4.0 Tiny Fellowship Reflection with Alani Douglas, trubel&co Co-Founder

Building the Future of School is undoubtedly no easy task, but that's the journey the founding team at trubel&co ventured on last fall, in partnership with 4.0 Schools. Back in December, Alani Douglas and Nick Okafor , two of our co-founders, concluded the 4.0 Tiny Fellowship, spurred to reimagine education through the lens of equity, liberatory design, and joy. A daunting task, but 4.0 equipped our team with coaching, community, curriculum, and funding to make our pilots come to fruition. The Tiny Fellowship is a four month program that takes fellows from an idea with early traction to a proof point that is ready to grow. Fellows learn how to plan, run, and evaluate a recurring pilot. Fellows receive coaching from experts, a $7,000 grant, up to $3,000 after graduation, and a community of peers, all pushing themselves to run disciplined tests of their ideas with their communities.

Just last week, Alani and Nick attended a post-wrap in-person event - the Community Supper for 4.0's Bay-Area network and alumni - that kept the spark of fellowship amongst the cohort burning bright. Following last week’s event, trubel&co’s Laken Sylvander caught up with Alani to learn about the Community Supper, her experience with the fellowship, what she would share with future applicants to 4.0, and what good trubel is coming up next.

Laken Sylvander: Hi Alani! I’ve been so looking forward to hearing what you thought of the 4.0 fellowship and dive into the ways it has helped trubel&co grow and hone in on its mission!

Alani Douglas: Hi Laken - yeah it was a really formative experience for Nick and me at this early stage in the work of trubel&co and I’m excited to share what my experience was like, how it helped us and how it can help others at similar stages in exciting new projects.

LS: Well let’s get right into it! Tell me about your experience of the 4.0 Tiny Fellowship. What did you learn?

AD: Something that really stood out to me about the fellowship, that went beyond my expectations, was how the leaders centered joy in the process. I was pleasantly surprised at how much intentional space they created for all the individuals participating in it. I was expecting it to be more of a single-minded focus on building your idea and technical pieces to get our ideas off of the ground, but 4.0 made a really intentional choice to center joy, community and peace with all of that work. I found it especially grounding because of the usual pace of frenzy that comes with getting a new, ambitious idea off the ground. 4.0 really supported each individual’s mental journey in this process, not just the business side. And of course they created this additional learning module around joy: why it’s important to bring many sides of joy into your work to make it fulfilling, which was a really welcome addition to the scope of the program.

LS: Wow! So considering how that approach surprised you, I’d love to hear more about what drew you to the fellowship.

AD: Right, well definitely the supportive community that the fellowship had the potential to build, and did indeed build. From reading alumni interviews, the cohort model sounded really valuable for getting first-hand feedback from folks who are also at an early starting point. I was excited at the prospect of a community helping in shaping the direction of trubel&co to expand beyond Mapping Justice. Then there was the appeal of the support & community of having coaches, who ended up being one of my favorite parts of the fellowship, who could lend their experience in how we can approach our next steps. All of this community building was essential to Nick and me when thinking about how anti-racist pedagogy and framework for our launching trubel&co programming in new cities – there were a lot of necessary questions around what it means to enter the community you’re piloting in. How are you reflecting a community’s needs with your work, and how will you measure whether or not you met those needs? We knew we wanted to work with explicitly anti-racist organizations in this development stage, and 4.0 was exactly that.?

LS: How exciting to have found community at this early stage with folks that share a vision of anti-racism core to their work. I’m so glad 4.0 made that a known priority to attract those kinds of applicants - makes a big difference. Well, backing up a second, can you walk me through a bit more specifically of what this pilot experience meant?

AD: For sure! We kicked things off with “4.0 Tiny Camp” - 2 days of thinking through our high-level idea, and breaking it down into the people served, what we had to offer, how to measure our success, and how to determine where to go next. A lot of this thinking had already happened for trubel&co in our early pilots of Mapping Justice prior to the fellowship. We wanted to condense the idea for the purposes of the 4.0 pilot and ended up creating a one-time workshop. We shifted to this pilot so we could learn how much a group can take away from a significantly different time period compared to the multi-week premise of Mapping Justice. As the fellowship continued, we also made a pretty significant pivot in deciding to prioritize alumni interviews - it turned out that investing in understanding our existing alumni experience was a much more important use of that time. I credit the re-evaluation of our approach to the 4.0 workshops - our cohort & coaches were so helpful! We learned a ton from our coach. He had very specific feedback and was candid about sharing from his own experience of pivoting his own financial model in the early days of his startup. Most of all, though, was how helpful it was just to create a meaningful connection with someone further along in their process.

LS: Can you tell me more about your experience with your coaches? Sounds significant.

AD: jacob was our main coach - he is the founder of a STEM after school program, STEM to the Future. We met with him somewhere between 5 and 10 times over the course of the fellowship. I can say having graduated from the fellowship now that he is a very warm friend, and was an essential supporter throughout the process. He went out of his way with extra resources. We occasionally gave him some out of the blue questions and he really met us each time, and continues to be a strong supporter. We’re meeting with him again later this month! Our measurement consultant was Justin, a metrics expert, and he really helped us in giving crisp feedback on how we’re measuring and the questions to ask on what success looks like for trubel&co. He really helped me clarify why the pivot to alumni interviews was valuable in our pilot.

LS: I’m thrilled to learn that you and Nick have built an ongoing relationship with jacob, that’s kind of priceless. How about the cohort??

AD: Our cohort was a collective of founders for anti-racist educational programs targeted towards diverse youth. All of us were addressing the question: “How can we make sure we’re uplifting youth so that they have the same chances and opportunities?” In our workshops, feedback was shared around how we presented our ideas and building=-block steps, which is pretty universal regardless of content. For me it was exciting - it felt very multi-disciplinary, which I think is important to build people’s senses of the world. In undergrad, while I was studying engineering, I also worked in the theater department and loved the way it expanded my thinking, so I’m always looking for ways to increase multi-disciplinary learning and this felt like a natural extension of that. This really helped me hone in on how Mapping Justice has a lot of opportunities to incorporate more art and design: there’s a lot of artistry in how you show visual data and we don’t focus on or advertise that as much as, say, the technical skills, but I’d like to look to what that might look like and how that might attract a broader pool of students to Mapping Justice.

LS: I’m so excited to hear that - I tend to lean on my design/creative side, which is part of what makes Mapping Justice so important to me -? that we see it reach as many students as possible. As a high schooler, I did not see myself as someone interested in STEM at all, but Mapping Justice might have changed a lot of how I imagined myself within the field knowing that my spatial and visual instincts were already serving me greatly in the arts. I love that! So with all of this in mind, what have you come to articulate about the work of trubel&co that you had not prior to this experience?

AD: Oh that’s a great, big question. I think, passively, we’ve had the concept of our pilot with Mapping Justice workshops for months prior to 4.0 and we thought we had a really solid idea, but it took several detailed paragraphs to walk through it. 4.0 helped us hone that down to a more articulated pitch through multiple rounds of feedback. We’re also coming out of this ready to strengthen the alumni connection - we had a hunch that it was important before,but coming out of the fellowship I have a strong gut feeling that continuing to engage our alumni, whether Mapping Justice of the upcoming Hackathon or workshops, will be key part of our strategy both in developing ongoing support network for students to find opportunities and finding ways in cross-functional, multi-disciplinary way.?

LS: How do you see the work of trubel&co growing as a result of this experience?

AD: In the short-term, being able to join the fellowship was a huge confidence booster and very validating for our goal to take Mapping Justice and make it into the larger mission of trubel&co. I gained confidence from coaches and the cohort, and 4.0 as a whole, which propels us down this line of work.? The pilot we ran offered opportunities for students to break down challenging social constructs and discuss them together in ways they might not have had the opportunity for in the average classroom. We also interviewed alumni about the long-term horizon, which helped us identify more opportunities to learn and work in the areas they are most passionate about in civic justice, social change. We got to explore what kinds of opportunities they’re now pursuing outside the classroom. From our in-depth interviews, and 50-100 additional alumni surveyed, the vast majority are expressly taking skills and tools from Mapping Justice and figuring out ways to apply it to their interests in higher education. I don’t know that we would’ve taken the beat to go back and interview at length at this stage if it weren’t for the nudges from our coaches to dig into it. By asking us, “What is the core mission, and how are you trying to measure it?” we paused and re-assessed in a critical way, leading us to articulate how we intend to have a lasting impact on students and change the trajectory of the next several years of education and into their work life.

LS: And, looking forward, now that you’re in the 4.0 network, what does being part of this broader community mean to you?

AD: I’m personally excited to contribute back to 4.0 as a whole - helping source candidates, interview and being a coach - which was such a valuable part of experience. I’m excited to continue to see how founders in this cohort progress, especially as a remote network, there will be unique opportunities to collaborate. This really is an ecosystem of aspirational leaders to help each other advance our work - folks can provide advice, support and mentorship who are on similar journeys, maybe a little ahead of where we are as an organization, and when we pull ahead, paying that forward.

LS: Can you give an overview of what we’ve been up to at trubel&co since the fellowship concluded?

AD: Back in March we took a similar workshop from our 4.0 pilot to the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting! We lead 2 workshops and a networking event in Denver - Civic Media and Personal Rights in a Digitized Society, and Algorithms, Bias, and Designing for Inclusivity. We also just wrapped up a 3-part workshop series for MIT’s MITES alumni on Race, Power and Technology, led by our team and informed by research by one of our own Mapping Justice alumni!

LS: So, what’s next for trubel&co?

AD: We’re gearing up for another Mapping Justice summer! Keep an eye on our LinkedIn for an exciting upcoming announcement about this summer’s pilots built on new partnerships in brand new regions, and our returning commitments to communities we’ve invested in for years.

LS: Any final takeaways about your experience with 4.0’s Tiny Fellowship?

AD: I’m going to give one last shoutout to joy. 4.0 did a really great job creating opportunities for connection, especially in this remote world. It’s an odd time to be alive as individuals, and 4.0 really went out of their way for this cohort to connect us as individuals and humans, which really strengthened the feeling of the fellowship.

LS: What advice would you give to future applicants for this fellowship?

AD: This is a really intentional and meaningful space to get some feedback about your idea. Even if you feel like you’re very early days, it’s worth it to apply and to put your idea through a couple of rounds of rigorous thought. We were worried that we were too early, and actually I think we learned that we caught ourselves at just the right time! So go for it - think of it as an opportunity to take something from early thoughts to an actionable phase.