City as a School | Civics Guild

Teens are increasingly 

• Disenchanted with one-size fits all school & skeptical of University
• Seeking autonomy, relevant skills, professional mentors, and opportunities
• Disconnected from alternative pathways to explore career choices, entrepreneurship or solve local or global problems.
• Can’t find the knowledge, mentors, and tools that would help them engage with solving the civic problems in their schools.

In a global study of 10,000 young people, Hickman et al. (2021) found that 75% agree the future is frightening, 55% go so far as to agree that “We are doomed”, and 48% believe that adults ignore or dismiss their concerns. Youth depression and anxiety are on the rise as traditional communities for youth empowerment are in decline. Even before the pandemic, the 2020 WISE Global Education barometer found that students across 20 countries want far more out of their educational opportunities: Only half felt prepared to better the world around them, they want their schooling to provide more space to new technologies, creativity, curiosity, and collaboration, and they believe in equal opportunities for all.

At the last organisation I was product manager at, Kubrio, within our student body of 400 young people aged 10-18 only 15% were what most describe as entrepreneurial but a much larger percentage nearly 60% had attended a class in some social-impact or global challenge type topic. I assume this distribution is fairly common across other student bodies. That some percentage around 15% is self-determined and entrepreneurial and a large majority want to contribute to social challenges without the pressure to start a business and sell products and services.

Another data point that we observe is the intense selection process for young people applying to selective fellowships like Atlas or the Schmidt Futures’ Rise program. For Rise, 10,000 students apply but only 100 young people get selected. This untapped interest and drive is what we hope to catch and advance in our open ecosystem of problem solvers.

Disconnected passions from opportunities 

A young person aged 14+ is currently disconnected from the knowledge, mentors, and tools that would help them engage with solving the civic problems immediately. At best they can participate in a hackathon and win prize money and an opportunity to continue building their solution. What about the 100s of motivated young people that failed to get to the next round or win the pitch?

Currently open networks and ecosystems of the required knowledge, skills, mentors, and tech. are opaque to a motivated young person. The frontier of innovation and social challenge is shared through the bottleneck of human teachers at hackathons. Finding a map that makes sense of complex problems, projects and the groups actively working on solutions that would create meaningful change is only rarely found by the deeply self-determined young people.

Teenagers have incredible untapped potential as problem-solvers and future-creators. We provide the skills, networks, latest technology and opportunities that teens need to become changemakers via open ecosystems.

An opensource tech tree of social and scientific challenges curated by real labs and organisations, and emerging tech detector to build in-roads for young people to sense and solve real world challenges. Equiped with a network of neer-peer mentors, experts and A.I. co-pilots, the ecossytem crowd sources, crowd-funds and crowd-solves together.

Our solution is comprised of 4 parts. At a high level the journey for the learner is to:

• Join an online community,
• Browse and sign up for classes, mentor sessions and guided projects that align with their interests.
• Clarify their interests and where they want to apply themselves by exploring the problem space curated by real labs and organisations.
• Submit solutions to projects that have been scoped with the labs and organisations currently working on the issues.

In a more detail:

1) Community of near-peer mentors, experts and collective learning opportunities

• Weekly affinity meetings, Discord community, and multi-week courses onboard students into civics and global problem solving mindsets.
• Teens can book time vetted experts to better understand projects and opportunities in specific civics spaces
• Office hours and expert guest workshops are managed and facilitated by Pathway Managers. Expert guest workshops are listed on the the City as a school app
• Courses on global poverty, existential risks, effective altruism, animal welfare, sustainable development goals, and more.

2) Frontier Investigation - make it legible using open source Tech Tree

Use Foresight institute software for mapping problems, solutions, blockers and labs that are working on those problems / solutions in a tree structure. We also use Envisioning’s Tech detector to backwards design classes based on emerging tech.

• Teens who have come to the community with a specific interest or who have developed an interest based on courses, workshops, and mentors explore civic frontiers in more specificity.
• Using these existing trees or creating trees of more suitable/thesis aligned problem spaces, young people can begin to understand the territory surrounding the problem space.
• Currently tech trees allow labs to coordinate funding - The civics Guild creates pathways & talent in-roads for young people to build relationships and social capital via projects in that problem space.

3) Nolej & A.I. co-pilots for topic-specific learning

• Our partners at Nolej allow us to create active learning materials, concept maps, definitions and more for the target problem space
• Student agency to develop the knowledge and experience they need to understand the civic frontier they are most interested in pursuing.

4) Projects scoped by the labs for portfolio

• All the above culminates in projects teens can take on to support labs and organizations operating in specific civic spaces.
• City as a School pathway managers connect learnings from the community to labs and orgs. in the field through:
  • Monthly support workshops with labs to crowd source problems and scope projects that Rise learners can crowd-solve.
  • Curated projects, some with bounties or prize money attached.
• Labs, Industry Partners and sponsors provide funding to enable pathways managers to offer all the above for free to learners. We give them talent flow.

Young people between the ages of 14-24’s lives disenchanted with the one-size fits all model of school. Their time is over scheduled and they’re underprepared for the demands of the rapidly changing world of work and global challenges. 

Many kids this age can sense that high school is increasingly irrelevant and teachers are leaving. What's going on in their live outside of school and what's being taught inside the school feel disconnected. 

What's worse is that Gen-Z's entrance into the work force is often met with stigma about their 'short attention spans', 'inability to commit' from Millenial HR managers. This leaves many young people feeling deeply hopeless about their future career prospects.

We're creating realtime supply and demand of experts, resources and new pathways for teens to thrive in the modern world.

In doing so young people will know what they want to apply themselves to sooner, be future-ready and find pathways to apply themselves. The will not use education degrees, especially the ‘business and economics’ type degrees as insurance for the lack of self-understanding of where their unique talents are best applied. This will reduce the cost of their education by aligning their motivations, interests, course choices and the career potentials they've been exposed to in our Guild. 

This will impact their sense of personal productivity, meaning and contribution to the local or global community. 

We hope that each young person feels like they understand their unique place in the world and are able to participate in the creation and evolution of their society

Serj Hunt has worked at all levels of learning with the mission of unlocking human potential at scale. From international orgs. such as Asia Productivity Organisation, Startup Accelerators, Corporate L&D to Private schools, new forms of assessment and networks of  homeschoolers.  His interdisciplinary and integrative approach has been a journey to uncover universality in human nature to build infrastructure for a new education system fit for the 21st century and beyond. Before City as a School he was:

• Product Manager at Kubrio (prev GalileoXP) connecting 400 families to a modern curriculum and network of 22 learning centres and their offerings all over the world. The program connected 8-18 year olds to a relevant modern curriculum including skills in high growth industries and global challenges.
• Founding team of the School for Social Design, an org at the centre of the Humane Tech Movement, working closely with The Centre of Humane Tech. We worked with clients like Facebook Cultural Integrity Team, Google Maps and Extinction Rebellion, providing them with a new design process and language to reduce the harm done by their products. Advocate of the ‘Time well spent’ metric.
• Lead design thinking workshops for Growth School which included bringing the students and leadership together to build a new curriculum and community strategy.
• As part of my work as an ambassador of Notion.so he’s helped organisations with knowledge management and visual mapping tools to help them align resources to innovate in their organisation and be more productive. This familiarity with knowledge management tools and processes is central to enabling young people to explore the frontier of science and innovation using similar tools like Forsight Institure’s Tech trees.

Our Pathway Managers, Jonah Boucher and Kishore Daggupati, both studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and have been involved for several years with youth empowerment, educational innovation, and the effective altruism movement.

Our biggest challenge is building a marketplace platform that can effectively connect students with mentors and partner organisations, and generating sufficient demand from both sides of the marketplace to achieve sustainable growth.

Our Civics Pathway relies on three key human capital components: 1) Student learners and solvers, 2) Teachers and mentors, 3) Partner organizations to provide opportunities and projects. We are applying to Solve to expand our partnerships and resources in each category. We hope to:

-Partner with organizations that already work with large cohorts of students and would like to add more civic engagement to their programming.

-Engage teachers and mentors who want to expand their involvement in civic empowerment of youth.

-Partner with civic organisations that can scope projects and opportunities for youth, providing a pipeline for young talent to join them in their missions.

Another core challenge will be a legal challenge of setting up the correct governance, board, by-laws and relationships with the City as a School LTD, UK based for profit entity. We’ll require support to create the 501 (c)(3) to receive capital to subsidise our pathways.

There also exists the technical barriers of developing and scaling A.I. technology and building a reliable and user-friendly platform that can handle large volumes of data and transactions. We have quite a strong ethical stance on user data protection inspired by the work of RadicalxChange and Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. We require mentorship on how to technically enable this quality of data sovereignty on our platform.

The City as a School platform in general provides a new opportunity for learning that is accessible and scalable. We empower students to discover and pursue their passions, find opportunities to learn new skills and assemble a portfolio, build a professional network by connecting with mentors and professionals, and ultimately discover internship and career opportunities. We advance a new educational paradigm by flexibly leveraging the best of in-person and virtual learning, individual study and community-embedded practice, and human-centric engagement and AI technology, ultimately giving students their own agency to navigate these different modalities of learning.

Pedagogical Innovations:

• Personalized learning: City as a School provides a personalized learning experience that allows students to discover and pursue their passions, and learn at their own pace.
• Flexible learning modalities: The platform leverages the best of in-person and virtual learning, individual study and community-embedded practice, allowing students to navigate different modalities of learning.
• Human-centric engagement: The platform fosters human-centric engagement, providing opportunities for students to connect with mentors and professionals, and to engage in direct service with partner organizations.
• Hybrid format: City as a School's hybrid format allows for specific locations to become interconnected hubs of youth civic action, while also broadening the global reach of remote-first opportunities.

Technical Innovations:

• AI-Copilots for Just-in-time content: The platform uses Nolej.io‘s A.I. technology to create active learning materials and construct concept and skill maps in the domain of interest.
• Opensource Tech trees: We use opensource techtrees that are actively maintained by Labs working on the biggest social and technological challenges allowing people to make sense of the frontier of innovation.
• Digital learning records: The platform allows students to create digital learning records, which capture code, images, videos, and documents that can be used as evidence of learning.

Within this innovative educational context, the Civics Pathway serves as a super node in the network of organizations empowering teens to tackle civic and social challenges. It engages students in this pressing work, provides opportunities to learn and upskill, connects them with mentors across fields, and brings them to other direct service organizations ready to make a difference in the world. By increasing the pool of students ready, willing, and able to meet the challenges of their time, the ripples of the Civics Pathway will spread far and strong, supporting the work of dozens of partner organizations in the civic action space.

Year 1 Goals:

1. Number of students engaged: 300 students
2. Placement rate: 10%
3. Learning record posts: 1,500 posts
4. Project Deliverables produced: 600 deliverables
5. Alumni engagement: Conduct 30 alumni interviews shared

Year 5 Goals:

1. Number of students engaged: 10,000 students
2. Placement rate: 25%
3. Learning record posts: 50,000 posts
4. Project Deliverables produced: 20,000 deliverables
5. Alumni engagement: Conduct 1000 alumni interviews shared

How we'll achieve this: 

1. Collaborative learning flywheel: Our learning record is a chance for learners to 'build in public'. Their user generated content in the learning network will be easy to share with other young people on other social networks and drive more signups. 

2. Our ability to succeed will depend on how well we can demonstrate outcomes. By documenting the learner's contributions in the learning record, and sharing the interviews of any current students or alumni who get placed we'll be able to create more content leverage and demonstrate outcomes. 

3. Bringing more mentors and partner organisations onboard also brings with them more networks of young people
   

4. Co-ownership as go-to-market strategy. We're a co-owned for profit. Our teachers and mentors are incentive in ownership of City as a School based on their actions taken within the network. We align incentives by rewarding, 1) 3 referals of new teachers gets you 50 shares, 2) Teaching a class 3) placing a learner at a work or internship opportunity. 

• Number of students engaged: This will be measured by tracking the number of students who participate in your courses and mentorship sessions.
• Placement rate: This metric will measure the rate at which we are successfully able to place students in fellowships, internships, or projects with your partners in the civic action space.
• Learning record posts: Students are prompted to record learning in their learning record and include code, documents, images and videos as evidence of learning in their projects. We will track the number of posts that students add to their learning record as evidence of learning.
• Deliverables produced: We will monitor the deliverables produced by young people related to civics and the associated skills tags.
• Alumni engagement: We will engage with Civics Pathway alumni in interviews to understand the opportunities that we helped them discover and the nature of their work once they’re hired.

Broadly within the SDG

• SDG 4.3.1: Participation rate of youth and adults in formal and non-formal education and training in the previous 12 months, by sex
• SDG 4.4.1: Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill
• SDG 4.7.1: Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development are mainstreamed in (a) national education policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher education and (d) student assessment
• SDG 4.b.1: Volume of official development assistance flows for scholarships by sector and type of study

If we engage, upskill, and give technology that helps teens to make sense of social challenges then they will join and create movements taking civic action so that youth can lead the movement to create a more positive and sustainable future.

Goal: To equip young people with the skills, support, and technology needed to make sense of and solve local and global social and environmental challenges.

Assumptions: Young people need access to high-quality learning content, supportive mentors, and technology to tackle complex social and environmental issues.

Traditional education systems often fail to provide young people with the skills and support needed to address social and environmental challenges.

Providing young people with self-directed learning experiences, supportive mentors, and A.I technology can help them understand complex domains and develop the skills and confidence needed to solve social and environmental problems.

Activities:

Provide a self-directed learning experience through the web app and learning centres.

Build learning relationships around a learner from our network of supportive mentors for each challenge area.

Provide technology resources to young people to support their problem-solving.

Offer opportunities for young people to apply their skills to local and global challenges.

Provide a portfolio app to help young people track their progress and experiences.

Outputs:

A network of young people, mentors, and teachers engaged with City as a School.

Young people who are equipped with skills, confidence, and technology to tackle social and environmental challenges.

A portfolio app that helps young people demonstrate and evidence their learning while building social capital.

Outcomes:

Young people gain the skills and confidence needed to tackle social and environmental challenges.

Young people have access to a supportive community of mentors and peers.

Traditional education systems are disrupted by a viable alternative system that demonstrates success in preparing young people to tackle complex social and environmental challenges.

Society benefits from the innovative and impactful contributions of young people.

The Civics Pathway specifically will be driven by two core technologies: First, our learners will use AI-powered learning tools from our partner Nolej, including their collective intelligence engine that matches learners and experts with knowledge and resources, to chart their way through problem spaces that they’re intrinsically motivated to solve. Second, drawing from The Foresight Institute’s Tech Trees, & Envisioning’s Tech detector, the Civics Guild will map and connect organizations, labs, and people in specific cause areas such as climate change so that students can explore the frontier of action and find where they can fit in.

The Civics Pathway is situated within a broader ecosystem of technology.

The City as a School platform is a marketplace (web app) and learning record (mobile app). Our learning record is currently not blockchain based but will eventually store credentials and evidence of learning on chain. This web app allows are teachers and mentors to list their offerings and for learners to filter these offerings based on their goals, interests and location.

All learning on and off the platform is recorded in a multi-modal learning record on a mobile app this allows learners to evidence and share proof of their skills and knowledge in other networks. They can create custom views of their learning record to present to employers. We actively matchmake learner portfolios with opportunities within our network of partner organisations. The mobile app will include a QR check-in feature and Augmented Realty capability to use the City as a canvas for learning.

Diversity:

Serj Hunt the founder, CEO is mixed race, British, Indian, Chinese, Melanau. It’s in the DNA of the organisation to embrace multicultural, interdisciplinary thinking. Cultural diversity within our team and network of teachers is key to innovation and our interdisciplinary pedagogical stance.

CAS as a movement, is committed to ensuring that young learners who are most marginalized, in particular Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth, have the same opportunity to participate in learner-centered environments as any other young learner. This means confronting and mitigating the structural, systemic, and individual barriers to access and or eliminating them entirely.

Diversity itself is valued as an asset within our ecosystem. The aim is to respond to and support the uniqueness of each child with unique pathways for learning. In standardized, one-size-fits-all education systems, the differences between learners can be seen as a problem; by contrast, in the learner-centered system, differences are welcomed as opportunities to create more meaningful and relevant learning experiences for each learner.

The presence of differences is recognized as an opportunity to draw on and enrich learning with different perspectives, different lived experiences, and different concerns. Likewise, the differences between adults and community members are welcomed and valued as contributing to a rich learning experience for children.

Equity:

Commitment to teachers: City as a School is a community owned company. We run a phantom share co-ownership model that enables teachers to access wealth generating opportunities by taking specific actions on our platform 1) Teaching a class 2) Referring a new teacher onto the platform 3) placing a teen at a work or internship opportunity.

Commitment to our learners: Our relationships with sponsors and industry partners allows us to subsidise learning on our platform. This makes certain classes and pathways on our marketplace free to the learner as part of our mission to reduce the financial barrier for more young people to access knowledge, skills and networks.

Ensuring equity for each young learner requires that we:

1. provide an environment that's sensitive to different cultures, identities, and backgrounds, that allows for different ways of learning and of demonstrating that learning, and that responds effectively to the different needs and aspirations of individual learners.
2. Set individual outcomes that are aimed at each learner reaching their full and unique potential as whole human beings.
3. Mobilize funding resources, provide needs based pathways, and empower learner agency appropriately for each learner’s self defined goals.

Inclusion:

At City as a School, we see our individualized pathways, the cultivation of learner agency, and the fostering of a healthy learning community as supportive of our efforts to include every individual learner. Inclusion is the shared responsibility of every member of our learning community. Inclusion is achieved when everyone sees their own role in the inclusion of oneself and of others by taking decisive action to elevate, honor, and amplify the voices of those who have been historically and are presently marginalized or excluded; and attends to all dimensions of inclusion: mental, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual.

We are a marketplace that takes a 20% commission on all transactions. Learners and their families purchase classes and 1-1 mentor / tutor sessions.

We subsidise specific collections of classes on the marketplace with industry sponsors and contracts starting at $500 a month. In exchange the industry partners receive access to our talent pool and brand exposure.

Industry sponsors and contracts allow us to offer free classes and mentorship to our learners.

To achieve financial sustainability, we aim to generate revenue through our marketplace platform, industry partnerships, and co-ownership incentives. Our marketplace will take a 20% commission fee on transactions, generating revenue from classes, guided projects, mentorship sessions, and digital products. We also plan to secure monthly contracts from industry, philanthropy, and foundation partners to subsidize the cost of a "pathway manager" role, ensuring that the Civics Pathway program is free for learners and aligns with partners committed to advancing youth civic engagement.

To ensure liquidity in our marketplace, we will incentivize network members to refer new teachers and teach classes on our platform. Through our partnership with OwnCo, we will use a phantom share scheme to offer early members co-ownership in our company, allocating 2% of the company to teachers in our first year. This will encourage them to teach on the platform and refer teachers who monetize within the first two weeks of onboarding, helping us achieve financial sustainability and growth.

We’ve generated $7000 in Gross merchandise volume (GMV) during our pilot since August 2022 without any marketing.

We've also secured our first $500 contract with a partner organisation.