UPchieve

The Problem
Only 14% of low-income 10th graders will earn their Bachelor’s degree within 6 years, compared to 60% of their high-income peers. Despite $100BN that is invested in education nonprofits in the U.S. each year, the gap between students of low- and high-income students hasn’t changed in 10+ years. 

Our Solution
UPchieve is a nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring to low-income HS students. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our on-demand, volunteer-based model makes our solution uniquely scalable, low-cost, and accessible to low-income students.

At Scale
By 2030, we will have given all 8 million low-income HS students in the U.S. 24/7 access to free academic support, ensuring that every student has an equal opportunity to finish high school, attend college, and achieve upward mobility.

Education should serve to level the playing field for all students. However, in America’s current education system, the students who start at a disadvantage (e.g., low-income students and students of color) often receive the lowest quality education and the least amount of academic support. 

In addition to attending public schools with fewer financial resources, advanced course offerings, and guidance counselors, low-income students also receive less academic support after school and in their homes. Even if a student is fortunate enough to attend a school which offers after-school tutoring, part-time jobs and family commitments often prevent them from focusing on schoolwork until later in the evening. Additionally, 61% of low-income students have parents who have never been to college and typically can’t help them with schoolwork.

Unequal access to academic support ultimately leads to gaps in academic achievement between low- and high-income students. Currently, only 14% of low-income 10th graders will go on to earn their Bachelor’s degree, compared to 60% of their higher income peers. Despite the billions of dollars being invested into education nonprofits each year, the majority of low-income students still don’t have access to academic support when and where they need it most: late at night in their homes.

UPchieve significantly increases low-income students’ access to academic support by providing free, online tutoring and college counseling, available 24/7 from any device. 

Here’s how our platform works:

1. Students make a request for help in a specific subject (e.g., Algebra 1 or Biology) any time they need it.
2. UPchieve texts volunteers who are certified in the subject requested and have marked themselves as available during the requested time window. 
3. Within 5 minutes, the student is paired with a volunteer in our virtual classroom (equipped with an interactive whiteboard and text-based chat), where they can get help with anything they need.

Sample ways that students have leveraged UPchieve’s free technology to-date include: finishing homework, researching colleges, reviewing for an exam, writing college application essays, and learning concepts that they missed while out of school.

UPchieve also recruits, trains, and certifies volunteers to be high-quality tutors or college counselors (together referred to as “coaches”) on our platform. Coaches must pass a certification quiz in every subject prior to tutoring, and they also have the flexibility to select the times they’d like to receive notifications if a student needs their help from a 24/7 calendar.

Who We Serve
UPchieve is only available to low-income high school students in the U.S. We’re specifically designed for and targeted at students who do not have access to academic support in their schools and homes. This includes students who work part-time jobs or have family commitments after school, students raised by single parents or whose parents do not speak English, and students who would be the first in their family to attend college. Our students often belong to multiple marginalized groups. In addition to being low-income, more than 75% of our current users are either Black or Hispanic, and many come from immigrant families.

Understanding Students’ Needs
Founded by a former low-income student, UPchieve prides itself on being extremely student-centered. While building the first version of UPchieve, we conducted surveys, user interviews, focus groups, and user testing with hundreds of low-income students. These helped us understand key aspects of students’ needs and preferences and led to our unique on-demand and text-based tutoring model. Since then, we’ve continued to integrate student feedback into our product development process. Our product roadmap is heavily influenced by post-session feedback from students, and we’ve launched many of the features requested by students in the past (e.g., photo uploading and the addition of new subjects). We also conduct additional user interviews with students whenever designing a new feature. In the future, we hope to further elevate student voice within our organization by forming a student advisory council and inviting a former student user to join our Board of Directors.

UPchieve addresses and reverses educational inequities that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We support students engaged in independent work — for example, completing a homework assignment, studying for a test, or catching up on material they missed while out of school — in remote, hybrid and physical environments. Our model empowers students and increases their engagement in the classroom by improving their self-efficacy and self-advocacy skills. Finally, UPchieve’s platform is accessible in low-connectivity settings—even students who only have access to mobile devices, slow internet, or limited data plans can use UPchieve effectively to get help on their homework.

UPchieve has a live web app, iOS app, and Android app. Over 8,500 students and over 7,000 volunteers have created accounts on our platform, and we have at least one student user in all 50 states. We’ve matched more than 30,000 on-demand requests for tutoring with a median wait time of under 5 minutes. UPchieve is also growing fast: we have 8X more students than we did this time last year, and student activity (measured by the number of monthly requests) has increased by 20X.

We’re currently partnered with 20 schools and nonprofits to reach our target students and gather data and insights from educators on the ground. We’ve also secured employee engagement partnerships with 12 different companies, bringing our ARR to over $300K. Our partners include six different Fortune 100 companies, such as Verizon, PwC, and Dell.

Scalability
UPchieve delivers the most scalable solution to improving education for low-income students in the U.S. Our virtual, on-demand model makes it very easy to: 1) reach students across the country, and 2) sustainably recruit thousands of volunteers. Additionally, by leveraging  volunteers to provide academic support, we keep our costs extremely low. For example, we can provide one student with an entire year of unlimited tutoring and college counseling for just $10. In comparison, in-person tutoring programs typically cost hundreds of dollars per student. 

On-Demand Availability
We’re the only nonprofit providing on-demand academic support to students. By “on-demand”, we mean that students do not need to pre-schedule their tutoring sessions. Most students don’t know ahead of time when they’re going to get stuck on their homework or have a question about college. Being able to speak to someone any time they need it is game-changing, especially for students who may not always be able to prioritize their schoolwork.

Student Empowerment
UPchieve’s model is specifically designed to put students in control of their own learning. Other programs require parental involvement in order to sign up and long-term commitments to attend regularly recurring tutoring sessions in order to participate. In contrast, we increase students’ agency and self-efficacy by letting students determine: 1) when they need help, 2) what they need help on, and 3) how much help they need.

Current: 8,500 students

By end of 2022: 25,000 students

By end of 2026: 500,000 students

Reach / breadth of impact

• Number of students served

• Hours of tutoring provided

Availability of our services

• Match rate

• Average student wait time

Quality of our services

• Students’ pre- and post- session ratings of understanding

• Results of future research indicating improvements in students’ academic motivation and grades

Sustainability of our organization

• Number of corporate partnerships

• Annual recurring revenue

Full-time staff: 9

Part-time staff: 0

Contractors: 0

Our team
UPchieve is led by a team of 9 individuals who bring unique backgrounds and qualifications to our organization. Our staff is also highly diverse and representative of the students we serve: 67% are people of color, 56% were low-income students, 56% are first or second generation immigrants, and 44% took nontraditional paths after high school. UPchieve’s team includes:

• Aly Murray, Executive Director
• Dave Sudia, Chief Technology Officer
• Jericho Apo, Director of Growth Marketing
• Katy Laird, Director of Programs
• Mark Espinoza, Program Manager
• Shelby Crowell, Corporate Partnerships Manager
• Trey Stevens, Software Engineer
• Fernando Sanchez, Software Engineer
• Grace Kim, Junior Designer

Founder story
UPchieve was founded by the current Executive Director, Aly Murray, to help more students like her have the opportunity to achieve upward mobility. Aly was raised in a low-income household by a single mom who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. As a result of limited access to academic support, Aly began her postsecondary education at a local community college. From there, it took her 6 years to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania and finish her Bachelor’s degree while working part-time. Attaining a college degree ultimately helped her secure a job at J.P. Morgan and achieve upward mobility herself. In 2018, Aly quit her job at J.P. Morgan to work on UPchieve full-time.

UPchieve was founded to help students overcome racial and socioeconomic barriers to achieving upward mobility. As such, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) have always been an important part of our mission. Here are examples of actions we’ve taken to incorporated DEI into our organization and programs:

Students we serve
We prioritize reaching students of color by seeking out partnerships with public high schools and nonprofits located in highly diverse, urban regions. Additionally, when gathering student feedback and conducting user research, we ensure that we speak to a mix of students that represent the overall demographics of our user base (e.g., 40% Hispanic, 35% Black, 5% Asian, and 16% White).

Volunteer training
In September we launched a mandatory DEI training module to ensure volunteers on our platform create a welcoming environment for all students, including students of color. As part of the training, volunteers must: 1) read our official DEI policy, 2) complete an outside course on implicit bias, and 3) take an implicit bias race test. We also provide additional optional readings and podcasts.

Our staff & board
UPchieve has no education requirement for staff and focuses on demonstrable skills rather than years of experience while hiring, making it easier for us to hire staff members that are representative of the communities we serve. As mentioned in the prior answer, ⅔ of our current team are people of color. Additionally, more than half of our senior leadership team and our Board of Directors are people of color as well.

We’re excited to leverage MIT Solve’s expertise and network as we take forward our 2021 vision of adapting our processes to scale, leveraging data for better product/program design, and moving towards greater financial sustainability. 

Mentorship
We would love advice on streamlining our internal processes to be more scalable and maximizing our impacts on students’ learning by making changes to our volunteer training and feedback program. We’d also welcome MIT Solve’s inputs on our financial sustainability roadmap and as we explore different strategies for revenue generation. 

Network
UPchieve has relatively few connections in the social impact space and could greatly benefit from leveraging the MIT Solve network as we expand. We’re excited for opportunities to connect with potential partners and funders during MIT Solve live and virtual events. Many members of the Solve community are large, STEM-focused companies which would be excellent fits for our employee engagement partnership program.

Public Relations
As an early stage nonprofit we’ve struggled to get the word out about our solution because we lack the right media connections. There’s significant interest in and demand for our virtual tutoring solution, but our lack of press contacts has hindered our ability to reach students, establish partnerships, and attract funding. Partnering with MIT Solve to develop a comprehensive branding/media strategy and get contacts in the field would help us scale much faster.

Monitoring & Evaluation
We’d love to benefit from MIT Solve’s expertise in impact measurement to help advise our new Director of Programs—particularly on identifying the most important data to collect and designing our first research study. We’d also love to leverage the MIT Solve network to connect with researchers who might be interested in working together to learn from our data. 

Large STEM-focused companies
As mentioned previously, we’re very excited about partnering with STEM-focused companies that are part of the Solve community and helping them engage their employees as volunteers. This could help us bring in both funding and volunteers, the two of the three things that we need to scale our impact further. 

College STEM departments
One challenge we’ve experienced as UPchieve scales is finding more volunteers who are able to meet student demand for more challenging topics (e.g., calculus and physics). We’d love to partner with various math and science departments at MIT to engage their students as volunteers in higher-level STEM subjects. 

Large school or nonprofit networks
Our most mutually beneficial student outreach partnerships are typically with nonprofits that are focused on students’ academic achievement. This type of partner is not only incentivized to promote UPchieve to students, they also collect grade and achievement data that we can leverage to improve our programs and communicate our impact to funders. We’d love to partner with large education nonprofits like Teach for America and Urban Assembly to reach students, gather data, and increase awareness for our solution in the field.

UPchieve creates equitable access to career exploration for high school students by democratizing access to personalized college counseling. College graduates earn 74% more than those with just a high school diploma, and college counseling is proven to help students make more informed decisions when applying for college and increase college persistence. Unfortunately, many low-income students attend under-resourced schools where college counseling is not available or difficult to access. 

UPchieve’s highly accessible and scalable model has the potential to transform the college to career pipeline by expanding low-income students' access to personalized college advice. We’d love to leverage the ASA Prize for Equitable Education to increase college access and retention rates by:

1. Expanding our college counseling services to include additional topics like financial aid, sports recruiting, and transferring from 2-year to 4-year colleges

2. Launching a campaign to refer students who already use UPchieve for our tutoring services to our college counseling services

3. Increasing the quality of our college counseling services by building additional college counseling trainings for volunteers and creating a peer feedback system so less experienced volunteers can benefit from the advice and knowledge of their more experienced peers.

UPchieve increases equity in STEM by ensuring all low-income youth can access high-quality STEM tutoring for free, any time they need it. Students from low-income communities and communities of color are underrepresented in STEM careers—one of the most viable pathways to upward mobility. Our solution improves students' confidence, attitudes and grades in math and science, increasing their chances of pursuing a career in STEM. 

We’d love to leverage The GM Prize to expand our offerings in STEM and improve the quality of our service, for example by:

• Launching additional STEM subjects on our platform, like computer science and anatomy & physiology 

• Implementing additional training courses to help volunteers become better STEM tutors

• Forming partnerships with STEM college departments to recruit tutors for higher-level STEM subjects on the platform

We run a marketplace, and having the right volunteers active at the right time is one of our hardest problems. This is further complicated by the fact that we offer 15+ different tutoring subjects and 168 weekly time slots for volunteer availability. Using machine learning, we could build a predictive model of student demand that would allow us to more proactively schedule volunteers to best meet student needs. We could also predict which specific volunteers a student will most like working with based on past volunteer ratings, which could lead to improved educational outcomes for students. Receiving the AI for Humanity Prize would help us accelerate our technical development and improve our matching system dramatically.

UPchieve increases equity in STEM by ensuring all low-income youth can access high-quality STEM tutoring for free, any time they need it. 

Students from low-income communities and communities of color are underrepresented in STEM careers—one of the most viable pathways to upward mobility. Our solution improves students' confidence, attitudes and grades in math and science, increasing their chances of pursuing a career in STEM. 

We’d love to leverage The GSR Prize to expand our offerings in STEM and improve the quality of our service, for example by:

• Launching additional STEM subjects on our platform, like computer science and anatomy & physiology 

• Implementing additional training courses to help volunteers become better STEM tutors

• Forming partnerships with STEM college departments to recruit tutors for higher-level STEM subjects on the platform