What we mean when we say the word “Community”
For all intents and purposes, the spirit of 4.0 Schools began in a bar. Before we started sporting headbands and brainstorming on white board walls, Matt would bring teachers together to talk about what problems they were tackling and the ideas they were trying in their classrooms. Six years later, we’re still coordinating events around food and drinks, because sharing a meal is the most human thing we can do with one another.
That word with is powerful. Community is necessary for groundbreaking innovation in education. When we talk about community at 4.0, we mean a few different things. Our community is far reaching and goes beyond the faces of founders that are up on the wall in our NOLA lab. Our community is made of founders from all corners of the country. It also includes the ecosystem that supports those founders. Together, teachers, parents, students, and our partners create a habitat that nurtures innovation. As founders work with the community in the earliest stages their venture, the feedback they receive is vital to their success. Our community is also influenced by the lessons we are learning from the local context of New Orleans and New York. That local context evolves as we expand beyond these hub cities through Community Catalysts and Startup Weekend Education (SWedu) organizers.
Before we opened a second hub in New York City, we spent close to a year on the ground listening over coffees and beers asking “who else should we talk to?”. This on the ground work was crucial and it has informed the way we’ve been building ever since. This listening year allowed us to kick off Essentials in NYC for the first time with some incredible folks who would continue to help shape our community; Mikey Muhanna, who started Little Bets after attending Essentials and is now expanding the idea to Chicago, and David Fu, who would eventually lead our work in NYC and now nationally as he manages the Catalyst program are just two of many. This year, Alli Dunn is leading our NYC hub and she’s exploring how we can bring more parents, teachers and students to work on their ideas even if they don’t yet consider themselves entrepreneurs.
The NYC expansion helped us realize we want to share our learnings and empower others to build vs build it ourselves. As a result, Fu worked with the team to shape and iterate the Community Catalyst program, with this idea being a driving factor.
As a team, we wrestle constantly with how we can share what we’ve learned while also empowering local communities to build in a way that is responsive to their unique opportunities.
The Community Catalyst program and Startup Weekend Education are teaching us a great deal about how to support and encourage communities of education entrepreneurs outside of NYC and NOLA. Our latest addition, the Tiny Fellowship, continues down the path of aligning our programs to support local communities beyond NYC and NOLA.
This work of investing in local communities goes beyond us sharing knowledge with them, it also requires us to learn and grow from the experiments, success and failures of their work as well. I’m excited to see what we learn from our SWedu organizers and Community Catalysts working in places that outside New York City and New Orleans.
Internally we’ve renamed our Community and Idea Development team to the Communities team-probably not the biggest news coming out of 4.0, but for me, it reinforces the importance of anchoring our work in the communities where our users are building. This means John Baldo and Malliron Hodge will work to make SWedu more inclusive and less of a lift for organizers. Over this next year they are starting from a place of curiosity about what unique strengths and challenges each city brings to the table. They will explore how the ideas that come out of a SWedu weekend in Baltimore can build on ideas tested in Denver and inform how we support communities across the country.
Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From continues to be a favorite of mine in the 4.0 canon. After revisiting it, I was struck again by the powerful metaphor of the coral reef and Darwin’s Paradox, which Johnson uses to describe the impact an ecosystem can have on the abundance and diversity of life.
We now call this phenomenon Darwin’s Paradox: so many different life forms, occupying such a vast array of ecological niches, inhabiting waters that are otherwise remarkably isolated. Coral reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make their homes there.
4.0 Schools exists to build the reefs that allow a diversity of ideas to thrive and grow as we strive towards every community having their own example of the future of school.
4.0 Schools helps bold people test big ideas about the future of school with families and students who want to be involved in those tests. We’re a non-profit that strives to put students and families at the center of what we do, and we’re committed to diversifying leadership in education. To learn more about how you can get involved, please visit us at 4pt0.org, follow us at 4.0 Schools. Read more about what we’re doing right now at futureofschool.org.
