Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

A true education is one that prepares students for college, career, and citizenship. But if we look at what high schools offer today vs. what the world requires, there are huge gaps. Kaleidoscope was founded to bridge those gaps. We envision a world where more students can persuasively tell their stories, use math to make decisions, and manage their own psychology, so we‚ re building classes like Storytelling & Narrative, Analytics, and Practical Psychology. But there‚ no bigger gap than climate change: it is our most pressing issue yet rarely offered as a class. We plan to change that.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

We support diversity in a number of ways, including: the advisors we‚ ve brought on, the design of our curriculum, and our go-to-market approach. 

We have three advisory boards that support us--a general advisory board, a climate change professional advisory board, and a student advisory board. Our general advisory board is half women and half men, half white and half non-white. All have significant experience working to improve outcomes for diverse populations, whether as the managing director of a ventured fund focused on financial inclusion or as the founder of a renowned charter school. 

Similarly, our professional advisory board for Climate Science & Policy is currently seven members, four of whom are women and three of whom are under-represented minorities. We intentionally sought candidates who are not just experts in their fields but also represent the diversity of America. 

We are the first curriculum company founded with a Student Advisory Board. Our current student advisory board is ~80% female and ~80% under-represented minorities. We meet with them monthly to get their feedback on our materials & approach, so their voices & diverse perspectives are cemented into the design of our classes. 

Our curriculum itself is diverse. We don‚ t just teach the science of climate change. In the policy half of our class, we use the lenses of the major social sciences to understand their perspectives on the causes, impacts, and mitigation strategies for climate change. Sociologists consider how climate change impacts different groups, anthropologists, how it affects culture; geographers, how it impacts place. Our curriculum makes space to explore the social and economic dimensions of climate change, not just the science and tech and market-based solutions. 

We also track the authorship of the text selections that we‚ re including in our curriculum in order to ensure Kaleidoscope curriculum captures the lived experiences of all Americans and all people 

Finally, we seek to work with a broad range of students and schools. Over the past two summers, we‚ ve tested classes by running fellowships for high school students in the DC area. We‚ ve worked with almost 90 students from more than 30 DC-area high schools. This past summer, our students were two-thirds women. By race, our students were~30% white, ~30% Asian, ~30% African-American, and ~10% multiracial or Hispanic. 

We are currently in the process of reaching out to pilot schools. We do not target particular zip codes but rather reach out to all schools within a state. The schools in our pilot pipeline currently range from 0-93% of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Priced Lunch, averaging ~40%, which is also the U.S. average. We think this is a promising sign that we are attracting a broad range of schools rather than just one type. 

We have also built our business model in a way that is accessible to more schools. We charge for curriculum and professional development. These are things schools are used to paying for, and we price our product at a level that schools can afford.

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