AKALA: Accelerating career and college readiness through transformative tech-enabled mentorship

The environment in schools in underserved communities has made engaging with a counselor, and by proxy, the learner’s future, unlikely. In high school, the learner to counselor ratio is at an unfathomable 405:1, and rises to 1000:1 in many states (NACAC). 67% of public high schools DO NOT EVEN HAVE dedicated college/career counselors (NACAC). With almost 15 million public school students and 25,000 public schools in America, millions of students are not receiving any college or career guidance. This is not a problem; it is a crisis.

With no guidance, learners are not prepared to enter the postsecondary world, whether in the workforce or college. This leads to huge problems in America: Unacceptably high college dropout rates and unsustainable employment volatility rates. This is not a problem brought upon by the learner; instead it is our education system setting learners up for failure along their pathway.

On a societal level, the wealth gap in this country begins in our education system. We cannot exist as an equitable society when our education system prevents equity from happening.

This is where AKALA saves the day. We provide a solution to the severe lack of college and career guidance through our blended model of an innovative platform paired with mentorship. It comes at a time when learners, particularly in underserved communities, face a mountain to climb to find their pathway to college and career. The extent to which they receive guidance is telling them to settle. We know learners only need an opportunity to succeed and they will flourish. They have the ability; we’ve seen it. They have the dreams. They just need the right tools.

The last explanation of the crisis is in a stunning statistic. In 2000, FOUR states had 50% or more of learner-age children living in poverty. Today, the number of states has risen to TWENTY ONE. (The Atlantic, SEF, NY Times). AKALA, amidst this crisis, introduces a powerful tool to break the cycles of poverty in America.

Our solution is AKALA, a pathway discovery platform, helping 7th-12th graders navigate the complicated journey to college/career with critical guidance at each stage of their education. 92% of high school learners do not feel prepared for post-secondary pathways (USA Today, 2023), and the effects of guidance on a learner’s college/career path are undeniable. High school seniors who met with their counselor were 6.8 times more likely to complete the FAFSA and 3.2 times more likely to attend college, (NACAC, 2016). But only one meeting cannot ensure a successful pathway. Imagine a monthly meeting for 4 or 5 years!

Teen-friendly, adaptive surveys and inputs feed a recommendation engine that provides customized guidance, reinforced by one-on-one work with a mentor. Further, with our innovative College Major and College/Career Explorer features, it is easy to explore everything about a college or career to help build a postsecondary pathway list far more efficiently. We equip mentorship organizations with our curriculum and technology (and staff, when necessary) for an integrative, personal guidance experience, as learners discover their passions and purpose through creative education modules.

The AKALA platform is holistically based, organized into categories colleges and employers consider when evaluating candidates (classes, extracurriculars, community service, etc.); everything is customized to the learners’ schools and the area in which they live. 

The AKALA Curriculum: 

7th, 8th, 9th grade: Passion Exploration. Learners dive into videos curated to their interest categories, summer opportunities, career exploration (through our partnership with Gladeo) and more. They are also encouraged to engage in activities to further their exploration. Grades are monitored and increasing rigor of courses is encouraged where applicable. 

10th grade: Creating the Path. Learners, with passions discovered, create a more focused pathway list with our College/Career Explorer and College Majors features. Involvement in activities and community service are monitored monthly. Grades are monitored and increasing rigor of courses is encouraged where applicable. 

11th grade: The Process. Learners form their list of “best-fit” schools for their post high school aspirations and begin writing their college essays. Starting early alleviates the pressure/stress teenagers currently endure. If college is not the right fit, plans are put in motion to pursue other post-secondary pathways.

Each step is outlined in detail for the mentors facilitating the program. In addition to our training and curriculum, our staff is available to assist with questions for which mentors do not feel qualified to answer. When we incorporate our AI-enabled Pathways Assistant Mentor, or PAM, the mentor-learner experience will be even more efficient, saving research time and increasing research accuracy. It will further empower our mentors, the critical and irreplaceable human aspect of the process.

AKALA will change the trajectory of a learner’s future through its game-changing platform and method of meeting early and often with a mentor. Our curriculum guides learners not just through academic skill development and career exploration; it also has a strong focus on social emotional learning, especially in the areas of self-advocacy and collaboration.

Underserved learners are our target population, who are often studying in schools where the learner to counselor ratio is 405:1 to 1000:1 (NACAC, 2023). These learners are disproportionately black and brown, and first generation learners.

At school, the underserved often face low expectations. Our platform monitors interests and passions and our recommendation engine advises learners to attempt more rigorous course selections as well as electives that will directly impact their post-secondary journeys. Those who are struggling academically can be identified early and interventions can be adopted to turn around performance.

At home, underserved learners deal with a lack of time with parents, who are often forced to work multiple jobs, and a lack of access to mentors/counselors. This leads to a lack of participation and development as a learner, at no fault of their own. AKALA includes the learner, mentor and parent to inspire career-focused learning at every phase of the academic journey. This kind of knowledge of possible career paths as early as 7th grade has a tremendous impact. 

AKALA has proven that we can not only close the opportunity gap, but have built a technology that can do so at scale. Our platform and methods allow a mentor or counselor to work with many learners and stay organized without lowering the quality of guidance.

We have been embedded in these underserved populations for more than three decades, and the thing we most often see is that these learners are encouraged to settle, or to put a ceiling on their potential. The power of these learners is inspiring and we want to give them as many pathways as is possible for them, rather than limit their potential.

We created the AKALA webinar series to develop whole family buy-in to our platform. One example is that first-generation families often expect that their children should immediately get jobs after high school and contribute to the family income. Educating the parents during our programming about their child’s options is critical. The importance of a continuing education and the exponential possibilities for learners who do so, as well as other post-high school career options, is explained during our webinars.

Providing equity in college access and career exploration is an absolute necessity right now in America. By 2031, 72% of jobs will require postsecondary education and/or training (Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, 2023). In this current moment in America, 90 million working-age adults have no credential beyond a high school diploma. More than one-third of them, about 36 million people, attended college but left without finishing (Lumina, 2020). These numbers are not sustainable for our next generation.

Our blended model (tech + one-on-one) is our key differentiator from programs that use a “tech-only” approach. We know that tech-only DOES NOT WORK, especially in underserved, under-resourced communities, and in this critical developmental period, learners need adult mentors to guide them through the byzantine post-secondary process. 

Perry, Barbara, and Debon have been immersed in the communities they are trying to change for over 20 years (Barbara for over 30 years!). Our methodology at AKALA is rooted in user-centered design, as we learned as fellows at the USC Brittingham Social Venture Lab. All stakeholders - parent, learner, educator/mentor, counselor - are involved in our product creation and improvement. If data collected shows that a method is not working, we change course for what is best for the learner. The human element of pathways guidance cannot be overstated in the use of our technology.

The best way to scale AKALA is through national mentorship organizations. We have a proven model that we have implemented at Boys and Girls Clubs and Police Athletic Leagues (PAL). We already have a partnership with Santa Monica BGC (Hardeep Dhandwar, Director) partnering with their College Bound Program and a project with California PAL (Jennifer Lopez, Executive Director, California PAL), 70+ chapters in California, strengthening their Life After High School Program. With the MIT Solve grant, we will start with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts (Terrence McCarron, the Chief Program Officer) which services 900 underserved learners that fit in our desired age group of 13 to 17, as well as California PAL chapters and multiple sites of the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club. It is within these organizations who interact with underserved communities every day where we have crowd-sourced ideas to better serve these communities.

Further on our roadmap, we will expand to BBBS and PAL chapters nationwide and to individual parents through a far more affordable model than exists in the market today, and then to school counselors who can utilize the platform and curriculum to scale to more learners, while better handling their overwhelming caseloads.

Our work with Boys and Girls clubs and Police Athletic League chapters is proving us correct that early engagement with learners and continued mentorship using our platform is the key to discovering appropriate post-secondary pathways. We know the AKALA platform works; we just need the opportunity to prove it at scale.

In terms of current scale, the platform is built and the curriculum is complete. We have partnerships with Santa Monica Boys and Girls Clubs and California PAL which has proven the efficacy of our model that pathways guidance, given both early and often, has an incredible impact on a learner’s future. 

Pre-Covid: 1500+ users with our program implemented solely onsite.

Post-Covid to present day: 350 users and we are stronger and more scalable through key feature additions (college search tool, college majors survey) to our platform that work seamlessly within our blended model (tech+one-on-one). Our base has doubled every year.

Industry leaders in education technology have been fascinated by what we are doing. AKALA is an ASU-GSV Elite 200 education startup, and winner of the USC Marshall School of Business’ Social Venture competition, the largest monetary competition at the school. We were named a Gener8tor G-Beta education company and we have just been selected for TechStars Equitech Accelerator 2024.

With all this momentum, we are poised to enter communities and have an impact on day 1. We’ve seen the undeniable effect on communities and organizations and we are excited to see this happen on a grand scale.

We have built the ability to scale fast to many other chapters on the front end and back end. We have a team of high-level full stack generalists, specializing in Python, Django, ReactJS, with a MySQL database, running on AWS. Led by Mirko Bojcic, they are the original architects of AKALA and built it from scratch, adapting the architecture based on community input and ideas. We are always fine-tuning our robust platform. Right now we are developing PAM, our AI-powered, pathway exploration assistant and our “Dreamcatcher” educational game. For PAM, we built some prototypes using LangChain and we’ve used PGVector to store embeddings about our students. 

AKALA has been hoping for an organization like Solve to come around. We are at the stage where we have a proven method and model that solves a huge problem in our education system. Now, we need to expand our reach to more learners. We can accomplish this through industry mentorship, guidance and support, helping us to spread the word on the game-changing work we are doing with AKALA.

The mentorship that Solve provides over a 9-month period will continue our strong tradition of implementing learning engineering and user-centered design. Joining the Solve community will help adapt and improve our model, working with thought leaders within education and beyond. We find that Solve supports the sort of constant technology adaptation that is core to our values. We also find it very important to learn from adjacent industries of our own. A solution in sustainability or in health could very well be a solution within education, and this starts with a dialogue and experimentation. Solve puts us in position to do just that.

AKALA, in order to scale, will need monetary and strategic solutions to the public relations and research hurdles we have faced. We want the platform to reach 2500 learners by 2025. To accomplish this, we need to acquire more counselors to train and introduce the platform in more mentorship chapters and organizations. Helping us to spread knowledge of AKALA and how it can change the game in pathways guidance is crucial. Solve, through its vast alumni network and reach, can assist us in this.

Data is something we have always wanted to capture, and in the Solve community, we will partner with researchers to make our model as efficient and effective as possible. We want to be in the position to approach education agencies and show them with data that our platform can revolutionize their learner outcomes.

AKALA is implementing passion-focused and career-focused mentorship as early as the 7th grade while many other organizations begin only in the 11th grade. Starting this late mistakenly skips the entire process of development with a learner. Our platform has developed a revolutionary curriculum that starts in the 7th grade and monitors a learner’s interests and passions through to grade 12. Our experience in guidance in post-secondary pathways has taught us that career and passion exploration early and often sets a learner up to explore and pursue the perfect pathway. What's better than being a teenager exploring your passions and what drives you, with no stakes or pressure, and then arriving in grade 11 or 12 confident in yourself and your path?

One of the most powerful outcomes of our program is the effect that a learner’s education has on them while they remain attached to their discovered passion, and eventual career. This is due to our innovative curriculum developed by counselors and teachers with over 40 years of experience in education. Our platform engages a learner and lets them run the show. This is rare in our education system.

Our approach to underserved learners is innovative as well. Learners in middle school often have a very limited view of possibilities regarding their future endeavors. And, although they may have a grasp of general categories - law, science, medicine, teaching, CS, journalism, etc - they have a very narrow conception of the related options within those categories. Early exploration can open pathways that students may never have considered. Such knowledge will also have a critical role in choosing courses - both in subject and rigor - to pursue throughout their high school years. If a learner knows that biology is directly attached to their imagined career in the medical field, the effects of learning take on a whole new level. This addition to a learner’s mindset will have an incredible and positive effect on the world of education, and have an effect on the market to be more learner-focused, in career and passion.

Our platform is designed to collaborate with a human being because we know that our competitors’ tech-only approach does not work (in addition to our competitors incorrectly starting in grade 11). This separates us from many of the organizations working to improve pathways guidance. Without a mentor or counselor, accountability and guidance is lost along a learner’s journey. We believe this sort of synergy with technology will inspire future ventures in education to not lose sight of the human aspect of education and a learner’s development.

The mentorship aspect of AKALA is critical to ensuring student engagement, because accountability cannot be overstated. We hope this becomes an industry standard once we become the industry standard. Understanding the psyche of a teenager, we know that without oversight on a regular basis, most students will not access and continue with a platform. Although a tech-only program might send reminders to students, the effect of actual human contact cannot be replaced. 

AKALA, by empowering mentors with our technology, will supply learners with pathways guidance early and often, leading to more learners achieving college and career journeys that match their passions. Our theory of change is that by having early engagement we will change the trajectory of learners, thereby impacting their trajectories and their future success. This success will help narrow the massive wealth and education gaps that currently exist in our country. The immediate outputs will be students landing on better pathways. The longer term outcome: traditionally underrepresented communities rising out of poverty and into the middle class and beyond. 

Something that is harder to measure but we are proud to influence in our education system is the spirit of self-advocacy. This is immediately evident in our work. We know that these short-term outcomes will help grow a learner into an unstoppable candidate for whichever post-secondary pathway they pursue. Self Advocacy “helps students take charge of their own educations, improving their learning experiences through increased motivation, engagement, and even achievement (Toshalis & Nakkula, 2012)...students in all classroom settings stand to benefit from self-advocacy instruction (Andrews, 2018). Expanding this instruction can especially help marginalized students, who often have less experience with self-advocating (Calarco, 2014)” (Hu, Yale, 2019) 

To prove the ultimate success and impact of the AKALA program, learner engagement and progress will be measured against the statistics for learners who are not on the AKALA program from the same school districts where the learners are based.

Our methodology at AKALA is rooted in user-centered design, as we learned as fellows at the USC Brittingham Social Venture Lab. All stakeholders - parent, learner, educator/mentor, counselor - are involved in our product creation and improvement. If data collected shows that a method is not working, we change course for what is best for the learner. Further, we utilize a blended model (Technology + one-on-one guidance). The human element of pathways guidance cannot be overstated while we develop our technology.

AKALA will also be a model for ethical use of AI, as educators, researchers, and mentors work with the technology to inspire the futures of our children. The privacy of AKALA is that of a guidance counselor’s office, and with a blended model (tech + one-on-one), it’s important that learners and their families are protected and continually informed.

Our effectiveness lies in our mentors. 

Mentors monitor and guide the learner’s involvement with the platform. Actual humans holding students accountable is critical for our success. Parents are included as well in helping the student remain accountable. The AKALA platform excels at keeping the learner organized, and helps guide their decision-making all the way through high school. This organization helps the mentors stay informed on the progress of the learner. A process like this is groundbreaking. AKALA takes a failed system and introduces a powerful tool for learners and mentors to break through the cycles of poverty in America. 

Our impact goals are the following from the UN Sustainable Development goals: Target 4.4, “Substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship, and then target 4.a “Build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all”.

AKALA is a direct provider of information and pathway mentorship for a learner to achieve their career dreams. The AKALA program is a multi-year approach to preparing learners for future education or direct entry into the workforce. Progress will be measurable immediately, culminating in the most efficacious pathway for each student. During the program, students will have a regular schedule of tasks to complete, sessions with counselors to attend, and webinars in which to participate. Their academic progress will be monitored with an emphasis on future courses as well as difficulty level of those courses for subsequent class years. At the end of the program, we will measure effectiveness by tracking the number of students who matriculate into a post secondary pathway.

Learner progress will focus on the following metrics: platform engagement, task completion, and webinar attendance, as well as measuring known indicators of success like leadership, self-advocacy, accountability, organizational skills, Social Emotional maturity, college readiness, and attendance (both in school and in the AKALA program) culminating in the most efficacious pathway for each learner. Mentors/counselors monitor and facilitate the learner’s involvement in real time to avoid regression. Further, parents are included in our program and on the platform to help the learner remain accountable. It is the organization AKALA brings to a learner, along with mentor/counselor guidance that allows them to arrive in 12th grade with a clearer picture of their futures. 

For our DreamCatcher game, we will employ both the EFM model for educational gaming and the ARCS Model Of Motivational Design (consultation from Michael Zyda, Founder, USC-Viterbi Gaming Program) to design the game. For data, we will measure using the GAMEX scale, results like influence, creativity, autonomy, and confidence, and then measure the correlation between playing the game and school performance through data like attendance, tardiness, grades, etc.

AKALA is poised to have a major impact on our education system and the lives of underprivileged learners who have been mostly forgotten and given up on.

Our technology is inspired by the needs of learners and parents on their path to adulthood and career.

Before we get into the transformational platform we have built, it is important to know that this technology is powered by the mentor or counselor. The tradition of the mentor goes back millenia and it is just as important today. Our platform works because of these incredible life teachers.

A critical feature of the AKALA platform is an instant messaging system enabled by SMS technology. Parents, learners, and mentors can use this system for instant contact. Mentors can also access AKALA professionals 24/7 straight from their phones. 

When a learner arrives at our platform they are welcomed by our easy, teen-friendly surveys that help power our technology. From this, a wealth of information is provided to the learner. Our approach, which takes less than a minute, centers on choosing a picture depicting what a student might find interesting and then offers the options that correlate to that picture. The options that appear are short descriptions often accompanied by video components. If there is particular interest in an activity, the decision tree approach takes the students to information such as email addresses and websites to use for followup. Surveys used by competitors include hundreds of questions that take upwards of 15 minutes and require students to rank answers numerically. It is indeed questionable how reliable such surveys can possibly be. After just a few questions most students tire of the format and generally choose the middle number for all choices as it is the easiest way to finish this incredibly cumbersome format. 

Staying organized throughout middle and high school helps make the transition year to year much smoother, not to mention how important an organizational tool and commitment to it will be as these students leave school. To this end we have made it easy for students to update their profile information from the comfort of their phones in just mere seconds. Additionally, we have enabled a recording feature on the phones for students to speak responses to questions they have been asked, reflections that are required, and note taking on items such as the College Explorer feature.

Though we have made staying organized and completing tasks teen-friendly, we acknowledge that there might be a need to entice students with a reward system for completed tasks. We are seeking advice in designing a point validation and redemption system as well as reward protocols.

AKALA as a combination of tech+one-on-one makes it a highly effective tool for both learner and mentor/counselor.

We have been in this line of work for 30 years. 15,000 students have come through the program and now live successful lives. We have also tested the program with over 500 students who are considered low-income. 

Everyone knows that one of the biggest advantages the wealthy have over their more disadvantaged peers is exposure: to opportunities, to guidance, to discovery. By getting guidance on college and career to underserved youth much earlier, we are leveling the playing field and giving these kids the same level of guidance that their wealthy peers access regularly. 

The development of our platform at Google and USC’s Brittingham lab established AKALA as an undeniable education technology solution. Our methodology is rooted in user-centered design. All stakeholders - parent, learner, educator/mentor, counselor - are involved in our product creation and improvement. The human element of pathways guidance that involves all stakeholders cannot be overstated (this, after all is what the wealthy in America pay extreme top dollar for)

For the past three years students at the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club who participated in our program have had a 100%  admission rate to colleges including UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech, Pepperdine, and Cal State Northridge. All of these students are considered minorities; most are first generation college students on free and reduced lunch. 

We constantly update our curriculum and send to participating organizations. 

For students on the subscription model, they are monitored by their assigned counselors. Student profiles are checked to be sure assigned tasks are completed. Our messaging system allows us to contact students and parents directly to their phones for accountability or if any issues arise. All students have  monthly meetings with their counselor over zoom. The human element together with our technology that can begin as early as 7th grade makes us unique. We also lead monthly webinars covering the many aspects of preparing for the post-high school journey.

The AKALA platform is a sustainable option for successful mentorship because it is built to scale quickly and work seamlessly at a very low cost while maintaining integrity and effectiveness. The product is built. We know it works well.

Now, we require the necessary funding to begin its scale.The extremely low cost will enable participating organizations to fund from their current budgets.  Our innovative and advanced technology is very easy to learn and quickly brings new users onboard. Once trained, a mentor or counselor can work with many learners at once in a far more efficient way than current approaches.

We have five full-time staff, two part-time staff members, 1 contractor and 14 expert counselors (who can also be classified as contractors.

Our work began in 2017 and we had a meteoric popularity in the education technology space. Our product was developed through a Google incubator and launched in 2019. We immediately acquired multiple school accounts in Los Angeles and Cleveland, roughly 1500 students. Then, the pandemic rendered all of our work suspended indefinitely. Only in 2021 were we able to recover our users, but this also gave us time to perfect our product. We did a massive overhaul and dug deep into the effectiveness of our curriculum and system, with the help of teacher, mentor, parent and student feedback.

Our company loves people with a passion for education and a deep belief that if we improve our children’s education, we improve society. We also hold firm to the belief that bringing together diverse opinions and backgrounds leads to strong decision-making and paths forward. Our woman and immigrant and minority founders have established a culture of diversity at our company.

Each member of the team at AKALA has spent their lives immersed in the communities we aspire to improve. 

Barbara has worked under grants in Newark NJ (Gear-Up, Project Grad, Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Program) and with the W.E.B. DuBois Scholars Institute at Princeton University (23 years). Perry has been working with California PAL and Santa Monica Boys and Girls Clubs for 5 years. Debon Lewis has nearly 20 years of experience in urban education working as an instructional coach and principal in public schools and in the renowned KIPP charter school in NYC. He was also a founding member of three charter schools with Achievement First.

We have partnered with leaders of mentor organizations from different cities in America to incorporate diverse voices and thoughts into our methods. Each year we hire interns from diverse backgrounds to inject fresh perspectives. It is not an obligation for us to do this. It is in our culture and has been since our founding.