Visible Connect Wednesday: Meet UPchieve
This June, Visible proudly announced the second cohort of its annual Visible Connect Accelerator Program, which supports nonprofit organizations changing their communities using mobile technology. In partnership with Uncharted, Visible Connect awards each nonprofit in the accelerator a $15,000 financial grant and free mobile devices with one year of Visible service. Visible and Uncharted will work alongside these game-changing entrepreneurs to help them elevate their organizations and connect them with the resources, services, expertise, and relationships they need to accelerate their impact.
For the next few weeks, we’ll introduce an inspiring nonprofit within our cohort, honing in on how they’re using mobile technology to create meaningful change.
Aly Murray and Jack Keating are teammates at UPchieve, a free, online platform that connects low-income high school students with live tutors any time they need it. Aly is the founder and Executive Director of UPchieve, and Jack is UPchieve’s lead engineer.
Aly, you helped create UPchieve, where did this vision come from?
Aly Murray: I have a strong personal connection from both a student and a volunteer perspective. I was raised in a low-income household by a single mom. As an immigrant from Cuba, she often wasn’t able to help me with my schoolwork or navigating the college application process. As a result, my own journey to finishing a bachelor’s degree was very challenging; I started at a community college, and it ultimately took me six years to transfer to and graduate from the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduating and beginning work at JP Morgan, I wanted to volunteer to help other students like me get in to college, as it was obvious to me how my own education had helped me achieve upward mobility. But as a young professional, I found it difficult to volunteer because of the long hours and unpredictability of my work schedule. I knew I wasn’t alone.
Both of these experiences gave birth to the idea of UPchieve: a free, online platform connecting low-income students who need academic support like tutoring with college students and professionals who are eager to help but need flexible opportunities to do so.
Why does UPchieve focus on providing one-on-one tutoring to students?
Jack Keating: A lot of students don’t know where to start when they’re stumped, and you can’t rely on Google when you don’t know what keywords to search. In that scenario, having a live tutor to turn to can be incredibly helpful. We’re essentially taking the place of a helpful older sibling or a college-educated parent that students can turn to when they get stuck.
Aly Murray: There’s also a lot of research that shows live, one-on-one tutoring is the best thing you can give a student who’s struggling academically; it leads to improvements in grades and motivation as well as longer-term outcomes like graduation. What UPchieve is doing is taking this proven solution and finding innovative ways to scale it to every low-income student who needs it. We believe students should be able to access live academic support 24/7, and we rely on a combination of tech and volunteer power to make this a reality.
Did you pick a mobile platform for UPchieve since you’re working with high school students?
Aly Murray: Absolutely. For most teenagers, mobile is just preferable to web because they like to use their phones for everything. But for our population, it’s actually a necessity. A third of the students we’re trying to reach depend on their phones for internet access and therefore have no other choice but to use their mobile devices for homework. This is why we started with a mobile-friendly web experience and are working to launch a mobile app in the near future.
Jack Keating: With the mobile app, we’ll be able to incorporate notifications for both students and volunteers. The volunteers will get push notifications when a student needs help, and students will be able to opt-in to reminders to finish their homework, study for a test with a tutor, or initiate a quick college planning chat. We’re really excited about the ability to use mobile technology as a way to increase the speed at which we can create connections and provide academic “urgent care” to students.
Is there a success story you could share?
Aly Murray: I’m also a volunteer on the platform, and one evening I picked up a request from a student who was working on a long homework assignment related to the Pythagorean Theorem. He was so confused about the underlying concepts that it took us 20 minutes just to get through the first problem. He was frustrated and felt like he would never be able to finish the remaining questions in time on his own. He wanted me to give him the answers. As a tutor, I encouraged him to keep going, explaining that the more he practiced, the faster he would be able to solve each problem. By the time we finished, he was able to solve the last problem on his own in just one minute. However, without access to UPchieve in that critical moment, this student would have had to choose between giving up and going to bed, or staying up all night trying to figure it out on his own.
Jack Keating: People often think that because all the tutoring happens online that we’re not forming meaningful connections, but we see examples to the contrary all the time. One of my favorite stories happened a few weeks ago: we connected a student from one of our partner schools, an alternative high school in Arizona, with a volunteer from Chicago. Once the student had a solid grasp on the material, she asked the tutor if she planned on being a math teacher when she grew up. The volunteer laughed and said that she had technically “grown up” already and just enjoyed helping students in her free time. The student’s mind was blown that this person — a complete stranger — wanted to help her succeed. Following the session, the student wrote in her feedback that her tutor was ‘dope’!
