Denver: Generation Citizen empowers young people to become engaged and effective citizens, and their workplace culture looks to create the same for its employees. So, I went over to the New York City offices recently to check it out. We’ll begin with their CEO, Scott Warren, and then hear from some of the other members of the team.
If I were to describe my next guest, the words I would use would be curious, eclectic, collaborative, and mindful. Those are wonderful attributes to have when you’re looking to identify some new ways to solve some very old social problems. He has been an executive with JPMorgan Chase, teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, and has served or is serving as a chairman of more nonprofit boards than you can count– places like the Quincy Jones Music Consortium, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and New Profit. He is Jeffrey Walker, who is all of the above and so much more.
One of the biggest challenges in the field of education is to find talented and committed individuals to teach in poor and underserved school districts, most of them located in the urban centers of America. An even bigger challenge is to keep them, to not have them burn out and leave the teaching profession altogether after just a couple of years. One organization that believes that it has found an approach to better train teachers, prepare them for the classroom, and lead them to become lifelong educators is Urban Teachers. And it’s a pleasure to have with us now their Chief Executive Officer, Peter Shulman.
It has been said that 90% of success is just showing up, and while that might be a slight exaggeration, it is a big part of it, especially when it comes to school. Yet, up to one-third of student populations in high-poverty urban areas are chronically absent. When my next guest observed that and the impact it had on things like graduation rates, she decided to do something about it. And that was the start of the social venture called Kinvolved.