proven that this solution does not work alone.We believe in housing for the homeless.However, if we truly want to make an impact we need to focus on building equitable pathways to create jobs that utilize technology to accelerate learning and recruitment. 

Essential City reimagines education to meet the needs of the homeless. We simplify the obstacles of education and recruitment to help participants  gain skills to find a permanent employment. Our education platform is mobile first which makes the content accessible. In addition, we utilize AR to create an immersive skill based trainings aligned to real world projects. Once completed, our participants are connected to employers where they transition to on-the-job training and apprenticeship programs. 

Technology has created access to transform employment. 65% of the homeless population has access to cellphones. And research has shown that immersive AR training can accelerate learning. Our mobile platform builds on solving the complex problems of an unserved population that need technology and hope to transition their lives to stability. 

The first phase of our solution serves the homeless individual population in urban cities.We are partnering with homeless non-profits,and government partners in developing pilots to best understand the homeless individuals needs and barriers of entry before using our product. We are focused on building with organization to optimize the experience. 

In our early conversations,we found that exposure to jobs and creating more inclusive pathways where our users feel 'welcomed, belong and understood' were critical to address their needs and to support them into work.Our goal is focused in giving them grounding and stability through our partnerships and products so that we can address the needs for them to transition back into the workforce.There is a high desire to participate in middle skill jobs but traditional education pathways block our users in participating in their dreams. We have an inclusive approach on qualifying our participants through our mobile platform focusing on learning core competencies that simplify the education process and accelerate the time to be hired.Our sole mission is to remove barriers of entry to get a job by focusing on outcomes in a timely matter.The homeless population needs help immediately and they don't have the luxury of traditional pathways. 

Our vision for Essential City is to create new and simplified pathways for individuals to get hired for stable middle-skill jobs and be on a trajectory to build wealth to become middle class. We're focusing on the homeless and unemployed population which the largest human capital population in need of stable work. Our current systems are providing this population government funding but not concrete pathways for them to transition back into work and be essential tax citizens. We'd like to transition them from economic debt to opportunity.Our solution creates equitable and simplified pathways to get  work and build wealth.

Currently, we have three people working on Essential City. All are full time.

Our goal is to be a workforce that is reflective of the diversity of America. Our current team is diverse women-led organization that comes from different racial backgrounds (black, white, and asian), geographical locations (mid-west, west coast), and genders/sexualities. 

We understand that racial inequality is a human inequality. Our impact is to build an organization that is focused on the diversity of our organization, building belonging with others to then rebuild a workforce focused on equitable pathways to be middle class in America. Our MOAT is diversity and building an inclusive community for our organization and users. 

We are developing a new workforce and education pathway for the underserved homeless individual population. This is an innovative solution that creates economic development in our urban cities through establishing avenues to create work for human capital in need of help to transition their lives into stable work. There is no other organization that utilizes deep technology and partnerships to build a new simplified model for homeless individuals to gain middle-skill work. Government partners are focused on programs that focus on permanent shelter. We are focused on getting them into a stable life through employment. 

The two core technologies for our solution is augmented reality and artificial intelligence. 

We are developing a mobile friendly platform to simplify and accelerate learning for our learners to expose them to middle-skill labor. Through utilizing Augmented Reality, we can give our learners immersive experiences based on tools, skills, and spatial environments to build foundational core-competencies to get them ready for a real life project. This maximizes the time people have while learning skills to be a candidate for an on-the-job training program which are typically paid and lead to full-time. 

We also hope this benefits the employer partner. By utilizing A.I, we can share back data to aggregate what trainings/skills work to better learning and development for the partner as real-time actionable feedback. This helps the employer also build better on-the-job trainings programs overtime for the jobs as it relates to on-boarding. 

By utilizing these technologies, our hope is to create a platform where we are creating a new and inclusive pathway for learners to get jobs in trade and also a way to continue life-long skills training to future proof their jobs with technology. 

There's research that AR is being used successfully as an emerging technology in the military for machine and combat training. It accelerated the pace of learning because learners are able to transition learning into the real world much quicker through AR. 

For example," U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) that are actively researching the potential of augmented reality technology." And have developed a,"system is mounted to the helmet the same way the goggles are and can operate during both night and day. So, TAR  (tactical augmented reality)basically replaces the typical handheld GPS device and goggles." (link) 

Most of the jobs we will be focused in trade industries like construction, and real-estate maintenance. We can utilize proven learnings from the military to commercialize into our product offering for middle skills labor to accelerated the pace of learning to hire in an equitable environment. 

Essential City's theory of change is if we can simplify the financial and education barriers to teach the most impacted by economic distressed experiences, homeless, unemployed and transition into middle skill work (trade jobs to start), we can rebuild the middle-class in America. We want to change the notion of being 'homeless', ' out of work', 'unemployed' as temporary states with more equitable and accessible ways to get work quickly. Our Essential City mobile platform, utilizes a digital medium that low income individuals have the most digital access to a phone. With that experience, we want to leapfrog training through Augmented Reality which incorporates project-based, and embodied learning into the interface so that we can get people employed quickly.  

Short-term, this will provide the homeless population with work and exposure to get hired for a stable job. This in turn will give financial literacy to get a stable place they can live for more than a day, and on a trajectory to be seen as a tax paying member of their city. 

Mid-term, through our platform we hope to future-proof human capital trade jobs by creating a place where trade workers can get hired and get on-going learning and development as technology evolves through the blended use of AR and AI. It creates a two-sided market where our users can get skills to get hired and employer partners can evolve the core-competencies of work through real-world projects.  If we can do this short-term and mid-term, we can transition trade skills with technology rather than fearing technology automation. 

Long-term, we have the capacity to build a new middle-skills workforce that is built with technology and stabilize employment for the middle-class. If we are able to do this through our platform, we have the opportunity to build a new educational pathway to build generational wealth for our users. 

Our goal within the next year is to prove our business model by partnering with 2 local city partners and employee partners to test with 1-3k homeless individual participants in our platform. The first half of the year, we will secure real-world projects from employers then in parallel build our AR and AI platform. Our north star is focused on outcomes in getting our users real-world projects, personalize learning styles, and transitioning them into on-the-job training programs with our employee partners. In our second year we can understand indirect and induced economic impact like saving our government partners funds to reallocate community social services. Directly, our impact can help our participants rebuild hope, transition back into the workforce, and build a stable life. 

In five years, we will have our product at scale and impact over 100,000 homeless and unemployed individuals getting them hired and building a stable life. In addition, we have over 100+ real world projects that transition to on-the-job training programs for employers to hire our users fast and more qualified that any other platform.Through the use of our technology, we have the capacity to future forecast skills for our users and have built out continuous learning and development programs on our platform to ensure they keep their jobs as their skills are evolving with technology. We've become the complementary training platform of work for the EDD to get the unemployed population hired fast through creating an equitable pathways to transition and build skills for middle-skill jobs. 

We currently have financial and market barriers that might limit our impact. 

Here they are listed below: 

1. Financial Barriers - Currently we have three co-founders are working on Essential City. With financial backing, we can build out a team of programmers, instructional designers, and 3D artists to build out our solution. 

2. Market Barriers - We understand our wedge is in our government and employer partners. If we can build trust with them, we can scale our mission of increasing middle-skill work. However, we acknowledge that we have to reframe the current government strategies when it comes to the homeless population. Government partners are focused on housing first (HomeKey Program) and we want to create a holistic solution with them focused on employment. In our current economic climate, we want to change the landscape of being homeless from permanent to transitional. If we do it, we can change lives and save the government money. 

Financial Barriers - We are pursuing grants to increase our runway to build a team for our company. We are particularly excited about MIT Solve as this will significantly accelerate our ability to impact the homeless and unemployment population. It is also signal to investors the credibility of our business and engage government partners. 

Market Barriers - In our first pilot, we are partnering with local non-profits to help qualify homeless individuals into our program. This creates a potential avenue to work with government partners that speaks to the impact and demand of our product. We are navigating government partner discussions directly and also through leveraging local non-profits to signal the importance of Essential City's mission. We understand government partnerships are complex so we're navigating these relationships through multiple data-points. 

Data we would like to get: 

1. On-boarding correlation of our users as we build their profiles, gain their interest, and utilize AI to determine potential real-world projects 

2. # of users who get full time jobs through Essential City

3. % of Employee Partners who continue to employee Essential City Members 

4. % of Essential City Members who move out of government support housing 

Our team are well suited to solve the problem of human inequality for three main reasons: (1) we're seasoned operators and leaders in education, technology, and supply chain/manufacturing (2) team members have worked at successful high-growth education startups (ex: General Assembly) as founding team members building a new model for education for the digital skills economy and a team member has built out a middle-skill initiative training incarcerated individuals with HVAC skills in the state of Kansas (3) our team also has lived experiences living in low income households, being underrepresented minorities at work, and being homeless.

We have the knowledge and experience to solve the complex problem of creating new pathways for a underserved population. In addition, we're also very passionate about rebuilding the middle-class in America by creating new education pathways to jobs. We believe that education is the bedrock of economic opportunity and would like to create more inclusive ways to education to be shared to all. 

We are in conversations with the City of Oakland and Los Angeles to build our solution with the city so that it can impact the homeless and unemployed populations. 

In addition, we have partnerships with real estate developers (ex: elevating properties) to build real-world projects and workforce development programs to simplify the pathway for on-the-job training programs. As well as non-profit organizations (ex:new earth life) in cities who work directly with the homeless population to help qualify leads. 

In creating a new education pathway for homeless population, we are also creating a new system where our partners are working with each other in a new way through our platform so that we can evolve human capital skills as the technology evolves. 

Business model: 

Outcome - To create jobs for the unemployed population

Our Product - Mobile AR/AI platform that simplifies education pathways to get hired. We are focused on real-world projects, embodied, personalized, and project based learning to ensure that our members get qualified into on-the-job training programs. 

Why Mobile? Essential City is creating inclusive digital platform. Mobile is an accessible solution for our customers with 65% of homeless individuals having access to phone. 

Process: We will on-board our users to our mobile platform through them creating a profile. Users select real world projects. Once finished, our employer partner can see 'talent pipeline page', invite for an interview. 

In the first two years, will focus on the user journey of real-world projects to on-job-training programs. After two years, we will scale continuous learning for middle skill jobs to create education pathways for skills to evolve with employer businesses and technology.

Key Customers - 

Government Partners need new solutions to solve the exponential rate of homelessness in their cities.This could reduce chronic homelessness and a reallocate government spending long-term. 

Employers who are looking to hire middle-skill talent and are in need of building their pipeline for on-demand jobs.We reduce recruitment costs. 

Users - 

Homeless & Unemployed Individuals who are looking to find work and might not have a traditional college education. Highest causes of homelessness are due to financial hardship, eviction, and loss of job. We provide this population equitable pathways to find a job. 

Our path to financial sustainability will be a blend of connecting with aligned partners for grants, selling products/services, and raising investment capital. In our first two years, we are focused in building a product aligned to our customers getting jobs and building the right partnerships to scale our platform for impact. That will mean that we will need to accrue a financial runway mostly through grants and private investment capital so that we can build the right team, product, and partners. 

Our growth targets for the first two years will be 10,000 individuals, three to five years, 100,000 individuals then after five years millions of individuals a year. 

In five years through our focus in product market fit and building trusted and reliable relationships with our partners, we can then transition to scale which will lead financial sustainability. Our goal is to utilize the relationships to gain access to state government partners and have our platform to be the complement training partner for the employment development department (EDD). Our product will be at a place to scale to millions of users and we can utilize our partnerships to scale our outcomes for middle-skill jobs. 

We have not raised funds yet. 

Our first pilots will be Q1 2021. 

We are hoping to raise $250,000 in funds to build the technology with the launch of our pilots, build our AR and AI mobile product, and build our team. 

We're primarily seeking funding through grants and private funding.  

Our estimated expenses for 2021 will be around 500k to build a team and product. We are working decentralized and remote so we will not have expenses when it comes to having a physical office. 

Here are some top-line estimated expenses: 

1. Technology, Product & Infrastructure - $30,000 - $45,000 (includes hiring a 3D artist to build out the spatial environment for our product)

2. Operations - Remote and operations tools - $5,000

3. People - key hires to build product market fit - $175,000

4. Marketing and Partnerships - $25,000

We are applying to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment because we believe in our solution in creating new, simplified, and equitable education pathways for an underserved population - homeless and unemployment individuals. We want to create new beacon of hope to help this population transition into stability, become middle-class, and generate wealth. In our current landscape, there is an exponential rate of uncertainty, we are approaching an economic depression with millions of people are unemployed and homeless without a clear economic opportunity to get out of it. 

We believe that the density of the middle-class population is a global measurement of innovation. However, there is not a clear pathway to become middle class and there's complex barriers in place that effects access and inclusion for all. We believe that our solution at scale can help to simplify and create an equitable pathway to become middle class in America. 

With these barriers, we'd like the opportunity to be supported by the challenge partners to help us navigate government partnerships and utilize the MIT solve platform to amplify change. 

Our biggest in partnership opportunity is building our government partners. 

We're looking for potential board advisors who are passionate about our missions and could connect us with local city partners (short-term) and state partners (long-term). 

Our goal is to create 5 local city partnerships in 2 years so that we can help create our employment outcomes and company mission. 

Here's a list of organizations/people we'd like to partner with: 

1. We'd like to partner with Andrew Yang as he builds universal basic income (UBI) to see if we could incorporate Essential City with his initiatives. We believe this will help us scale a new definition of being middle-class in America. It's aligned as our long-term vision is to build easier pathways to generate generational wealth. 

2. We'd like to partner with organizations that are solving the essential problems of humanity (climate change, inequality, renewable energy) as we build new educational pathways to work. We believe that our employer partnerships and solving the problem of middle-skill work would be dependent in working with "fringe" organizations who are mission-aligned and who we can build up-skilling programs for middle skills labor. 

3. We'd like to partner with President-elect Biden who is hoping to tackle climate change the day he is inaugurated in office. We believe we can help solve climate change through workforce development solution to get people hired quickly by gaining core competencies. 

4. We'd like to partner with government partners who are looking to tackle the complexities of homelessness through innovative solutions. By focusing on aligned partners, we can accelerate our impact.