Why this BHAG?* (post #2)
Stories about Pioneering a “Networked Impact” Approach to Large-Scale, Systemic Social Change
By Talia-Milgrom Elcott, Founder and Executive Director of 100Kin10
Why do hundreds of companies, foundations, government agencies, museums, and non-profits care about getting and keeping more excellent STEM teachers?
For the first time in recent memory, a majority of Americans worry that they are leaving their kids a worse future than they themselves had.
As a mother of three young children, I know this feeling all too well. Maybe it’s because we know we’ve bequeathed to our kids problems that we don’t ourselves know how to solve. As Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Whether it’s climate change, food shortages, or economic inequality, almost all the world’s most pressing problems require STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math)-based solutions.
Yet only a tiny fraction of our population has the STEM knowledge to even be at the table solving them. So it’s no surprise we haven’t yet solved our biggest challenges.
But we can:
If we are going to solve the challenges we face, we need all our kids to be equipped with the STEM skills and inspiration to find new ways of solving these challenges. And tomorrow’s problem-solvers need excellent teachers to guide them.
In 2010, leaders from across industry, business, academia, and government substantiated this need and issued a call — echoed in President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address — to bring 100,000 excellent STEM teachers into American classrooms over the coming decade.
By every account, we should have heard the call for 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and given up before we even started. Like the challenges that face our planet and our nation, the challenge of 100,000 excellent STEM teachers should have felt too big for any of us to tackle alone. We would have turned our attention to problems within our reach, and this goal, like so many others before it, would have quietly passed into oblivion.
With support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, NewSchools Venture Fund, and the Institute of Advanced Study, and with commitments from 28 founding partners, 100Kin10 emerged in 2011 to activate the country to respond to that urgent call and to accelerate and coordinate the resulting effort. 100Kin10 was founded out of the belief that this time could be different, that we could reach the goal, but only if we created a new approach to problem-solving, a new model for how coalitions work.
Since its founding, 100Kin10 has evolved into a national network that now unites 280 of the nation’s top academic institutions, nonprofits, foundations, companies, and government agencies to train and retain 100,000 excellent STEM teachers by 2021.
100Kin10 has been described as a national network, a campaign, a collaborative, a movement, a harbormaster, a hub, a collective-impact initiative.
At its core, though, it’s a social-innovation lab, testing the grand experiment of whether it is in fact possible to mobilize hundreds of great organizations, across every sector, to authentically contribute and work together to solve a big, knotty, seemingly intractable problem.
* BHAG = Big Hairy Audacious Goal
