Mangrove Stories

Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for universal basic education by 2030. Despite UNESCO's estimate that an additional 69 million teachers are needed to achieve this goal, the current trajectory suggests a growing deficit in the number of available teachers. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that over 200 million children worldwide are not attending school, highlighting the critical need for a concerted effort to address the teacher shortage and ensure educational access for all children. Additionally, in today’s dynamic world, there is a significant gap between what teachers need—such as tech-readiness and an ethical understanding in complex social and cultural contexts—and what academic institutions are currently able to provide. Furthermore, given these monumental challenges, scaling solutions without the aid of technology is impractical.

We offer a proprietary character development framework and training workshops that leverage educators' personal stories as case studies. This method empowers educators to provide ethical guidance to their students and enhances their ability to effectively use modern technology. As we continue to train teachers globally, we will build a substantial database of case studies derived from the stories we collect. Our own technology platform, Mangrove Stories, serves not only as an archival tool but also as a new foundational model for ethical education, utilizing evolving AI technology. We will also license these case studies and stories to academic institutions for educational purposes, to media companies for resource production, and to third-party developers in need of authentic and unique datasets, all of whom share our values. This strategy will enable us to scale our impact and extend our reach to more educators and their students worldwide.

With learners of all ages as our end beneficiaries, our solution primarily serves academic institutions, ministries of education, and their educators within our B2B/G business model. By equipping these customers with our proprietary character development framework and comprehensive training workshops, we empower them to upskill their educators. This professional development not only enhances teachers' ability to integrate modern technology into their teaching but also deepens their understanding of the ethical contexts that impact society.

Additionally, we leverage technology to extend educational opportunities to regions with inadequate educational staff. Through our own platform and those of our partners, we deliver our character development and ethical training modules and content directly to students in underserved areas. This approach bridges the gap where there is a shortage of teachers and ensures that all children, regardless of their geographic location, have access to quality education.

We are exceptionally well-positioned to deliver this educational solution due to our deep and longstanding relationships with the communities we aim to serve. Over the past few decades, we have worked closely with diverse populations—from small villages to large cities—and have engaged with people across all generations. Our interactions span multiple countries and involve a range of stakeholders, including academic institutions, governments, media companies, non-profits, and NGOs. This extensive engagement has not only built a foundation of trust but also fostered genuine friendships, enabling us to have an intimate understanding of the communities' needs and dynamics.

Our proximity to these communities ensures that their voices are central to the design and implementation of our solutions. We co-create solutions with community members, incorporating their input, ideas, and agendas at every stage. This collaborative approach guarantees that our educational programs are not only culturally relevant and sensitive but also directly address the specific challenges and aspirations of the communities.

The trust and rapport we have established over the years empower us to act as true partners in development, ensuring that our interventions are welcomed and supported. It's this deep connection and ongoing dialogue with the communities that make us the right team to effectively design and deliver this solution. Our commitment to these values and practices positions us uniquely to make a lasting impact in the lives of the educators and students we aim to serve.

Before the pandemic, our team embarked on a listening tour spanning several countries including Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, China, and Uzbekistan. This initial engagement was crucial in understanding the specific educational needs and challenges faced by these diverse communities. As a result, we successfully built a community of over 3,000 registered educators and members.

During the pandemic, we leveraged the opportunity to offer free online workshops. These sessions not only provided immediate support to educators but also allowed us to refine our training approach based on direct feedback and interactions. This iterative process helped us enhance the relevance and impact of our educational materials.

In January of this year, we took a significant step by testing our refined workshop model in Cambodia. This pilot was instrumental in validating our methodologies and content with a local audience. The insights gained from this experience have been invaluable in further tailoring our approach to better suit the needs of our target populations.

Moreover, we are expanding our testing significantly. We have partnered with EdEthics Students group at Harvard Graduate School of Education to test our workshop model with their pre-service teachers. This collaboration marks the beginning of our global MVP testing tour, which will continue from May to August in Indonesia. Here, we have secured a partnership with a consortium of over 100 universities, allowing us to reach a broader audience and further validate our educational solutions at a larger scale.

These steps underscore our commitment to continuously improving our offerings based on real-world application and feedback, ensuring that our solutions are both effective and adaptable to the needs of educators and students across various regions.

We are applying to Solve because we recognize its potential to help us overcome several critical barriers that currently limit our capacity to scale and deepen the impact of our educational solutions. Our challenges span technology integration, market expansion, legal compliance, and team development—all crucial for our programs' global delivery. 

Specifically, we urgently need a tech lead skilled in blockchain, machine learning, and AI. These technologies are pivotal for enhancing the scalability and effectiveness of our educational platforms. To broaden our reach, robust business development partnerships and market-specific insights are essential. Solve's global network can provide strategic guidance and facilitate introductions to key stakeholders in critical regions, helping us navigate diverse educational landscapes and effectively tailor our offerings. Not to mention, each new market introduces unique regulatory challenges. Comprehensive legal support is crucial to ensure compliance with local education laws and international data protection regulations. Additionally, to enhance our visibility and attracting the right talent requires a skilled marketing officer and an experienced HR head. 

Our solution stands out as innovative due to its unique combination of human interactions, advanced technology integration, and a deeply collaborative approach to educational content creation. We harness the power of unique personal stories that have not been exploited by AI, integrating these narratives into an ultra-modern educational framework that is being collaboratively built with stakeholders in key target countries. 

While our platform leverages technologies like AI, machine learning, and blockchain to enhance scalability and effectiveness, it maintains a strong emphasis on human elements. This approach ensures that while our tools are technologically advanced, they remain empathetic and culturally sensitive, providing education that resonates on a personal level. 

Our educational content is unique, built around real stories gathered from the communities we serve. These are narratives untouched by AI, rich with local context and insights. By bringing these stories into classrooms worldwide, we provide a learning experience that is not only engaging but also deeply relatable and inspiring for students of various backgrounds. The educational frameworks we develop are not created in isolation but through a collaborative process with educators, local authorities, and community leaders in the countries we target. This approach ensures that the solutions are not only relevant and culturally appropriate but also supported by those who will implement them, enhancing buy-in and effectiveness. Finally, the community we have built and continue to grow is designed for and by educators. This network not only supports the sharing of best practices and continuous learning among educators but also fosters a sense of ownership and commitment to the educational improvements we aim to achieve.

Our solution is grounded in a theory of change that posits if educators are equipped with the tools to integrate their personal stories into a cutting-edge, technology-enhanced curriculum, then they can more effectively engage and inspire their students, leading to deeper learning and understanding. The ultimate outcome is an education system where students are not only more knowledgeable but are also more empathetic and culturally aware, contributing to a more understanding and inclusive society.

Our activities include developing a unique character development framework that utilizes real-life stories told by educators, and integrating this framework with advanced technologies such as AI and blockchain to ensure scalability and adaptability across different cultural contexts. By conducting workshops and training sessions, we help educators learn how to effectively use these tools and share their stories in the classroom.

The immediate output of these activities is a set of educational tools and resources that are deeply personal yet universally applicable, enriched with real-life experiences that resonate with both educators and students. This leads to more engaging and impactful teaching methods that are informed by the lived experiences of the educators themselves.

The longer-term outcome is that students receive a more relatable and inspiring education, which research suggests can enhance learning outcomes and foster greater empathy and cultural sensitivity. The use of real-life stories in education, as inspired by Kobe Bryant's insight that "Nothing in this world moves without stories," taps into the innate human connection to storytelling. This connection can make learning experiences more memorable and impactful, as supported by educational research indicating that narrative-based learning can significantly improve retention and comprehension.

The strength of these links is supported by evidence from third-party research and our own evaluations. Studies in educational psychology consistently show that narrative methods can enhance learning by making abstract concepts concrete and by forging emotional bonds between the learner and the content. Additionally, our pilot programs in Cambodia and feedback sessions with educators during our workshops have shown a marked increase in student engagement and understanding when lessons are delivered through personal stories.

This approach not only improves educational outcomes but also prepares students to be global citizens who value diversity and inclusion. By hearing stories from a variety of cultural perspectives, students learn to appreciate different worldviews, which is crucial in our increasingly globalized world.

By empowering educators to share their personal stories and embedding these stories within a technologically sophisticated educational framework, we create a more engaging and effective educational experience that prepares students for a diverse world. This is how we expect our solution to impact the education system and contribute to a broader societal change.

Our primary impact goal is to revolutionize educational experiences by equipping educators with tools that integrate personal storytelling and advanced technology to create engaging, culturally rich, and impactful learning environments. This goal is anchored in the belief that education should not only impart knowledge but also foster understanding, empathy, and a connection to the wider world. We aim for our solution to have a transformational impact by making education more relatable and inspiring for students, thereby improving learning outcomes and preparing them to be thoughtful, inclusive global citizens.

To effectively measure our progress towards these impact goals, we employ few specific indicators:

1. Engagement: We measure the number of educators who complete our training workshops and subsequently implement the learned techniques in their classrooms. This indicator helps assess the direct reach and adoption of our methods. We track student engagement levels through classroom observations and feedback forms, looking at metrics such as participation in discussions, completion of assignments, and demonstrated understanding of the material. Increased engagement is a strong proxy for the effectiveness of our educational approach.
2. Quality: Through qualitative assessments, including interviews and surveys with both students and educators, we gauge the depth of interaction and the emotional impact of the stories used in teaching. Feedback like that from Sokorn in Sovannaphumi, Cambodia, who noted the increased relevance of personal storytelling in the age of technology, illustrates the qualitative impact of our training.
3. Ethics: We evaluate how well educators can integrate personal stories with the curriculum, which is key to the effectiveness of our model. The feedback from Reaksmey in Sovannaphumi, Cambodia, who highlighted how the workshop effectively tied together tech, character development, and the creation of original stories, serves as a testament to the successful application of our framework in culturally nuanced context. We assess students' understanding of different cultural perspectives and ethical considerations before and after the implementation of our solution.

At the core of our mission to provide equitable access to our educational framework and materials is the use of blockchain technology, which is critical in ensuring privacy, security, and authenticity for the datasets that underpin our educational platform. Blockchain's decentralized nature allows us to securely authenticate and manage educational content across a global network as we expand our physical reach into multiple countries and continents. This technology is essential not only for maintaining the integrity of the information stored, exchanged, and shared but also for ensuring that our business thrives on the foundation of trust and transparency.

We utilize blockchain to create a secure, immutable record of educational content contributed by educators around the world. This ensures that the stories, which are central to our educational approach, are authentic and protected against tampering, thus preserving their educational value.

To make our educational resources accessible in diverse settings, from remote villages to refugee camps, working with partners, we employ a range of technologies from simple mobile phone applications to advanced VR streaming. This flexibility allows us to deliver meaningful educational experiences regardless of local infrastructure limitations.

We are committed to making the process of injecting and managing data intuitive for our partners and contributors. The design of our platform interface facilitates easy and secure contributions of content, allowing continuous support for our initiatives without compromising on security.

Recognizing the importance of equitable distribution of resources, we are exploring revenue-sharing models that leverage cryptocurrencies or digital payment schemes. This approach aims to provide a sustainable economic model for our contributors across different countries, ensuring that they are rewarded for their participation.

By integrating these technologies, our solution bridges the gap between traditional educational methods and modern technological advances. The use of blockchain secures the authenticity and integrity of educational content, which is crucial when this content is derived from personal stories of educators—stories that embody unique cultural and personal experiences that are instrumental in teaching. Meanwhile, the ability to deliver this content through both low-tech and high-tech means ensures that it can reach a wide audience, making education more accessible and inclusive.

This technological approach not only supports our educational goals but also fosters a broader ecosystem of innovation. By encouraging the use of advanced technologies in education, we not only improve learning outcomes but also stimulate technological adoption in other sectors, potentially influencing areas such as digital payments and content security. Our solution sets a precedent for how technology can be used to enhance education globally, particularly in underserved or hard-to-reach areas, thereby driving forward our mission to solve world challenges through innovation that benefits both people and the planet.

My co-founder, Yuta Otake, and I are fully committed to this venture, although we must continue working for our respective employers for the time being (to pay the bills). We have added a third member, Helen Wang, from Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I am currently pursuing a master's degree as a part-time student for another year.

Starting as a hobby in 2019, we built a global network of teachers and offered free online workshops during the pandemic. Our network grew to 3,000 educators, leading us to idealize this as a venture. We've conducted extensive field tests and research, and partnered with a consortium of over 100 Indonesian universities to host 30+ conferences and workshops in summer of 2024. We're currently expanding our team to support the next phase of our MVP testing in physical experiences. The dataset we're compiling will underpin the technological development planned from fall 2024.

I have spearheaded neurodiversity initiatives for Sesame Street Japan in partnership with local authorities and have worked in over 20 international markets. Currently, I am one of the older students, if not the oldest, at Harvard Graduate School of Education, studying Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This endeavor is not only to design our educational programs with UDL principles in mind but also to ensure that our team fully embraces these principles as our core mission.

My co-founder, Yuta, brings extensive experience from Islamic countries where gender equity issues are notably complex and sensitive. His insights have been pivotal in creating our educational framework that focuses on ethics and embraces diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, going beyond typical American-centric norms. We plan to recruit stakeholders in these countries as well.

Helen, a fellow Harvard student from China, has recently joined our team as the producer responsible for Research and Development. She ensures that our products comprehensively address all aspects of DEI+B, a fundamental understanding required of all our key hires.

Together, we are laying a foundation for a future leadership team, and all staff as well as for products and partnerships, built on these principles.

Our business model is structured to provide value to diverse populations through a combination of impact-driven services and multiple revenue streams, employing a hybrid of B2B and B2G approaches. This model allows us to effectively address the varying needs and structures of our key target countries, where the beneficiaries are always learners of all ages.

We offer educational services that leverage the power of storytelling to enhance learning. Our primary offerings include training seminars, workshops, and conferences for educators. These events are crucial as they not only deliver valuable professional development to teachers but also serve as a platform for collecting educators' personal stories. These narratives are then developed into case studies and supplemented with media content, forming a rich dataset that is integral to our educational approach. 

In summary, we have three revenue models: 

1. Training Services: Our foundational business activity involves providing training to educators through various educational institutions, whether they are private or public schools, or local education authorities such as school districts or ministries of education. This is our primary source of revenue and also serves as a key engagement point with our beneficiaries.

2. Licensing and Subscriptions: We monetize the datasets comprising stories, case studies, and audio-visual content by offering licensing agreements or subscriptions. These are available to third parties such as academic institutions, which use the case studies in their curricula; media companies, which may adapt the content for films, TV shows, podcasts, or books; and technology developers, who require access to rich, authentic datasets for various applications.

3. Grants and Contributions: Given the research-intensive nature of our work and the need for continuous improvement, we rely heavily on grants and in-kind contributions. These funds support our research and development efforts, allowing us to refine our offerings and conduct efficacy studies to ensure our interventions are both effective and impactful.

Why Customers Value Our Services:

Educational institutions and educators value our services because they provide a unique blend of professional development and practical tools that can be directly applied in the classroom. Our approach not only enhances the teaching experience but also enriches students' learning through engaging and culturally relevant content. Media companies and tech developers, on the other hand, seek out our products for their authenticity and the depth of insight they offer into human experiences, making them valuable for a wide range of creative and technological applications.

Impact and Outreach:

By integrating local stories into global educational frameworks, we foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of diverse cultures and experiences among students, thereby contributing to a more inclusive and empathetic global society. Our business model not only ensures the sustainability of our operations but also maximizes the educational impact, fulfilling our mission to transform learning environments and outcomes across the globe.

To ensure the sustainability and growth of our educational initiatives, our revenue model is strategically diversified to include training fees, licensing revenue, and grants/contributions. This multi-pronged approach not only aligns with our mission but also guarantees a steady inflow of funds to cover our expected expenses.

Our training services have been a significant source of revenue. Over the past several years, both individually and collectively, we have been active in the educational field as keynote speakers and trainers. While individual sessions generate nominal fees, larger engagements have been much more lucrative. For instance, my co-founder Yuta has successfully managed seven-figure budgets for organizing large-scale conferences sponsored by entities such as the State Department, covering entire regions like Middle Asia and providing training to thousands of attendees. This summer, we are expanding our reach by partnering with a consortium of over 100 universities in Indonesia to host our conferences in more than 30+ locations.

Our licensing model is inspired by successful precedents in the academic and business sectors. We create and distribute educational content that includes real-life case studies and stories. Observing the success of institutions like Harvard Business School, which generates approximately $300 million annually from their case studies, we see a clear opportunity in the market. Unlike traditional offerings that are predominantly business-oriented, our content spans various disciplines and includes a broader range of human experiences, filling a niche that is currently underserved. This unique content allows us to license our material not only to educational institutions but also to media companies for adaptation into films, TV shows, podcasts, and books.

Grants and in-kind contributions are crucial for funding our research and development efforts especially in early stages of content building. These funds enable us to continuously improve our offerings and ensure their efficacy through rigorous studies and trials. While specific grant amounts and contributors are confidential, the support we receive is instrumental in advancing our research initiatives and expanding our educational impact.

With over two decades in the media business, I have produced numerous films, TV shows, and digital offerings, generating over $100 million in revenue. This experience and the relationships I've cultivated with filmmakers, distributors, IP licensees, and developers allow us to explore profitable revenue-sharing models. These partnerships not only enhance our financial stability but also broaden the reach and impact of our educational content.

Our funding strategies have already proven successful. The extensive network and partnerships we've established provide a robust foundation for future growth. Our ability to attract significant funding and manage substantial budgets for educational events underscores our capacity to sustain and expand our operations effectively.