Who're Your Five?

Background

All young people can benefit from mentoring, but the need is even greater for underserved youth attending inner-city schools. Today, students are perhaps more comfortable forming and maintaining relationships online through social networking pages. The relationships haven't changed, just the environment. Who're Your Five (WY5) which aimed to create learner-centered networks for underserved students in the Bay Area. TeamPlay, an education-focused nonprofit supporting inner-city schools and mentorship programs, developed "RealDreams" software to help students and mentors define and pursue their dreams. WY5 and TeamPlay were co-founded by Steve Jubb, a nationally recognized education reform leader with experience working at all levels of the education system from the school house to the state house.

Mission

WY5 proposed a social innovation to connect urban learners to a team of adult mentors and advocates who would guide and support them to become competent, connected and caring adults. In partnership with TeamPlay's RealDreams Software, WY5 sought to help develop a web-based software as a service (SaaS) and benefit up to 100 underserved urban learners (13-17) in the Bay Area by January, 2010. The WY5/TeamPlay/Full Circle Fund collaboration aimed to help create a sustainable model that would support these students' educational and life aspirations and create learner-centered, goal-oriented networks of adults and peers to help them pursue their dreams inside and outside of school.

Full Circle Fund Role

Full Circle Fund's team partnered with WY5/TeamPlay and Juma Ventures in an effort to bring mentoring services to the students who need it most. Using existing, free technologies ( cell phones, email, social networking sites, Google, and YouTube) students would set goals and build teams under the guidance of site coordinators. Participating young people would agree to provide critical feedback to help create a "service blueprint" -- a description of what the user's experience of the software should be.

Four sites agreed to become WY5 development sites, enrolling three students each in the first phase:

• ARISE Charter High School
• Lighthouse Community Charter Secondary School
• MetWest High School
• JumaVentures

Results

The economic downturn of 2008-2009 put this project to rest. Despite Full Circle Fund's participation, the project was unable to fund development of the pilot platform. The Full Circle Fund team redeployed its members to other priorities. In reflecting on this outcome, Full Circle chair Jeff Camp commented that "while we would like all of our projects to produce the outcomes that we hope for, the world doesn't work that way. One of the benefits of our model is that we can take chances and learn from them."

[Update as of 2011: The experience with WY5 informed Full Circle's interest in Khan Academy, which includes a view for "coaches" to see student progress. Additionally, Full Circle invested in the Niroga institute to support students' development of mindfulness.]

Additional Resources

Watch a YouTube video created to recruit mentors for the WK5 program TeamPlay Mentor Recruitment Video

Watch a YouTube video showing the product demonstration for WK5's interface WK5 Product Demonstration Video

NAME: Who're Your Five?
LOCATION: Oakland
GRANT TERM: 2008-2009
TEAM LEAD: Marc Spencer