Teach For America entrepreneurial interns visit Knight Foundation in Miami. 

There is something special about the intersection of innovation and education. A community that invests in ideas and has the vision to, as Steve Jobs said, “Think Different” about our students and their teachers is a community abundant with opportunity.

In Miami-Dade County, we are at a place that I think of as “the nexus of opportunity.” Early last year I traveled to the headquarters of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., with Teach for America to attend the inaugural Entrepreneurs United conference after recently accepting a position to lead the alumni movement in South Florida. I was excited to find out that my fellow alumnus Wifredo “Wifi” Fernandez was doing a presentation later that day on startup communities and his work co-founding The LAB Miami.

After his presentation, Wifi and I connected over an extra-large pizza at a local diner that had Jamiroquai programmed as the Pandora station of choice. We began to talk about our shared experiences teaching in the classroom, the challenges we encountered and the need to innovate solutions that will meaningfully impact children and education. The conversation highlighted the unique opportunity to bridge his work in entrepreneurship with the work I do with Teach for America corps members and alumni talent cultivation and retention. We asked ourselves what it would take to give every one of our students across Miami-Dade the excellent education they deserve, and what working as a community and problem-solving means in our evolving and ever-connected world – particularly in Miami.  In short, we left the conference with a commitment to join forces, fill a need and create a solution, just like Miami’s entrepreneurs and makers do every day.

Source: Alumni & Community Impact team at Teach For America Miami-Dade on Vimeo.

Over 250 Teach for America teachers work in Miami-Dade’s highest-need schools, and almost 300 alumni work across Miami-Dade to ensure that all children have access to an excellent education. Our corps members and alumni are passionate about finding innovative ways to give every child access to great education. Teach for America endeavors to draw emerging leaders into education to provide excellent educational opportunities for our kids, and to understand the challenges that children growing up in poverty face. We are uniquely positioned here in Miami —  given the strong startup community — to equip our teachers with tools, networks and support to create solutions for real-world problems facing them and students. Entrepreneurs, ideas and communities have built Miami — a city where small mom-and-pop stores exist alongside Ruby on Rails, and where bilingual sometimes means you also speak Java. Our teachers see what tools students will need to be successful in college and careers, and they also envision new ways to design a prospering Miami community full of opportunity for the next generation. In order to build the ecosystem our students deserve we must see ourselves as the founders, architects and leaders of institutions of change.

Knight Foundation has demonstrated a deep commitment to retaining talent in Miami-Dade, and to building an ecosystem of entrepreneurs. Together, with The LAB Miami we launched TFA to Startup, which kicked off in June with Startup Summer. Through the Startup Summer program, 11 local teachers are spending summer break working in Miami startups. Joan Larbi, a fifth-grade science teacher at Holmes Elementary, partnered with MakerCamp to take 85 students with no technology experience through a curriculum in electronics, microcomputers, virtual reality, 3-D printing and entrepreneurship. 

Andrew Tonali experienced the world of Waffle Wednesdays, gaining a deeper appreciation for the power of community.  Rosie Justine, a six-year alumni educator in Little Haiti, leveraged her experience to co-design a scope and sequence curriculum for a professional learning community centered for blended learning with Redbird Advance Learning. And Daniel Applewhite and Matthew Campbell sought new ideas to approach the challenges of classroom organizing and fundraisers through cloud-based solutions while working with ClassWallet.com.

In the fall corps members and alumni will participate in Design Camp, learning the principles of entrepreneurial and design thinking, and understanding how to apply those to the issues and problems facing our kids and their communities. In May, Wifi and I will return to the Entrepreneurs United conference at the Kauffman Foundation with a cohort of 10 Teach for America alumni educators, innovators and entrepreneurs committed to creating the change we wish to see in the world.

Miami is a community that welcomes newcomers and new ideas, that thrives on entrepreneurism, that seeks to design a better future for the next generation. Check out our Startup Summer bloggers, and if you’re an entrepreneur yourself, join this growing partnership and movement and volunteer as a mentor or coach.