Starting up with the Austin Impact Accelerator
We worked real hard on our applications for the Austin Impact Accelerator and the City of Austin Social Innovation Grant. Like *real* hard. Lots of writing. So now we’re doing … and it feels a lot better.
First off, there are some badass organizations in the cohort. There’s groups like Austin Justice Coalition and Integral Care that have been fighting the good fight for a long time and are looking to put on new gloves. There’s smart startups like Survive2Thrive and Prowess Project. So much talent and so many people working to benefit our community rather than just themselves. Amazing group of people to be … accelerating with.
“Reflect on the impact you are trying to achieve through this accelerator, and the goals you set for the five months.”
The impact Magnazine is trying to have is straightforward — offer amazing, free, high quality job training and educational material to adults who need to secure a better economic future by getting a GED, vocational job training or personal skills growth.
There are like fifty bajillion companies falling over themselves to create tools to teach software coding. And coding is great. But what about other high paying, secure trades? Few if anyone is paying thinking big picture with salable solutions for vocational trades. Same goes for “Open Education Resources” — Creative Commons licensed free tools for education. Much of what is being developed in the Education Technology space goes to people who are already receiving a lot of the benefits of technology. I could go on.
What we’re looking to do is take the energy that those fifty bajillion code bootcamp companies are putting into teaching people to be software engineers — how they’ve figured out good scalable solutions, how they motivate people sitting at home to learn — and apply some of that energy to lower wage workers looking for modest but important economic security and job advancement. We’re looking to mirror some of the awesome innovation energy that’s going into Open Education Resources and Education Technology and apply it to people … who maybe can’t even access the web regularly.
Our goals for the five months are to jump in to connections and relationships with partners like Skillpoint Alliance and Workforce Solutions Capital Area to help us validate our solution ideas and beta test our products, incorporate as a nonprofit and create and test our first (official) 5 products. I’m sure that will only take like three weeks so then we’ll just sit back and draw cartoons of Tim and Matt.
We’re super excited to have a specific accountable platform to work on these goals. And the connections we’d not have if it weren’t for the accelerator. Check back in five months to see if it really went as planned. Of course it will, right?
