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Entrepreneurship
Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 17: Beth Schmidt - Founder of Wishbone.orgStudent wishes come true
Created by Kauffman Foundation.
Want to join the conversation?
- were you aware that the subtitles for this video we infact the subtitles from one of the warby park interviews? at least the first part anyway, still finishing the video(6 votes)
- Very inspiring video ....in trying to improve and change society ....if everyone of us make this small steps ...we will have a world of educated people ...doing better decisions in life ...(2 votes)
- The subtitles are wrong.(1 vote)
- Silly question, but is there ever any confusion with this organization and the salad dressing maker?(1 vote)
- How do they make a profit? Do they take a fixed amount from each donation?(1 vote)
- is it easy to start helping educate people like I mean could I help now(0 votes)
- Shure! you could find a struggling student in a subject you are good at and help them!(2 votes)
Video transcript
- My name is Beth Schmidt, and my organization is
called Wishbone.org. I started Wishbone to actually
send low-income students on these afterschool and summer programs that are otherwise pretty
much cost-prohibitive for that demographic. I was teaching 10th grade English in South Central Los Angeles, and I said, go research any afterschool or summer program in the Los Angeles area, and part of the research
paper was to match a passion to this afterschool
program or summer program that a student wanted to attend. There were about 13 papers that started with the sentence nobody's ever
asked me what my passion is. And so I'm sitting there heartbroken, thinking (laughs) I
have to send these kids on these programs. But I was on a teacher's
salary at the time, so I can't afford to send them all. I actually ran a marathon
to raise some money to send seven of them. Took the teacher route, and I stapled together packets
of my students' wishes. They each wrote a paragraph,
an excerpt from their essay about why they wanted to
attend the program they chose. I took a photo of each student, and I mailed it out to friends and family. I like to err on the side of transparency, just because I think it
motivates people to give more. Any donor wants to know where
their dollars are going. That was really part of the
whole design for Wishbone. People could actually see what the dream for the student was, and they could see the price tag to say, okay, my donation is
actually making a difference. So it all started with the teacher packet. We had one student who
is taking flight lessons. I think he did over 60 hours this summer of flight school with Wishbone. We have other students who want to go to iD Tech Camp and learn how to code. We have some students who wanna learn about stem cell science. These kids actually come
back into their school day and become the experts
on whatever they've done. It's powerful, what can happen
within a single community when one kid comes back
and has that a-ha moment. It's incredibly powerful to
see peer groups come together and realize I can do that too. I took about a year to really think about whether I was gonna pursue this full-time, and then I dove right in. I realized I didn't wanna
run a marathon again. That was the year I said I
need to figure out a new, sustainable method for
sending kids on programs. There's very humbling moments where you're constantly
learning and iterating. And I remember when Wishbone
earned its first $25,000, and I thought the organization
was made. (laughs) Then you realize, oh boy, this isn't gonna get me very far (laughs), so it's a rollercoaster. But a piece that's unwavering
is your solid belief that this is an issue and there's
a specific solution to it. So for Wishbone it's really clear. There's an opportunity gap. Low-income kids are prohibited from path-changing opportunities, and the solution is to get
them those opportunities. That is the piece you cannot waver on. The future of philanthropy, I believe, is definitely through technology. We have so much capacity
to be able to give online, and it's one of the last
fields actually to come online.