Open Avenues

One-fifth of all American jobs required significant expertise in a STEM field (NFS, 2014). STEM jobs that require less than a four-year degree pay about 10 percent higher wages than non-STEM jobs with the same educational requirements (Brookings, 2016). The current landscape of university/corporate partnership is bimodal with either large corporations engaging intensively with colleges to design training or superficial academic/corporate engagements for career services or guest lecturers. 

Open Avenues brings together universities, high-growth companies, and global talent to build an ecosystem that supports the growth and development of diverse students in STEM fields. We design our programs to maximize all the best practices for training students to be career-ready in STEM positions (OECD, 2016). Top global STEM professionals, who are our Global Talent Fellows, lead students in project-based learning. Students complete our programs with competencies in relevant skills that local SMEs need to grow. 

STEM jobs encompass a large number of positions in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. One-fifth of all American jobs required significant expertise in a STEM field in 2014 (NFS, 2014). Colleges nationwide have adopted company-sponsored training and certifications to match student learning to desired qualifications of these high-quality STEM positions (Soares, 2010). Unfortunately, small and medium high-growth STEM companies, specifically startups, are largely left out of these training programs. Outside of specific training programs, partnerships between academic institutions and employers are generally superficial (Opportunity America, 2020). Although the National Association for Colleges and Employers identify career-readiness competencies, these are often siloed to career service departments. 

Experiential learning—which involves students tackling relevant industry issues and learn in and outside the classroom—is fundamental to equip candidates to be competitive in the job market (WPI, 2019). Experiential learning is especially effective in retaining students from underrepresented socioeconomic backgrounds in STEM (Dagley, M., et al., 2015). However, traditional experiential learning--such as unpaid internships and extra-curricular activities--are often not feasible for low-wealth students. Many colleges have limited capacity to provide experiential learning alternatives to low-wealth students. Overall, there is considerable inequity in students’ exposure to high-quality experiential opportunities across academic institutions.  

Open Avenues brings together universities, high-growth companies, and global talent to build an ecosystem that supports the growth and development of diverse students in STEM fields. We design our programs to maximize all the best practices for training students to be career-ready in STEM (OECD, 2016). We partner with high-growth companies in various STEM fields through our Global Talent Fellowship. Global Talent Fellows are top global STEM professionals from our partner companies. Open Avenues hires these Fellows for 5 -8 hours per week to ensure deep engagement with students. Fellows receive leadership support, scope and launch industry-driven projects, and connect classroom STEM learning to real-world experiences. As a non-profit dedicated to advancing STEM education, our industry projects are competency-based; specifically, activities and learning processes align with the National Association for Colleges and Employers (NACE) competencies. NACE competencies are evidence-based and fielded with companies to ensure their relevance to STEM careers. Our programming integrates technology platforms (e.g. slack, github) widely used by small and medium businesses. At the same time, we give additional attention to confidence-building and networking skills, which are especially important for first-generation students. We integrate students' use of LinkedIn to network as part of our projects. 

Open Avenues programming prepares students to be competitive candidates for high-quality STEM jobs in high-growth small- and medium-sized companies. Our solution serves students enrolled in STEM classes or certificate programs. We partner with educational providers that share our educational paradigm to invest in experiential learning to prepare students for future employment. We rely on our partners’ knowledge of their students’ employment goals to match our Global Talent Fellows' projects, skillsets, and industry experience. Our Global Talent Fellows develop the overall scope of their projects to align with high-demand skills in their companies. The Open Avenues team then fashions activities and assignments to align with NACE competencies, based on national surveys of soft-skills that predict individuals’ professional success. At the start of each course, we survey students to understand their personal motivations and immediate goals for employment in STEM. We use these survey responses to emphasis or de-emphasize certain activities in the projects. We then survey students at the end of the project to measure how much students’ learning did, in fact, align with anticipated learning outcomes. Our solution aligns students’ learning to apply current skills desired by companies while building soft-skills that are associated with individuals’ long-term career success. 

Most career-readiness learning at public and private colleges is siloed to specific courses or departments. Our solution is a high-quality enrichment component that matches student learning to current employer-demands and teaches soft-skills that support long-term professional success.  We offer a new avenue for colleges to engage employers and ensure that student learning is relevant to industry needs. We aim to make integrated industry-relevant learning in all community college and technical classes a possibility for academic institutions nationwide. Our services can be used by faculty in traditional STEM classes, education providers running bootcamps and stand-alone challenges for students.  

1 full-time staff; 10 part-time staff

Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values of our organization, which we discuss with our employees in our onboarding process. We operationalize these values in our day-to-day operations. For example, our leadership facilitates conversations on racial justice issues as part of our standing agenda for our monthly all-staff meetings. While our leadership team includes a first-generation college student, we are implementing our board development strategy to ensure that our Board of Directors’ composition reflects the racial and ethnic backgrounds of our student populations by 2021. We seek out educational opportunities on social justice as part of our professional development annual KPIs. Our Vice President has participated in the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond: Undoing Racism Workshop as well as other seminars sponsored by the Boston Women’s Fund and the Lenny Zakim Fund dedicated to social equity. 

As the community colleges and technical schools have seen the importance of connecting their students to experiential learning opportunities, partnerships have sprouted throughout the country. These partnerships are often between large local employers and the academic institutions, or are superficial engagements, however. Open Avenues takes an innovative approach to these partnerships by: 1) connecting universities with an array of start-up, small and medium companies in different STEM fields through one partnership, minimizing the burden on administration and staff; 2) working with companies that support Open Avenues’ employment of their global talent for 5 – 8 per week for at least six months, boosting the quality and substance of student/professional engagement; 3) integrating competency-based career readiness learning that responds to employer needs seamlessly within classes and certificate curriculum. 

Our innovation is filling the gap between stakeholders in a way that changes all parties perceptions of how to make student learning match employer needs. Once we have scaled our model, there is immense potential to use our data to create interactive software and connection platforms that engage students and STEM professionals throughout their learning and into their career. 

Our innovation is how we align students’ learning to employers’ current and future needs, as opposed to employing a specific core technology. 

We rely on evidence-based research to design our programming and actively evaluate students’ learning after participating in our projects. The research we use to design our projects includes: 

National Association of Colleges and Employer (NACE) Competencies

Center for Project-Based Learning, Worcester Polytechnical Institute 

Working Group for Community Colleges, Opportunity America  

Because we design experiential learning projects for STEM, our Fellows have scoped projects that use Raspberry Pi, Robot kits, ChemDraw and Big Data. All our projects use mobile applications, such as Slack, for teamwork.  

Open Avenues’ Theory of Change is that experiential learning can radically change individuals’ career trajectories (WPU, 2019). Research shows that experiential learning is especially effective for underrepresented student populations in STEM (Dagley, M., et al., 2015). Our leadership team has first-hand knowledge of the challenges that face first-generation college students. We work closely with our university partners, who share our educational paradigm of preparing students for careers using experiential learning. Research shows that entry level positions in small and medium-sized businesses have the most potential for upward mobility. Student populations in two-year and certificate programs have self-selected to pursue an education with career goals in mind. This provides fertile ground for our programming to have impact. Integrating industry projects and professional competencies throughout students’ learning builds confidence needed to effectively apply for jobs and to perform once hired. Initial pre- and post-survey data from our student participants show increases in motivation to pursue a career in STEM and improved precision on the type of skills that potential employers are looking for in them.  

We want to be at the forefront of the new renaissance in technical STEM education where all students enjoy high-quality experiential learning that is relevant to industry demands. Educators are embracing their role as being a destination for career-ready learning that leads to high-quality employment at graduation. We want to support these educators in achieving their educational mission. Within five years, we aim to establish our programming as a resource for colleges nationwide to integrate experiential learning throughout students’ coursework and build connections with high-growth companies. We estimate that we can grow our Global Talent Fellowship program cohort to over 150 STEM professionals, each launching multiple projects per year to train 2,000+ students in different geographical areas in the US. At each institution we partner with, we expect to produce measurable broad success in graduates’ employment in technical STEM positions. We expect to be a convenor for startups, small and medium STEM companies, creating a virtuous feedback loop between these employers’ soft skill needs and our industry project designs. As our alumni base grows we will leverage their experience in their jobs to inform projects at their alma maters and engage with current students. All our work will ultimately elevate the prestige of technical STEM education; a better prepared frontline workforce in technology and innovation will generate a more opportunities for US workers. 

Market Barrier: Implementing our services in colleges nationwide requires overcoming administrative barriers within colleges to partnership and implementation of industry projects within credit-bearing curriculum. Most academic institutions, by virtue of its accreditation process and organizational structure, are biased towards siloed approaches to experiential learning that live within one department or a specific course cluster. To expedite these processes, from our experience, there needs to be a warm introduction from a well-known, trusted entity. In Boston, The Boston Foundation has been able to make these introductions for us. Nationwide, we will need to find other avenues to build these relationships.

Economic Barrier: We acknowledge that there are many factors that contribute to students success in getting and retaining technical STEM jobs. Our challenge is ensuring that when we expand our services across the nation, that we can ensure job placement is possible. Due to larger economic factors in the world right now due to the ongoing pandemic, there are additional barriers that low-wealth students face that can obstruct their ability to move forward on their career trajectories. We will increasingly need to consider the basic needs of our student populations and build partnerships to expand support as we continue to build.

Market: Maintaining flexibility within partnership is key for us. We sign memorandum of understandings with all our university partners at the highest level of administration to ensure that, at least administratively speaking, we can partner across departments and within a variety of contexts. To overcome barriers within universities, we hope to have third-party reviews of our projects by leading experiential learning experts and NACE competency experts. We also will provide our data to universities to inform their marketing and outreach to students and create a positive incentive for all departments to be part of their school’s good performance in job placement. 

Economic: We will continue to build networks and partnerships across organizations meeting different social needs to ensure that our services make the most impact within a complex environment. In Boston, we have begun conversations with the Boston Foundation to identify ways to support students with laptops and other items necessary to succeed in our programming. In our applications for grant funding, we are focused on mechanisms to increase incentives for students to participate in our programming, such as stipends for participation. As we continue to scale our programming, we are seeking to build local partnerships in areas where our university partners are to support students beyond our capacity. We believe in a holistic approach to ensure success of students, but we know we cannot do it alone. 

We would like to collect longitudinal data on the extent to which our projects have contributed to students’ placement in STEM positions. We also would like to collect comparative data on students’ earnings between those who have participated in our programs and those who have not to get a true return on investment calculation of participating in Open Avenues’ projects.  

Many of the students we serve experience serious academic barriers to pursuing professional careers in STEM, are first-generation college students, and come from low-wealth backgrounds. Our Vice President has many of these shared life experiences as our students. She attended a small college supportive of first-generation students and students with learning disabilities, which built her confidence and learned foundational Math competencies. She then transferred to a four-year institution, graduating with a degree in Economics. She was unable to pursue unpaid internships and relied on mentors to help her navigate her choices of paid jobs during college to give her the type of experience that prepared her for a professional career. 

Our President has over 26 years of experience as an immigration lawyer working with start-ups and small businesses who either are founded by immigrants or wish to hire foreign-born professionals to build companies in the US. We hire all our Global Talent Fellows as W-2 employees, which is a purposeful choice to ensure that our Fellows are compensated for their time spent designing projects, working with students and on their leadership development. 

Open Avenues partners with Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology (BFIT) to launch Industry Projects in mechanical engineering and computer science. Global Talent Fellows work with BFIT students to complete relevant projects and build soft skills to speak about this experience in future interviews. Fellows support BFIT professors to enhance current curriculum and build future curriculum. 

Open Avenues partners closely with Stack Education, a Boston-based team of education veterans developing STEM curriculum and bootcamps at universities. OAF provides Industry Projects that complement Stack Education curriculum for Data Science, Coding/Web Development, and Clinical Trials Management bootcamps at Worcester State University and Framingham State University.  

OAF partners with Merrimack College to provide students enrolled in their Internship Institute with access to Industry Project Challenges. For example, OAF Global Talent Fellows launched projects for a 3-D printing company and AI Urban Development company to challenge student teams to act as junior consultants.  

We have a growing number of employer partners. Our industry partners nominate top global STEM talent for our Global Talent Fellowship. We hire Global Talent Fellows for 5 -8 hours per week for leadership development and to lead industry projects for our university partners.  

Open Avenues has a double-sided marketplace where we bring services to companies and universities. Employers pay quarterly to support Global Talent Fellows' salaries and program operating expenses to participate in the Fellowship. Fellows receive leadership development and employers have their projects integrated into coursework at our university partners. We provide employers with data on how their Fellows have contributed to students' learning. We currently do not charge universities for our services. This decision is aligned with our goal to advance equity in education opportunities across academic institutions. Our agreements with academic partners stipulate that they will support our programming through student outreach, support and evaluation. We have collaborated on grant applications with our college partners to fund students' access to technology and financial assistance as part of expanding our projects across their departments. We would like to develop our analytical capacity to collect data on student placement, earnings and job readiness, which we will form into a subscription-based service for the general public.  

To achieve financial sustainability we aim to generate three sources of funding, each making up roughly one-third of our total revenue. The sources include: 1. Earned Income; 2. Grant Funding; 3. Individual Donations. Earned income through company payments for our Global Talent Fellowship is a stable and growing source of revenue. Open Avenues has strong and growing corporate engagement for our Global Talent Fellowship. Participating companies include MIT Media Lab start-ups and top-tier medium-sized companies. To bolster our grant funding, Open Avenues wants to strengthen our board. We would like to hire a dedicated Development Officer for identifying and applying to grant opportunities. Our Executive Director, along with dedicated interns, have developed a marketing strategy and outreach to cultivate individual donors who believe in our mission and product.

We have raised revenues from our partner companies who nominate STEM professionals to participate in our Global Talent Fellowship. With these revenues we are able to pay our Fellows to work with students for 5 to 8 hours per week and pay for supplies and materials for our projects. Our Global Talent Fellows’ companies include: InsightSquared, LifeMine, Self., Tamr, Akston Bio, OPT Industries, Spacemaker AI. We are currently seeking funding from small private foundations but have not received decisions within the 2020 grant cycle on many applications because of shifts in funders due to the pandemic. We receive in-kind support from our President’s firm and donations from our board members. 

We want to diversify our revenue base to include grant funding that supports our monitoring and evaluation efforts, to purchase supplies or equipment to facilitate low-wealth students' participation in online projects during the pandemic, and expand operating capacity to market and build partnerships with new companies and universities. We also hope to develop relationships with grantors who share our vision of integrating experiential learning into technical STEM education nationwide.  

We break our estimated expenses for 2021 into three categories non-profits are expected to report on: operating expenses (e.g. rent, equipment, technology) and programmatic expenses (salaries, supplies) and marketing/fundraising expenses. In 2021, we expect our overall operating expenses account for less than 15 percent of our total expenses. Our programmatic expenses, which represent roughly 75 percent of all our annual expenses, will depend on our ability to scale in 2021 within our existing university partners and expand to new partners. Our marketing and fundraising costs are mostly made up of wages paid for time spent by our leadership team on these activities; they account for the remaining 10 percent of our 2021 budget. 

To successfully scale Open Avenues’ STEM education programming, we must continue to development of partnerships with high-growth companies and universities. Our model requires a balance of demand from universities for programming and a supply of companies willing to nominate employees for the Global Talent Fellowship. To this point, we have partnered with companies in Massachusetts, Texas, and California and are continuing to develop these relationships at a fast rate. However, our connections to universities are limited to the New England region. There is so much opportunity to expand and provide these learning opportunities in areas of the country where there is an even greater demand to advance education equity for diverse students, including the most historically underserved. We want to work with the Challenge partners to connect, build relationships, and launch our programming for students at new university partners around the United States. A hugely important part of our model is that we do not charge universities for this programming. This is intentional to increase feasibility of implementation for universities that need it most, but it requires introduction and partnership development, as strong productive partnerships often start through a warm introduction from organizations they already partner with. Based on the national footprint and investment focus New Profit and Mordridge Family Foundation, and other Challenge partners we are sure there is opportunity for scale.

So much of the success of our work is wrapped up in our "right to play" in the educational and workforce development space. As a service provider, we aim to disrupt technical STEM education from within higher educational institutions. We have worked in higher education; we know that this is not an easy task. To that end, we hope our partners will support us in building understanding and enthusiasm for integrating experiential learning within all learning in two-year and short-term certification programs. This goes beyond marketing and gaining champions of our work who can support our strategic thinking on engaging stakeholders from higher education and SMEs in a meaningful way. 

We hope to partner with the following stakeholders:

We already have relationships with Chambers of Commerce and aggregators of innovative and fast-growing startup, small and medium-sized companies, such as venture capital firms and incubators. As we expand across Massachusetts and nationwide, we hope to develop partnerships with these groups in various geographical locations. 

We would like to engage with venture philanthropists and innovative philanthropy organizations. These types of philanthropic stakeholders can provide valuable strategic guidance and connect us to networks of professionals and organizations working on STEM workforce development and related social issues.We are particularly interested in receiving strategic guidance and opportunities to share our experience and ideas with others from Morgridge Family Foundation and New Profit. 

The field of education and experiential learning is constantly growing. Our leadership team would benefit from participating in WPI’s Project-Based Learning Institute to strengthen our network of educators in the field. We are building relationships with local community colleges, but would like to work closer with community college working groups and councils across the nation.   

We have implemented a strategy for diversity and inclusion that includes increasing racial and ethnic representation on our Board. We have applied to be considered as a partner for the African American Board Leadership Institute. We welcome partnerships with other groups that support diverse and inclusive board development.