Changing the name of Science
This is the November 8, 2022 edition of the Opportunity Miami newsletter written by Matt Haggman, which we send every Tuesday. Click here to subscribe to get our weekly updates in your inbox.
Featured Content
Rockets and the moon: launching talent and fostering life skills through STEM
Watch the On Site video here.
How can we propel Black entrepreneurship and innovation in Miami?
Read our Thread here.
As a child, Brandon Okpalobi ripped apart his Nintendo to understand how it worked.
“My parents were beyond upset, but that started my tinkering at a very young age. And then I started to look at different things in science,” said Okpalobi, a Nigerian-American entrepreneur and former University of Miami college basketball player. “I think that we’ve put science in a box, and sometimes we don’t understand that science is in everything.”
Okpalobi is changing that for the next generation.
In thinking about the Miami of 2040 — when the child today will be entering the workforce — an exceedingly bright and ambitious prospect is building a talent pool across Miami that’s more diverse and more capable than any region in North America. After all, Miami-Dade County is already among the most diverse areas in the U.S.
But doing it will require a large-scale effort from the ground up, providing learning opportunities that engage students in different ways, including every neighborhood across Greater Miami.
Enter Dibia DREAM, a non-profit Okpalobi founded in 2014 that engages underserved students through after-school programs, summer camps, and hands-on workshops that foster life skills development in STEM — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
For our latest On Site video series, where we hear from entrepreneurs solving problems critical to Miami’s economic future, we joined Okpalobi and his students. You can watch it here:
Watch: Rockets and the moon: launching talent and fostering skills through STEM ▶
After graduating from UM with a degree in Computer Information Systems, Okpalobi merged his passions for sports and science into DIBIA Athletic, which trains competitive athletes, and Dibia DREAM. Both are based in Miami.
Dibia DREAM is part of an increasingly rich STEM learning ecosystem across Greater Miami that ranges from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools to nonprofits, colleges, universities, and for-profit ed-tech startups. With Dibia DREAM, fundamental to the effort is making science accessible. To show a young child how it applies to many parts of their lives and can be directly part of their lives.
“That’s how you start to build the ideas and the change that we want to see,” Okpalobi said. “Science is in everything that we do. So it was really about having fun.”
The programs expose children to different career paths.
“That’s what we’re trying to do: Make sure kids see the fun in science and say, okay, I can be a personal trainer or a physical therapist, or I can be a doctor. Or as you see, the Golden State Warriors now, they use basketball analytics to see how they’re going to win games…You can do anything with science.”
Since launching eight years ago, Dibia DREAM has engaged over 20,000 children in Miami, other U.S. states, and other countries. Okpalobi is also a STEM host on Discovery Education for kids and launched Siyanse, which delivers STEM kits to the home aimed at making it easier for kids to learn about science.
Last spring, with the inaugural Formula 1 race in Miami, a fundraiser for Dibia DREAM was headlined by seven-time Formula 1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton and seven-time Super Bowl Champion Tom Brady.
“We’re excited to change the name of science and really have people excited about science going forward,” he said.
Meanwhile, a tool we’re developing to organize the content we’re sharing each week is something we’re calling Threads. The idea is to take the Q&As, podcasts, essays, and more and organize it around a specific question pivotal to our economic future. The goal is to have Threads be a place to learn the background, metrics, people, and solutions — and update the Threads as we go.
In thinking about Miami 2040, a key question is how can we propel Black entrepreneurship and build a truly diverse ecosystem in Miami? Currently, there are huge inequities in how the companies of the future are built. For instance, in the third quarter of this year, Black founders received just 0.43 percent of venture capital funding in the U.S., according to Tech Crunch.
But Miami has a real opportunity to be a leader in writing a different story.
Over the past year, Opportunity Miami has shared content highlighting leaders based in Miami who are working to solve this problem, including Henri Pierre Jacques, founder and Managing Partner of Harlem Capital; Felecia Hatcher, CEO of Black Ambition; and Shu Nyatta, who led Softbank’s Opportunity Fund before departing earlier this year to launch a new venture capital fund.
With the help of Kai Cash, we have updated our Thread focused on propelling Black entrepreneurs and building a truly diverse tech ecosystem in Miami. The thread was originally authored by Andrew Sherry. Please take a look here. But this is a starting point and is meant to change. Please jump in and make suggestions to update. You can email us directly with suggestions at next@opportunity.miami.
Read this brief explainer on our reporting on Black entrepreneurship ▶
And when it comes to Miami’s economic future, we would love to hear your thoughts on anything. In addition to email, you can engage with us on social media. You can also invite friends to subscribe to the newsletter here.
Matt
