Problem 1

There is a shortage of 120,000 PK-12 teachers in the United States caused by a combination of high attrition rates and low supply. This shortage is concentrated in hard-to-staff rural and urban schools that have high concentrations of students from low-income households (Title I schools), and the subjects that are most affected are math and science. For example, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that only 50% of public high schools are able to offer Calculus and only 60% are able to offer physics.

Code: Utilize new technology platforms (VR, AR, high-speed internet) to enable award-winning teachers to teach more students in real-time (not just pre-recorded distance learning of the past) and to mentor new teachers (to help with attrition).

Legal: Work with teacher unions, school districts, and state agencies to make it possible for teachers with different state certifications to work across state lines and to ensure equitable opportunities for teachers to participate, earn additional income and receive support.

Markets: Pay these award-winning teachers a stipend on top of their salaries to participate, thereby incentivizing them to stay in the classroom (instead of being pulled into administration where salaries are higher).  Create a business model that makes use of this platform a cost-savings to districts when compared to the cost of professional development and teacher replacement.

Norms: Promote the importance of equitable access to the fields of the future (STEM) in rural and urban communities through parent organizations, advocacy groups, and the media.

 

Problem 2

My neighbors in Dorchester—parents, kids, family members; homeowners and renters; local business owners; school leaders and teachers, civic and religious leaders—simultaneously feel priced out of their neighborhood and unsafe as violence persists, particularly among discouraged and disconnected young men and women who may identify as Black, Central American, Caribbean or as affiliated with a street gang. These issues have deep historical roots with linkages to segregation, economic exclusion, immigration, housing policy, education policy and investment, political disenfranchisement, community-level conflicts, and general disconnection from the power centers in Boston and Massachusetts. Simply calling this “gentrification” misses, in my view, the complexity of the forces at work and, therefore, the challenges of identifying a point of entry that can lead to a meaningful “solution.”

Code: Going to interpret code liberally and include the built environment. Work with developers to build housing that aims to accommodate mixed-income communities and add to the economic well-being of the Dorchester neighborhood specifically.

Legal: Use zoning and other housing policy tools to focus on truly accessible low-middle income housing construction within every new development, as well as the use of land-trusts, prohibitions of the sale of public lands for private development without appropriate public-use, mixed-housing development or public transportation improvements.

Markets: There is a housing shortage in Boston and so prices are inflated; this creates the potential for triple bottom line thinking, meaning there is enough of a margin between construction costs and market value that social and environmental investments could be made without mixed-use housing projects becoming unprofitable. In other words, investors could still make money and be attracted to projects that are oriented towards community retention and health instead of displacement. In fact, like fair trade goods, investors may even pay a premium for socially conscious, community-focused real estate development.

Norms: The vast majority of the resources needed to make these large-scale changes happen are in the hands of others who need to be influenced, so utilizing the power of the ballot, lobbying, media campaigns and awareness strategies will all be necessary. There are also many resources within the community that could be mobilized through public messaging campaigns to explore what can be done without city/state government—to think about how to promote land trusts, school partnerships with trade unions or other local businesses for training programs, and networking existing mentorship/youth programs.

 

Problem 3

A community I work with in rural Mississippi has an anemic local job market that, combined with fifteen generations of race-based exclusion, is having a devastating impact on the outlook of teenagers who may identify as Black. They have no reason to have faith in the underfunded schools, see unemployment in the area that is as high as 30% and few jobs outside of entry-level service positions, and they imagine that the only way to succeed is to leave for Memphis or Atlanta. They want a bright future but have limited opportunities (especially since there is no local public transportation system) to even begin to chart out a pathway for themselves.

Code: Mobile education unit featuring a technology, arts and entrepreneurship curriculum; partners with after-school programs, local schools and businesses in the area.

Legal: Promote career pathway programs in high schools that allow for work apprenticeships that are credit-bearing and that can lead to an associate’s degree at the local community college.

Markets: Paid positions for student workers, scholarship and entrepreneurship opportunities for student participants, and apprenticeship programs with local businesses.

Norms: Build a sense of place within the youth program—a place for relationship building and acceptance, not just skill development. Expand this sense of place through partnerships with other civic organizations in order to create a community dialogue focused on valuing its assets, truly facing its history, and building an inclusive economy for the 21^st century.

We hopped out of the air-conditioned Landcruiser into the naked noontime sun, the unrelenting heat hitting us hard and with a quickness. The farm was about an acre and the farmers, Yonas and Amadi, slowly led a donkey in a circular pattern on top of their harvest, which was spread out over a burlap tarp in a small clearing. The crop was teff, a tiny wheat-like grain that is the principal ingredient in injera, the spongy flatbread that accompanies almost every meal in Ethiopia. My friend Muktar translated and I learned that after of the threshing (taking the edible part off the plant) was done, Yonas and Amadi thought they would collect about three-quarters of the grain they had spent three months cultivating. I had seen and heard the same thing on eight other farms in the Ethiopian countryside.

When I stopped in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s headquarters in Addis Ababa a few hours later to chat about what I had seen and heard, I wasn’t surprised to learn that post-harvest loss is a major problem. By some estimates, smallholder farmers, who make up about 70% of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, can lose anywhere from 25%-30% of their harvests during threshing and another 20%-30% due to poor storage. Not only were traditional methods inefficient, they often exposed the yield to dirt, small stones, and even animal feces. I met with the British director and the technical lead who was from Ethiopia; they both validated my observations and spoke passionately about the need for a low-cost, efficient and sanitary technology that could thresh multiple types of crops (teff, rice, corn, barley, sorghum). They believed that this would not only minimize post-harvest losses but also attract the next generation of farmers to stay in agriculture, perhaps as entrepreneurial service providers instead of as the same backbreaking field laborers their ancestors had been for generations. Thinking of that brutal sun, I nodded.

“You are from MIT,” they said, “can’t you and some of your students figure out a technology? If you do,” they continued, “we have the ability to procure and then distribute tens of thousands of that kind of a machine.” Immediately, some designs came to mind based on some of the other technologies I had seen over the years. Some of those technologies were able to be affordable, locally repairable, and environmentally responsible because they were pedal-powered, so most of the ideas I had immediately invoked that type of a machine. By the time the meeting wrapped up and I had gotten back in the air-conditioned vehicle, I had 3 sketches. As we drove to the airport I thought to myself, “I wish I had more time to talk to more farmers and to show them these ideas.” I pushed the thought out of my mind—I had spoken to several farmers and the two professionals I just met, both with decades more experience than me, had also validated this direction and guaranteed a market. What could go wrong?

Looking back, I’m embarrassed to say that I did return to MIT, put the project directly into a class, and mentored a group of students over the next year before realizing through field trials that farmers didn’t want a human-powered thresher. In that hot sun, they much preferred something faster that had an engine, and they also didn’t want their own threshers because they only needed them for roughly 15 days a year. The envisioned agricultural service provider? They definitely didn’t want something pedal- or treadle-powered; they wanted something fast and much cooler. Here, my students and I learned hard lessons about the dangers of assuming that affordability is the highest priority when designing technologies for low-income markets—that somehow the values of performance, durability and human aspiration don’t apply like they do in every other market. Did we fully understand the scope of the problem and who would be affected by a “solution.” Not in the least. Were we—in our air-conditioned vehicles and classrooms—the best positioned to address this problem? Not in the uninformed and self-assured way we were working. Did we predict that 5 years later the human-powered multi-crop thresher project would evolve into a company that uses a motorcycle to carry a diesel-powered machine into fields across Tanzania? Not at all.

 

My name is Kofi and I grew up navigating multiple worlds, traversing between the hallowed halls of New York’s elitist private schools and the survival-oriented streets of the Bronx. My parents were as deeply committed to excellence as they were to the social justice movements they participated in, so, between independent assignments, planning meetings and demonstrations, my school week never ended. From an early age, I learned how to synthesize my experiences at the welfare office with class ski trips, and to maintain my friendships with trust fund kids, veteran organizers and the corner store crowd that never seemed to have anywhere else to be. Translating people and cultures became a joyful experience, so I soon expanded my neighborhood to include Harlem, El Barrio, and the Village,  but Brooklyn and Queens remained exotic locations across the international border known as the East River. I am eternally grateful to my parents because they let me explore and instilled in me a lasting desire to both serve my community and always pursue knowledge. Eventually, I even moved to Brooklyn.

Soon after college I had the privilege of traveling through the entertainment industry from Senegal to Ghana, India to South Africa, Brazil to the Dominican Republic, and I was deeply impacted by the shared experience of so many young children in these vastly different cultures and landscapes: bright faces and sharp minds missing hours of schooling to work in fields or trash heaps, fetching water or collecting firewood for hours, and when school work was finally undertaken, the lucky ones working beneath naked, flickering light bulbs if not by candlelight or kerosene. Why? The birth lottery, or, as Xavier de Souza Briggs describes it, the geography of opportunity. These experiences caused me to reorient my goals and compelled me to return to graduate school to pursue skill sets that would allow me to contribute to finding “solutions” in the context of global poverty. I wanted to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, to understand rapid urbanization, as well as the barriers to rural development.

This brought me to MIT to study Urban Planning and eventually to D-Lab where I began to work closely with Amy Smith on a curriculum that challenges traditional approaches to “development” where people living in poverty are relegated to being passive recipients of technological solutions and, instead, to encourage and enable people living in poverty to become creators of technology solutions. A theme of amplifying the voices of people who are generally excluded from the processes that affect them the most emerged, and I threw myself into developing a curriculum that introduces design thinking to people without any formal education, then invites them to contribute their knowledge and skills to defining a problem and, in about three days, making a prototype. This curriculum, called Creative Capacity Building, was the basis of my thesis and was developed in post-conflict Uganda; folks around the world have been trying it and refining it over the last 8 years in settings ranging from refugee camps to classrooms to community-based maker spaces.  Most recently, I have begun translating elements of this curriculum for use in local afterschool programs in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and Roxbury, Massachusetts. But this curriculum is no panacea—pursuing it has opened serious questions for me about the limits of this work in terms of generating sustainable social and economic change.

These projects have marked me with a burning passion for the transformative possibilities of hands-on, experiential learning that invites young people to explore their own creativity, insights, and knowledge as valid sources for creating solutions to real-world problems. Watching students in small rural villages in Uganda find the same joy and excitement as students in rural Mississippi when they turn their own concepts into functional three-dimensional representations revealed what appears to be the universal power and potential of making. Far beyond the practical skills learned of using computers, machines or tools, which are also important, the most powerful aspect of this work to me is the visible self-confidence and expressions of pride, optimism, and possibility among participants—some kind of magic can happen when a person begins to view themselves as a change agent, as someone who can solve problems, offer solutions, rally support and move their community forward.

In addition to continuing at D-Lab, I’m now a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Education exploring the intersection of learning through creative problem-solving and the pedagogies and policies that can address the inequities in access that correspond with the geography of educational opportunity. In other words, I’ve come to think of technology creation by everyday people, not just specialized engineers, as a powerful lever that I would like to see democratized through educational practices that emphasize the critical thinking, collaboration, and cross-cultural communication skills that are essential for learners, workers and social change agents in the 21^st century. Simultaneously, I see through my work with young adults in Mississippi that access to these types of strategies and resources is constrained by the complex impacts of racial segregation, suburban sprawl and rural underinvestment on education policy and practice. What brings me to this class are my wonderings about whether technology can be effectively and equitably used as a lever for ensuring that every learner experiences the magic of making, regardless of whether their school is in a rural or an urban area, in a moneyed or unmoneyed school, in the U.S. or around the world.