December Updates

Hello, everyone!

We had such a wonderful time with you in Coahoma County and appreciate the time you all have put towards the effort of a mobile learning space. This is the inaugural monthly newsletter for the project team, to keep you updated and get your input. Here are a few key highlights of what we have been working on since October.

Partnerships

Coming back

Aditi, Anne, Ashley, Adam, and Kofi will be traveling to Coahoma County in January, possibly with some new members of the team! We hope to be down there for a full week and are currently coming up with a plan of action. Let us know if there are any events we could attend and if we can schedule some time together!

Communication

We created a one page proposal, a one-minute pitch, and a five-minute pitch about the project so that we can quickly and effectively communicate what this is all about to new people. We are working towards making digital text versions, videos and/or recordings of the pitches available to to any of you wishing to communicate about the project.

Bus Design

Brand identity

We’ve spent time exploring how to construct a strong brand identity. During our next trip, we plan to bring together some youth ages 12-22 for the creative process of defining this brand. We welcome any suggestions or advice you may have for how and where to engage youth interested in learning about branding, style, or graphic design.

Curriculum

We have been learning about how to best develop useful curricular materials for the mobile space by talking to Coahoma County educators and doing our own research.

Most recently, our team (as part of the ADE program) just entered into an exciting partnership between Autodesk (a design software company) and Massachusetts School of Art & Design (MassArt) to begin creating curriculum specifically around making high quality, low-cost musical instruments, like electric guitars, electric basses, fiddles and and cellos. The curriculum that goes along with this might fit really well with the bus in Coahoma County, so we are excited to begin exploring this more over the next semester.

Business Model

Funding

We have expanded our search for funding options to include private foundations,, social entrepreneurship competitions, and crowdfunding. We will have a list of grants and competitions we will apply to and a complete proposal that can be customized for different applications by December 12th. We also intend to send these proposals to state and county officials in the coming months. If you can think of any grants or competitions or other local funding sources that would suit this project, we would love to know!

Product/Service sales

We are also looking into creating a secondary revenue stream for the bus, via sales. Ideas we have for units that could be sold include teacher development activities and youth-made products.. Potential customers for these products include makers and tinkerers in Coahoma County, educators (locally and nationally) looking for new perspectives, and tourists attending festivals in the area. Since we are in the brainstorming stage of this process, we welcome your insights and ideas!

Social return on investment:

We have begun the process of creating a framework for measuring the social impact of this project as compared to the financial investment required to launch and run the bus. In other words, can we show impact in terms of dollars in addition to other metrics for social progress, like graduation rates, employment or income? The goal of this area of our work is to give you more tools to share with your boards and potential funders. This work has just begun and will be ongoing, so we will continue to update you over the course of next semester.

If you have any ideas or feedback on our process, please let us know! Also, if you would like to be more involved in any of the items mentioned above, we would be very happy to have your input and participation.

Your friends,

Ashley, Anne, Adam, Aditi, Alisha, Hamza, Irene, Nora, Cecelia, Kofi, and Amon