BUILD

BUILD is a national nonprofit dedicated to helping youth of color from under-resourced communities develop an entrepreneurial mindset while discovering their hidden potential. Focusing on activating youth voices, BUILD launched a Youth Advisory Panel to serve as their in-house design squad. This grant supports BUILD’s work to provide space for students to work with staff in creating digital products, leading to developing teacher assets as open educational resources. (Substrategy: Content, Tools, and Services)

Founded in the Bay Area in 1999, Businesses United in Investing, Lending and Development (BUILD) uses entrepreneurship to "propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success." Each year 500,000 high school students (1 in 5) drop out, and each annual cohort of dropouts collectively costs society an estimated $145 billion over the course of their lifetimes. Nationwide, only 8% of young people from low income backgrounds will earn a degree by age 24, compared to 74% from upper income families. BUILD’s entrepreneurship-based, experiential learning helps students develop their own business ideas, write business plans, pitch to venture capital advisors and launch real businesses, helping to "make school relevant and motivate them to succeed." This grant would support BUILD’s ongoing work and curriculum redesign, enabling BUILD to expand to three new sites in the next five years.