nXu’s Learning Lab

Few schools have been intentionally designed to equip students—especially BIPOC students & students from historically marginalized communities—with a sense of purpose, a deep understanding of their own identity, social capital, and the social-emotional (SEL) skills necessary to navigate our rapidly changing world.  And few schools provide space for students to deeply explore their purpose & identity and to allow for career exploration through these lenses. 

These shortcomings have only been compounded by the challenges brought about by COVID.  We have all had to consider some deep existential questions about our core values & identity given the collective loss we have experienced due to the pandemic and the ongoing manifestations of structural racism, all while navigating so many unprecedented uncertainties. 

As we welcomed students back in person last fall, we have had to address their academic needs while simultaneously rebuilding a sense of belonging, tending to their social-emotional well-being, and reigniting a sense of direction for their futures.  And to this end, purpose is a powerful intrinsic motivator.

nXu believes purpose is essential right now because it is an antidote to the profound social-emotional wellness issues that both educators and students are and have been experiencing.  One recent study revealed that 27% of teachers vs. 10% of adults more broadly have reported symptoms of depression, while another noted an alarming 31% increase in mental health related emergency room visits among youth, ages 12 to 17.  Purpose is a uniquely powerful construct because it requires us to make meaning of our past, including the challenges of the last two years, our future, and our identity–a process that is more important now than ever before. 

nXu recognizes that young people in today’s society must master more than core academic skills to be both personally and professionally successful and satisfied.  We know it is essential for young people to meaningfully explore their identities, develop a strong sense of purpose, cultivate social capital, and foster social-emotional wellness to succeed in life after high school and to pursue compelling career pathways.  We have anchored around purpose for multiple reasons including, in the case of youth, a correlation between purpose and greater academic engagement (noted in research by David Yaeger, Angela Duckworth, and others), greater resilience, greater well-being, and positive career identities.   And for youth and adults alike, purpose is correlated with a range of positive outcomes including better mental and physical health, and a longer life.

As a field, youth purpose development curriculum and programming are still very nascent.  Even more nascent are efforts to strategically integrate purpose development with identity development, SEL, relationships & social capital development, and career exploration.  

To address these educational shortcomings and broader systemic social-emotional challenges brought about by the pandemic, nXu has designed and codified a research-based model that integrates five core developmental areas—purpose, identity, social-emotional wellness, social capital & career exploration—to engage students and educators in defining personal & professional pathways that align with their evolving sense of self.  We have strategically connected career exploration to these 4 core constructs through a middle and high school curriculum that allows students to engage in career exploration through the lens of purpose and identity while cultivating their SEL skills and social capital.

While we have an existing broader solution to the aforementioned problem in the form of our purpose development curriculum, more specifically we have established a Learning Lab through which we can strategically leverage technology, pre-existing and burgeoning technology-driven partnerships, and ongoing refinement and codification of our content to ultimately serve more students and have an even greater systemic impact on youth development and purpose development programming.  

We have adopted a three-pronged approach to carry out our organizational mission to catalyze and equip youth and adults to explore, articulate, and pursue their purpose while developing their social & emotional learning (SEL) skills.  In this approach, we are focused on developing research-based purpose development methodologies, and learning by directly serving students & educators and by forming strategic partnerships with schools & educational organizations.  We are systematically codifying our learnings in the form of shareable resources including our purpose and SEL development methodology, our curriculum, and our assessment system.  And we are continuously disseminating our learnings and resources through youth & educator programming, and school & organizational partnerships. 

Implicit in this approach is a need to continue to intentionally and directly learn about youth purpose development ourselves.  Through our Learning Lab, we are not only continuing to serve students directly by offering both public and partnership-based student programming, but also are continuing to grow other operational, analytical and programmatic components of our model, including but not limited to: recruiting and securing staff–especially facilitators–to lead our student programming; further developing and managing our facilitator training program; recruiting, securing and managing new organizational, technology-based partners through which we offer partnership-based student programming; gathering and analyzing key data from our direct student programming; refining and further codifying our student programming content (e.g. in the form of facilitator manuals); and transferring insights from our direct student programming into our curriculum that we have developed to be implemented by schools.

Through our Learning Lab, we are continuing to systematically directly serve young people ourselves, including in an out-of-school context.  We are continuing to leverage “basic” technology tools such as Zoom and Nearpod to directly deliver our content, while also establishing and fostering strategic tech-focused partnerships with organizations and institutions that have more robust tech-related capacities.  In addition to this direct service, we are continuing to pilot, implement, iterate on, and refine our methodology, programming and curriculum.  And through this continual experiential learning, we are able to more effectively codify our approach and resources with an eye toward accelerating the dissemination of our model to an even broader range of audiences, including youth-focused organizations that operate outside of the traditional school context. 

We are acutely aware that our organizational expertise lies outside of the technology realm and, rather, within the domain of purpose, social-emotional learning, relationship & social capital building, and career development.  With this in mind, we believe we are most likely to succeed in generating growth in purpose for students & educators by remaining focused on our core expertise and leveraging technology via external strategic partnerships with organizations already employing tech as a means of driving systems change. 

To date, we have offered our student programming by directly recruiting students ourselves (i.e. “public programming”), and through organizational partnerships with schools as well as with out-of-school youth programs such as College Track, Cooperman College Scholars and SEO Scholars.  To broaden our impact, we also plan to leverage more strategic technology solutions–via organizational partnerships–to increase our reach.  We currently have three exciting partnerships with educational organizations whose more strategic and creative use of technology is allowing us to reach a broader audience of scholars. 

This spring, we are partnering with Stepmojo, a nascent online platform led by the former CEO of Achievement First, Dacia Toll, that is connecting high school youth nationwide with a robust and diverse range of virtual academic programming opportunities.  The platform uses Canvas as its Learning Management System (LMS), allowing for ease of curriculum sharing and centralization of resources.  Through the Stepmojo partnership, nXu staff are directly, virtually teaching our curriculum and, more broadly, the partnership provides a structured way to serve students in a range of school contexts.  We currently have a nXu Facilitator directly facilitating one 60+ lesson, 3 credit bearing course based on our career exploration curriculum with high school students from DSST in Denver, CO, via this new Stepmojo platform, and we are in conversations with Stepmojo to expand the number of sessions offered next fall. 

We also have a burgeoning relationship with Opportunity College, a nascent higher education entity through which we are virtually delivering a new college-level, 3 credit bearing version of our career exploration curriculum (45 synchronous hours; 90 asynchronous hours) to enrolled high schoolers from across the country.  Through this partnership, scholars with whom we otherwise might not have had contact, are virtually interfacing with nXu’s content and directly benefiting from the robust youth development, purpose development and career exploration programming we offer.  Similar to Stepmojo, Opportunity College is employing the Canvas platform to power its programming. 

And earlier this month, we signed onboard with Opportunity Labs in collaboration with The American Dream Academy (founded by the Milken Institute), a new tuition-free, six-month online program whose mission is to help individuals aged 18 to 34 gain the skills needed to pursue a great job or continue their education.  Since launching the second week in March and using the global online learning platform Coursera, The American Dream Academy has received over 5,000 registrants to their virtual platform.  nXu is pleased to be offering three Introductory to Purpose Sessions over the next several months to this growing population of virtual learners.  

By leveraging technology via these new, strategic tech-based partnerships and by continuing to deploy our direct student programming, a Learning Lab affords us the opportunity to have an even greater systemic impact on youth development and purpose development programming. 

Since our inception in 2017, we at nXu have intentionally focused on serving BIPOC students and students from historically marginalized communities, and, more recently, the educators, schools, and organizations that serve these students.   We have been focused on ensuring that students are able to thrive in an increasingly uncertain world.  Specifically, we have developed and have been offering learning experiences that support them to cultivate a sense of purpose while gaining new social-emotional competencies and, therefore, to rise to the challenges of our time.

The demographics of nXu’s program participants reflect our intentional focus on serving traditionally underserved and under-resourced communities.  For example, the schools participating in our recently launched “Purpose Opportunity Program” (POP) are regionally, operationally, & pedagogically diverse–the inaugural POP cohort of schools is made up of about 5% private, 60% public charter, and 35% public district schools; the 13 partner organizations include 20 schools in 8 states and 10 cities; and over 80% of these schools are focused on serving BIPOC students and/or students from historically marginalized communities.  Across all the schools who self-reported free and reduced price lunch in 2021, the majority of POP participants reported at least 65% of students with free or reduced price lunch.  

As the name suggests, a Learning Lab allows us to focus on learning rather than on intentionally scaling the number of students we serve.  We purposefully plan to moderate–i.e. not scale–the number of students we serve directly so we have capacity to continue to codify and disseminate our insights and resources and, in turn, to scale our impact through our school and youth organization partnerships, many of which strategically leverage technology to serve a broader range of students.  Through our Learning Lab, we aspire to expand our impact incrementally year over year, with the goal of securing 50 partner organizations and serving 10,000 students by the end of the 2024-25 school year through direct student programming and both traditional and technology-powered organizational partnerships. 

Through a Learning Lab and the leveraging of various technologies and organizational partnerships, our ultimate vision is to holistically prepare young people for the 21st century world, especially the world of work.  At a systems level, we are aiming to catalyze a paradigm shift in education.  Rather than focus on the monolithic goal of "college", we are seeking to encourage educators, policy makers, funders, and parents to consider anchoring each child's education most centrally to that child's identity and aspirations or—in the language of nXu—their purpose.  We are aspiring to influence these constituents by directly serving youth in an effort to learn and model how purpose development programming is optimally implemented; by codifying our insights through the creation of sharable curriculum and related, validated assessment system; and by scaling our reach & impact by training educators and partnering with schools and educational organizations.

Since our inception, we have been committed to working with BIPOC students and students from historically marginalized and under-resourced communities, and the schools that serve them so as to ensure they have equitable access to our content.  Our core leadership team and program-support staff all have a track record of intentionally serving traditionally underserved youth, and 100% of them identify as BIPOC or APIA.  Our curriculum has been designed, refined and codified by educators who have intimate knowledge of working with these students, and the content reflects a deep understanding of their academic and social-emotional needs.

nXu is being incubated by Together Education, and thus does not have its own board.  However, we have a Leadership Team that advises and guides nXu and includes the co-founders of Transcend, Aylon Samouha and Jeff Wetzler, Norman Atkins, founder of Uncommon Schools, and Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP.  All three organizations have prioritized serving BIPOC and historically marginalized students. 

During the first three years of our existence, we directly served hundreds of students ourselves–both in-person and virtually–to experientially understand how students responded to our content and curriculum.  We have since broadened our reach and diversified our programmatic offerings.  In fall 2021, we launched our Purpose Opportunity Program (POP) through which we are providing ongoing implementation and assessment support to schools and educators nationwide–through these school-based partnerships, we are gaining critical insight into how a broader set of educators, schools and students are experiencing our purpose and career development curriculum.  

With our latest partnerships in which technology is being strategically leveraged, we have purposefully and steadfastly embedded ourselves in program design and implementation.  With Opportunity College, for example, we developed the higher-ed, 3-credit bearing career exploration curriculum for them, and have continually sought their feedback throughout the implementation process.  We have also been the primary liaison supporting the initial educator who is piloting this curriculum– a high school teacher at Uncommon High School in New York City.  With Stepmojo, we hired the program facilitator who is deploying our curriculum, and we are meeting with the Stepmojo team on at least an every-other-week basis to gather insight and feedback on how the program is running.  And with Opportunity Lab–our newest partnership that will commence this spring–we will be delivering the workshops ourselves so we will have first-hand knowledge of how their students are responding to our content.

And more broadly, we as an organization have been hyper-focused on program assessment.  In partnership with Transcend Education, the Search Institute, and Heather Malin, a leading youth purpose researcher, we have developed a research-based and validated assessment system that complements our curriculum and that allows us to consistently gather data to spotlight areas of our program that are effectively generating student growth and those that need improvement and refining.

We are respectfully requesting support from MIT Solve in support of our Learning Lab for several reasons.

The first reason relates to market barriers we are currently facing.  nXu is at the forefront of youth purpose development program design and is one of the few organizations nationwide currently offering this type of all-inclusive curricular and assessment-based model strategically coupled with comprehensive training and implementation support.  Our research-based model is anchored around five still relatively new, and often disparately taught, core developmental areas–purpose, identity, social-emotional wellness, social capital & career exploration.  As an organization, we are still trying to figure out how to elevate an interest in these developmental areas and our offerings, and support from MIT Solve would provide us with access to the technical expertise, financial resources, and the broader MIT Solve community to strategically market and disseminate our program. 

Second, from a program model perspective, we are still organizationally and operationally trying to figure out how best to deliver all of the services and programming we offer.  We currently have several components to our broader business model including direct student and educator programming (i.e. bootcamps and workshops); our Purpose Opportunity Program; individual purpose development training & coaching sessions; and our organizational partnerships.  Our team has been earnestly thinking through how all of these unique yet similar programmatic offerings fit together, and we are confident that the establishment of a Learning Lab–through which we leverage technology, including through tech-based partnerships–will allow us to continue to incrementally serve students directly through both public and partnership-based student programming, while also continuing to grow other operational, analytical and programmatic components of our model.

And lastly, we are continuously thinking through our financial model, and how to best balance financial sustainability and demand generation while keeping equity and access to our program as a top priority.  While we are not yet financially self-sustaining, we are generating revenue from direct student & educator programming, our Purpose Opportunity Program, and our organizational partnerships.  Philanthropic support from MIT Solve would allow us to continue to refine our programmatic model through our Learning Lab, in turn expanding our broader learning community & tech-based partnerships, and ultimately directly impacting more students and educators nationwide.

nXu is at the forefront of youth purpose development program design.  Our broad organizational approach is innovative and original in that we are strategically & methodically using a research-based model that integrates five core developmental areas—purpose, identity, social-emotional wellness, social capital & career exploration—to engage students and educators in defining personal & professional pathways that align with their evolving sense of self.  Our curricular innovation has been to strategically connect career exploration to these constructs through a middle and high school curriculum that allows students to engage in career exploration through the lens of purpose and identity while cultivating their SEL skills and social capital.  Through our educator trainings, nXu supports teachers to not only better support their students, but also cultivate their own sense of purpose.  And through our research-backed assessment system, we consistently evaluate the efficacy of our programming and make real-time curricular modifications to meet the demands of the students we serve. 

With this in mind, access to our type of purpose and youth development content is still limited within the education space.  We believe that by leveraging technology, we will be able to expand access to a larger number of students while mitigating the need for schools and educational organizations to have deep expertise in both the content and how best to teach the content.  It is our firm belief that not every organization, ourselves included, needs to build out its own tech solution to meet the needs of the students and educators we aspire to serve.  Rather, our proposed innovation to address the absence of widespread access to purpose and youth development curriculum & programming is to build strategic, tech-driven partnerships with other like-minded, mission aligned organizations that allow us to leverage the tech infrastructure that others have already built to reach and serve more students.

If we are fortunate to secure strategic, operational and philanthropic support from MIT Solve for our Learning Lab in which we leverage technology-driven partnerships to broaden our impact, we aspire to meet the following goals.  (Please note: we intentionally plan to moderate–i.e. not scale–the number of students we serve directly so we have capacity to continue to codify and disseminate our insights and resources and, in turn, to scale our impact through our school and youth organization partnerships.)

2021-22 School Year Goals (i.e. Current Status):

• Students served directly by nXu: 410

• # of school partner organizations implementing nXu’s curriculum: 13 

• Students impacted by nXu through nXu’s curriculum received through their schools: 2,290

2022-23 School Year Goals:

• Students served directly by nXu through the Learning Lab: 450

• # of school partners implementing nXu’s curriculum: 25 

• Students impacted by nXu through nXu’s curriculum received through their schools: 4,000

2023-24 School Year Goals:

• Students served directly by nXu through the Learning Lab: 500

• # of school partner organizations implementing nXu’s curriculum: 40 

• Students impacted by nXu through nXu’s curriculum received through their schools: 7,000

2024-25 School Year (and Beyond) Goals:

• Students served directly by nXu through the Learning Lab: 550

• # of school partner organizations implementing nXu’s curriculum: 50 

• Students impacted by nXu through nXu’s curriculum received through their schools: 10,000

We plan to achieve these goals by continuing to build upon our pre-existing school-based relationships and technology-driven organizational partnerships.  Recruitment for the next cohort of POP partners is already underway.  For the 2022-23 school year, we are aiming to secure 25 regionally, operationally and pedagogically diverse POP partners, serving 4,000 students across a larger, more diverse geographic area. Once POP is fully established, we aspire to serve ~50 schools/year, providing nXu’s curriculum to 10,000 new students/year. Over time, we expect POP partners to integrate our model across multiple grade levels, allowing us to impact a growing number of students annually.

With regards to our pre-existing partnerships with Stepmojo, Opportunity College and Opportunity Labs/The American Dream Academy, all three entities are currently in their pilot year.  It is our hope that as these organizations expand and diversify their footprint, our partnership with each will grow, in turn allowing us to systematically and strategically impact a broader range of students in a range of academic and out-of-school settings. 

We will measure progress towards our aforementioned impact goals in two primary ways: (1) student & educator outcomes and (2) growth in our reach.

Our student curriculum has been designed to generate growth in–and our assessment system has been built to evaluate–the following constructs: improved social emotional competencies and purpose measured by increase in self awareness, resilience, & overall sense of purpose; positive sense of identity and agency measured by growth in positive identity (racial & ethnic identity measures; occupational identity measures), self efficacy, and clarity of future goals (including related to career exploration); positive social behavior measured by an increase in collaboration skills, social awareness, & developmental relationships; school connectedness measured by an increase in general sense of belonging, and school connectedness & engagement.  In multiple settings and use cases, our curriculum has generated repeated measurable growth in purpose and social-emotional competencies among both students & educators. We have also been focused on assessing educator outcomes by evaluating their overall satisfaction with our curriculum as well as the program’s impact on their own sense of purpose, personal identity, belonging, & life/job satisfaction. Over the next 12 months, success will be measured through measurable impact on both students & educators. 

Second, we will assess progress through growth in the number of partners–both schools as well as tech-driven organizations–with whom we are working, and the number of students who experience our curriculum and programming as a result.  As our pre-existing partners gain additional traction in the education space and expand their own breadth of impact, we anticipate being able to serve an incremental number of students through these partnerships.  In addition, we remain committed to adding to our number of strategic partnerships, in particular focusing our partnership outreach on organizations leveraging technology to drive growth and impact. 

Our theory of change and how we aspire to directly challenge the system-wide academic and social challenges that are afflicting our nation’s youth and educators is best described in our organization’s logic model. 

We at nXu leverage independently, and in partnership with other organizations, a range of technology tools to deliver our purpose development programming.  When directly serving students and educators ourselves via virtual bootcamps and workshops, we use Zoom as our preferred virtual video conferencing/communication platform in conjunction with Nearpod, a virtual interactive classroom tool, to display our curriculum and carry out our lessons.  As we look to expand our breadth of impact, our strategic partnerships with organizations using unique technology-solutions of their own has proven to be an effective way of disseminating our content without having to design a more sophisticated technology strategy ourselves.  Programming delivered in partnership with both Stepmojo and Opportunity College is powered by Canvas, a leading Learning Management System (LMS) that grants students and educators equitable access to course content in an engaging, easy-to-use virtual environment.  All of nXu’s purpose and career exploration curriculum, which was originally developed and codified using Googledocs, was recently migrated over to Canvas to allow for ease of access regardless of location or time of day.  Opportunity Labs/The American Dream Academy is powering its programming, in partnership with nXu, via Coursera, an online course platform that grants a broader range of students access to our programming in a user friendly manner.  Through our Learning Lab, and as we look to build additional strategic partnerships, we are eager to leverage the tech infrastructure that others have already built and/or adopted to serve more students. 

nXu is being incubated by Together Education, Inc., a non-profit that incubates start-up education projects devoted to serving BIPOC students and students from low-income backgrounds.  nXu is fully responsible for its budget including all fundraising.   

Since our inception, equity has been at the core of nXu’s proposition.  As codified in our internal “Commitment to Equity” statement, we have pledged our commitment to equity & inclusion and expounded upon our focus on purpose development as it relates to equity.  First, we believe purpose development is crucial for all people, but especially for those who have been historically barred from access to power and resources.  Second, purpose development requires accessing one’s social-emotional skills to build an environment & culture of inclusion which are core to building equity.  And lastly, activating one’s purpose, given its roots in examining needs in one’s community, will increase justice and diminish outcome disparities in our society.  If equity is ensuring that people are provided with the support that they need to be successful, equipping people with the tools to better understand themselves and each other is crucial for being authentically responsive to people & communities.

Organizationally, we have built our team and internal organizational culture with an explicit focus on equity.  Our core team and program-facing staff have shown a long-term commitment to equity-related initiatives, and as we add new team members, we are continuing to seek individuals who reflect the demographics of the students we serve and who possess the capacity to navigate topics of race, class, & equity. 

We have developed our program model to build young people’s competence with issues of equity while ensuring that our learning experiences foster inclusion.  From an equity-of-access perspective, we have focused on serving BIPOC students and students from historically marginalized communities for whom issues of equity & inclusion are often an insidious problem.  As for our curriculum, it addresses foundational competencies that are necessary for equity & inclusion: in particular, a deep understanding of oneself and a willingness, desire, and ability to understand others’ perspectives.  In one curricular component, for example, students deeply consider their self-identity by drafting a life timeline which they share with peers.  While sharing, acknowledging, and affirming each other’s life histories and identities from an asset-based framework, they cultivate concrete SEL skills of conversation initiation and active listening which are essential for cultivating an inclusive environment.

We have developed a portfolio of programs of varying durations and for various audiences that we offer to partners interested in purpose and youth development programming. These programs include workshops (for students and educators, as well as the general public), bootcamps (series of multiple programming sessions), educator trainings, curriculum design and implementation support, custom consulting, educator coaching, and a comprehensive Purpose Opportunity Program that packages all of these offerings into a comprehensive program.  Our partners are typically middle and high schools, nonprofit organizations serving high school and college aged youth, and, occasionally, businesses. We deliver our programming through a combination of modalities, including virtually, in-person, or a combination of the two.

Our programmatic impact is not measured in financial dollars, but rather through growth in purpose and other related social-emotional constructs and developmental areas, as well as educator and student satisfaction with their nXu experience.  

Given the challenges of the twin pandemics of COVID and recent manifestations of systemic racism, there is now a keen awareness among a wider range of researchers & educators that it is essential to address students’ social-emotional needs and to reignite a sense of direction through cultivating a sense of purpose.  Given this increased demand for purpose & SEL solutions, we are eager to further build our capacity/infrastructure and strategic partnerships to comprehensively support a growing number of students & educators. We have a proven track record of success–our methodology & curriculum have been validated in multiple contexts & geographies–and we are committed to deepening our impact amongst students and educators, alike.

Our core programming is currently funded primarily through a combination of program service fees paid by customers/partner organizations (i.e. earned revenue) and private philanthropic funding.  We have had small government contracts in the past,but it is not a revenue channel that we have actively pursued.  While some of our more well-funded partner organizations are able to pay, others are less equipped to absorb the expense.  For this reason, we have secured philanthropic support from funders who are interested in supporting the expansion of our work and/or subsidizing the cost for partner organizations so more participants may benefit from our programming. 

In addition to our core programming that we actively deliver to customers and partner organizations, we also invest time and resources in creating new programming and revising/improving existing programming.  These activities are primarily philanthropically funded and are typically performed upon securing philanthropic resources.

As we evolve, we remain hyper attuned to the financial sustainability of our efforts.  As noted elsewhere,  we have had success generating earned revenue.  Going into SY2022-23, we have expanded the potential earned revenue pathways which–along with projected growth in demand–have positioned us to grow our overall earned revenue next school year.  More specifically, our technology-related partnerships are positioned to generate increasing earned revenue.  For example, we are already earning a meaningful per-pupil amount for every student we have been serving through our Stepmojo course.  Thus, we expect our overall reliance on philanthropy should moderate over time.

In the last three fiscal years, approximately 15-25% of our revenues have come from earned revenue and the rest from philanthropy.  Over time, we hope to increase the earned revenue percentage of revenues for core programming to be closer to 60-70%, by increasing demand for the program by demonstrating its value for our partner organizations.

Since our inception, we have raised approximately $4.5 million in philanthropy.  Notably, as a measure of confidence in our model and continued investment in our work, we have been able to secure multiple multi-year grants (e.g. earlier in our current fiscal year, we secured a 3-year $750,000 grant from a large national funder that had made 2 grants in the past).