Who're Your Five?

Background

Mentorship is in high demand across all levels of education and has proven critical for personal development and goal setting. 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) was a nonprofit, action design project which aimed to create learner-centered networks for underserved students in the Bay Area. TeamPlay is an educational nonprofit that supports inner-city schools and mentorship programs with software and related services to help them support students to use the software to develop "RealDreams" for their lives and to pursue those 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 in an attempt to bring mentoring 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 project lead Steve Jubb and 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

Unfortunately, the economic downturn during 2008-2009 put overwhelming pressure on this project. Despite efforts, in the end, this project did not lead to development of the platform that was hoped for by January 2010, and Full Circle Fund's team eventually deployed its members to other priorities. While the Education Circle continues to work with direct service providers (like Niroga), the Circle decided, going forward, to focus the majority of its attention on influencing policy and systemic change in California's education system, through its Systemic Change project.

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