Keeping Education Alive

2019-2021

Client
Stand Together
Verticals
Issue Orgs, Education

Because education can't stop when the rest of the world does.

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed down our world, it may have affected education more than any other sector. Students, all of a sudden isolated at home, had to find meaningful interaction with their courses and instructors. On the other side of the equation, teachers were left scrambling, without resources, doing anything they could to keep the ever-important connections between themselves and their students alive.

Having worked intimately with education groups for over a decade, we knew the stakes, and we knew we had to do something to keep education alive. We reached out to a group of entrepreneurial funders and nonprofits, led by the Stand Together Foundation. Quickly we began to draw out a strategy for what we thought would be the next month but quickly became the next year of at-home learning.

How can you help learning at this scale?

We decided that we would attack both sides of the equation: compiling, resources, free tools, educational webinars, thousands of lessons, and myriad other helpful ideas and bringing them to one simple platform.

For students, we would launch “Learn Everywhere,” a platform to bring thousands of free virtualized learning opportunities to their fingertips. For teachers, we would launch “Teach Everywhere,” a platform to offer continuing education, free teacher tools, and hundreds of SEL-infused free virtual lessons for those teachers endeavoring into the virtual learning landscape for the first time.

What was the impact?

McKinsey group estimated the economic impact of the potential COVID learning loss could near trillions of dollars. Worse yet, it would leave a generation nearly 2 years behind their peers in the job market causing millions of dollars of damages at the individual level. Keeping learning alive during COVID meant saving every single learner we touched from millions of lost lifetime earnings… it meant a life changing effect.

In just weeks, the results became clear. The Facebook Group for Learn Everywhere gained nearly 100,000 members and the website with at-home learning activities saw 100,000 visits. And for every parent or at-home learning impacted at Learn Everywhere, one of the teachers we helped at Teach Everywhere impacted nearly 100 additional students. So, when we reached 60,000 teachers in the first 2 months, we knew we had made an enormous impact in the landscape of education.