Inside The Impact At Playworks

Otter connects those in need of childcare with nearby stay-at-home parents who can provide it. The business has gathered millions in investments to continue its growth and, since its start in 2020, has relaunched in San Francisco serving about 250 parents with about 12,000 on standby waiting for Otter to become available in their area.

For one school district in Texas, using personal relationships established before the pandemic, proved the best way to reach bilingual students in rural parts of the district who weren't showing up to remote classes. One librarian and a parent “went door-to-door there to track down students and find out how they could help families transition to virtual learning. They also had parents fill out note cards showing how many children lived in the home to make sure no child was left behind.” Other Texas districts are similarly relying on home visits to check on students. Data shows those methods work.

Universities are a source of innovative economic activity for neighboring towns and cities. The entrepreneurial activity spurred by academic programs and the effect a large student body has on a college town's main street is significant. Cities become incubators for high-tech ideas that turn into money-making and employee-hiring companies and cities that retain college graduates can even refocus a city's failing economy like in the case of Pittsburg. Universities successfully make the case for investing in high-tech and innovative research centers to "jumpstart America."

In some regions of Czechia, “one in 10 children fails to advance to the next grade.” Every year 2,000 students drop out. One school in the town of Trmice doesn’t have this problem. The school has low dropout rates and the number of students going on to university keeps growing. Their model of empathy, understanding, avoiding punishment, and establishing deep-rooted relationships with families and students is working. “To react with understanding.” “Trmice’s success depends on two things: good communication with families and work with the teaching staff.”

In Uganda, which has high youth unemployment rates, schools are starting to incorporate entrepreneurship lessons into traditional curricula to prepare students for life and an unstable job market after school.

Spurred by state changes, an elementary in Tulsa, Oklahoma has transformed its approach to chronic absenteeism, adding frequent positive reinforcements for good attendance and building strong relationships with students to get to the root of attendance issues. “This is a solvable problem as long as people keep in mind," the executive director of Attendance Works said. "The solutions take time to unpack and address what’s keeping kids from coming to school.”

This fall, a group of volunteers, led by Boston Public Schools' superintendent, went door to door to talk with students who had previously shown patterns of absenteeism. The effort, one part of the city's effort to reduce chronic absences, is intended to show students that adults in the community are invested in their success.

Today, one in three college students is the first in their family to attend college; of these first-generation students, about a third drop out. A growing number of higher education institutions are reaching out to parents as one way to improve retention rates -- from offering online courses about life on campus to creating programming for parents during standard orientation schedules, colleges are increasing the chances that students make it through the challenging first year.

At Lambda School, students pay nothing up front, with the understanding that they will contribute a set percentage of their future salaries to the school's operating costs. Now, Lambda is experimenting with expanding the Income Share Agreement model from its current coding focus to a broader range of disciplines, such as nursing and cybersecurity and traditional four-year college majors.

By partnering with employers in the service industry and Silicon Valley investors, Guild Education, an innovative Denver, Colorado-based startup, helps adults in service-level jobs attend college at a significantly discounted rate. Some think this arrangement could soon "become as ubiquitous as 401(k)s."