MindRight

Empower schools to be trauma-informed through mental health coaching over text message to students and real-time socioemotional data for educators.

Our mission is to empower youth of color to heal from trauma from systemic oppression, including structural violence, poverty, and discrimination. We do this work because 1 in 4 Black children in inner-cities has witnessed a shooting (National Center for Victims of Crime). One in 3 develops post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from exposure to violence (National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network, NCTSN).

Why does this matter? Untreated trauma is a root cause of the achievement gap. Trauma has been proven to have psychological and neurological repercussions that inhibit the brain’s ability to learn (NCTSN). The majority of youth suffering from trauma perform poorly in school, with school dropout and expulsion rates three times higher than their peers (Justice Policy Institute). Finally, the most trauma-ridden neighborhoods with the highest rates of PTSD are low-income neighborhoods populated by majority African American and Latinx families. Untreated trauma continues to marginalize an already historically underserved population and perpetuates racial income and achievement gaps.

Proven interventions for trauma exist, but due to barriers to access and the stigma around mental health, youth often go untreated. In the average urban school, there is 1 counselor to every 500 students and 1 psychologist to every 2,000 students. Because underserved youth experience repeated traumas, their struggles often deepen over time, entrenching them in a cycle of poverty and violence.

To overcome the gap in services and stigma around mental health, we meet students where they are. We provide mental health coaching over text message to teens. Unlike a crisis text line, we check in with students daily and proactively, supporting them on both good days and bad days. We intervene early and prevent crises, as well as support students during and after crises.

To provide this service, we vet and train remote volunteers who serve as coaches. Our coaches use our Twilio-powered web application to provide mental health support over text message. Our coaches are monitored in real-time by our supervisors, licensed mental health clinicians who stabilize students in crises.

Our vision is to use technology to enable systems change. Because we coach students daily, we can collect data on student socioemotional needs and progress. We provide schools with this real-time data to enable educators to meet the needs of their students impacted by trauma.

By helping individual students heal from trauma at scale, and by providing educators with data insights to become trauma-informed, we are breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma. In the long-run, we envision a world where children and families in all historically marginalized communities have the infrastructure to heal from trauma.

We make trauma healing practices accessible to youth of color in a culturally responsive manner at scale. Text messages have a 99% open rate among teens. For teens, texting removes the sense of judgment or pity associated with talking in person. In underserved communities, trauma is so normalized that many who need support do not ask for help. So, unlike a crisis text line, we check in with students proactively seven days a week. Our coaching is not clinical but rather focuses on building evidence-based coping skills. Our coaches thus use relatable language, making mental health more palatable for youth.

Our coaches use our web application to text with students while being supervised by licensed mental health clinicians. On our web app, coaches conducts personalized, one-on-one texting conversations with assigned students. Coaches tag topics and emotions of students and support strategies used. This enables us to capture data on how to best support students. We apply run sentiment analysis so we can track real-time student well-being, and we share this data with educators on our data dashboard. Our data dashboard helps educators know on a daily basis how their students are feeling and identify which students may need additional support.

We will increase our impact to serve 1,000 students by the end of school year 2018-19 through confirmed school partners in Newark, DC, and Philadelphia. For school partners, we are launching our analytics dashboard that provides data and insights on student socioemotional and trauma-related needs. We will apply machine learning techniques to our web app that hone sentiment data and automatically tag student-coach conversations. This will enable us to increase quality as we grow and to provide insights to educators on what support strategies work with students so they can integrate these practices into schools.

We aim to serve 50,000 active MindRight users over the next five years, through district rollouts in our current cities and cities where we have relationships through team members and networks such as AT&T Aspire Accelerator: Newark, NJ; Washington, DC; Philadelphia, PA; Camden, NJ; Chicago, IL; Gary, Indiana; Stockton, CA; Oakland, CA; and New Orleans, LA. As we do district rollouts, we will impact not only MindRight users, but all students and educators in schools given our impact on school climate. We aim to evaluate how improved student wellness and school climate also reduces educator burnout and increases retention. 

To reach students, we will replicate our validated community engagement model across cities. We recruit Community Advisors and Youth Advisors who are from the communities we serve to present MindRight to students. We’ve found this to increase student uptake. To sign up for our service, students need only text our number. 

To reach customers, we will continue to do direct outreach to student support directors at the district level and principals and social workers at the school level. We have also begun to get inbound inquiries from schools, including our first charter school partner in Philadelphia for 2018-19.

We have served over 400 students. 95% of students are youth of color. 70% screened for high exposure to trauma as measured by the evidence-based Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) screen and non-clinical Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) assessment. In our first comparative study, 56% of students with high trauma had reduced PTSD symptoms, compared to 43% of non-users who had reduced PTSD symptoms over the assessment period. 90% of all surveyed users reported improved stress management. Qualitative data include the following testimonial: “Most people shut down like I would. MindRight helps me get back up again” - MindRight Student, Newark.

We will reach 3,000 students in the next year and 15,000 in the next three years. Students will access our coaching service over text message. We’ll provide schools serving those students with student student trauma and wellness data, enabling schools to better meet the needs of students with trauma. For example, our partners have used our data to identify students who would otherwise “fly under the radar.” We expect improvements in student well-being and attendance to start in the first year of implementation at partners. Our assessments have shown improvements in well-being within 8 weeks of using MindRight.

Our leadership team has expertise across business development, clinical social work, school leadership, software engineering, and talent management. We all have been personally impacted by intergenerational trauma and are driven to find scalable solutions to this problem. In our first two years, co-founders Ashley and Alina attracted over $700,000 in funding and recruited full-time team members: Dr. Jaime Mendoza-Williams, with over 10 years of experience as a clinical social worker and school leader; Seyi Adekoya, lead developer from Andela, which trains the top 1% of developer talent in Africa; and Sirrele Steinfeld as Head of Engineering.

We have been funded by philanthropy and earned revenue, including $12,000 in paid contracts in our first year. One of our main partners, Newark Public Schools, has confirmed with us a price of $100 per student for our coaching service for school year 2018-19.

Applying a SAAS model, we charge school- and district-level subscription fees based on school size for access to our coaching service, trauma assessments, and analytics dashboard. Between these fees, we will average $140 in revenue per student served per year. Our per-student cost falls as we serve more students. At $140 in revenue per student served, we will break even when we serve 19,000 students.

We will also pursue revenue opportunities with other institutions that have financial incentives to invest in cost-effective trauma-healing solutions for youth. These include cities, the juvenile justice system, and healthcare providers. For example, healthcare providers can sponsor our coaching service as a wellness program for adolescent members and subscribe to our aggregate state or nationwide data.

Finally, through the Every Student Succeeds Act, $320 million in grants must be spent on programs that specifically address trauma-informed services, which MindRight is an ideal candidate for.

Having validated the impact and product-market fit of our texting service and data, we are at a critical inflection point in our organization. We are ready to scale in terms of number of users of our coaching service. We are also evolving in our impact, business model, and technology, shifting from individual student to school-wide impact with school rollouts of our coaching service plus data analytics. We will move to evaluating impact on school climate and policies, building up to systems change. Solve will provide the multi-disciplinary support needed for our technology strategy, organizational strategy, and business development strategy.

Our key barriers are ensuring we grow while maintaining quality of service give the high-touch nature of our service. Solve can help through technology mentorship as we aim to make our web app a powerful tool for facilitating high-touch, high-quality interactions at scale; organizational mentorship to support with building our engineering and data science team; organizational mentorship to build out feedback systems so we can integrate a continuous improvement model to constantly track and improve upon our efficacy for all students and across all school partners; access to third-party impact measurement to enhance our business case with districts.