Transcriber: Vivian Polikar Reviewer: Laura Díaz Aguirre
Wow! This is going to take a moment to soak this in.
I'm truly honored to be here today, to share
my idea on how I can change the world and really the story that led to it.
Because I had a very unlikely journey to get to this stage.
And it really is about the kids that you see behind me.
These are groups of kids that I work with in New York city,
but when I look at this picture, I see kids that remind me of myself.
They attend one of the poorest performing schools, in New York City.
And we know what the bars are, we know what the statistics are
when it comes to that, what their future prospects would look like.
When I look at that, I just personally thought
that was unacceptable.
When I look at some of our poorest and most vulnerable communities,
I think that there is so much untapped potential in those children.
When you look at them, bright eyed, they're smart, they're full of energy...
I think what it takes is just people in our community,
people who really care about the future of our country,
to think of innovative ways that we can expand their horizons,
think about ways that we can address what statistics say are going to happen
to these children, just because they are born in a certain zip code.
So, my idea around change and what Global Language Project is all about,
is taking children from some of the poorest and underserved schools
and exposing them to world languages, and culture.
And the spirit behind the whole idea is that, sometimes,
these children have very small horizons,
just because of the communities they grew up in.
The thought is that if you give them fluency in a 2nd or 3rd language,
One, you are giving them a transferable skill that can help them,
but, two, you are literally broadening their horizons,
you are introducing them to places that they may not know about.
You are looking at some of the statistics here,
when some of them are just struggling in literacy,
and you are addressing that as well.
When I look at this, I look back at that picture
of the bright kids and you see the statistics
where, again, you know that they have a better chance of getting pregnant
and being poor than graduating from college.
When I look at that room and I can just say percentage wise
how many of them are not going to graduate from High School, again,
for me, that drives me. That's my passion.
I thought about what can I do to make a difference.
What do I have from the back of my experience,
that I can bring up here and turn to these children?
The other thing I thought about when I look at the statistics is:
we know that these children have received the short end of the stick, right?
We know that they lack community support, we know that they lack family support,
we know that they are not receiving the best education.
So, I thought of how do we address that? How do we have a make good of sorts?
The idea that I had around that was giving them exposure
to a lead opportunities,
educational opportunities that are historically reserved for elite students.
They're reserved to students who go to private schools.
They are reserved for students who have parents who can afford
after-school programs, language programs and arts programs...
I said, "What if we were to give
all of that great enrichment to these children?
How could it impact their lives, how could it change
their lives in the future?"
This is a statistic, you know, that, again, a lot of us know,
when it comes to these children, what they are dealing with, you know.
We know that their background, what they are up against,
it's how do we take that and how do we move it forward.
So, when I was thinking about this talk and what I wanted to share with you today,
I thought about where it starts.
This isn't a great picture, but it's of me and my grandparents.
And, the reason why this picture is very close to my own heart is
this is my undergraduate graduation.
But, what's more important is my grandparents,
which you can't really see them. My grandfather, on my right hand side,
he grew up in the segregated South.
He was not allowed to attend school pass the 3rd grade.
My grandmother only went to middle school.
So, by all accounts, they were wholy uneducated.
But, despite this, what happened was, it gave them a reverence for education.
And they raised me and they poured all their hopes and dreams...
To them, if I could just get a college education, I would be OK.
Like that was just the Holy Grail.
They believed deeply that if I was able to graduate from college,
that I wouldn't be destined to a life of poverty,
that I could break our families' generational poverty cycle.
And, when I look at that it gives me chills,
because, in a lot of ways, that was true.
After undergraduate, I went to a coporate career that,
literally, took me around the world.
You know, growing up, I remember my grandmother telling me,
"The world can be your oyster".
And, fast foward in 15 years,
I had gone to places and worked in places that they didn't even know existed.
I found myself leading teams in China, in Europe and I thought:
"Gosh, they told me this about education".
But... they didn't even know what I was up against.
But, that was about the hope that they gave me.
That's about raising the bar.
And when I stand here, before you, today, and I say that,
you know, again, I grew up during a time where I could be raised
by uneducated grandparents,
I could grow up during a time, where I go to a "ok" public school,
but I could still go to college.
I could still have a successfull career. I could still, again, break that poverty cycle.
What does that mean?
And when I look at schools, in New York,
and some of them in Providence, I realize, you know,
that American dream that I had is severely broken.
We have a generation of very disheartened students and parents...
their ability to dream and inspire has just been confined and restricted.
So, going back to my idea about this.
It blew my mind when I was developing the idea
and thinking about my travels... how, when you live in an area,
that most people who come from poor communities
are confined to a 5 or 10 block radius.
When I looked at that, I thought, "Gosh, it's such a small area".
And, in theory that's one thing, but I thought saw it close and personal.
When I was working at Nokia and I'd come back to New York
and volunteered in schools,
I met parents and students, who had not left their neighborhood.
And I mean, they did their shopping there,
they did their groceries, everything was confined.
They'd go to their school, that was in that same block radius.
And you are like, "How can that happen?"
What I am saying is, it does!
Our first group of kids, we are teaching them Spanish and Chinese,
and we took the Chinese group, this is back in 2009,
15 students down to Chinatown.
$2,50 subway ride, 30 minutes later, we are in downtown.
We are in Canal Street, New York.
The kids and their parents, the kids looked up
and one of them, Alexander, said to me,
"We are still in New York?"
And it threw me, because, you know, people said,
are you going to have them travel to other countries?
I'm like - they've not even traveled through New York City.
And that's when it really hit me,
what I was doing in terms of language and openning them up to other cultures.
Because, when we talk about a 21st Century Global Economy,
these children, in 18 years, in 15 years, their next opportunity
may not be here in the United States.
It could be somewhere in another country.
They could be working with someone that doesn't look like them,
that doesn't speak the same language with them.
And what it's going to be really important
and the key to their success will be how they show up.
You know, when I looked at my life, working in China,
I grew up in a predominantly African-American community.
Everywhere I worked in corporate America, that was not the case.
So, if I was not comfortable in that, there was no way I would be successful.
So, what's happening in this 5 block radius, it's not the world.
It's not the world that they will have to live in, to operate in.
So, really, the genesis behind Global Language Project was expanding
what the world looked like for them.
To take what's foreign -
I love how they call teaching languages, "foreign language" -
It's taking what's foreign and making it familiar.
So, if an opportunity comes to them, that they will be excited about it.
They won't be afraid of it.
When I first started Global Language Project,
when I was conceptualizing the idea,
I was working with the Harlem YMCA.
And they were going to give a group of teens
the chance to go to Colombia, the country, for 2 weeks.
They couldn't get one teen to sign up for this free 2 week trip.
And I said, "You can't find anyone to sign up?
What's the catch, they have to pay?" "They have to do a small fundraiser,
but if they can't bring up the money, we'll help them get there."
And I said, "You can't get one person to sign up for this trip. Why is that?"
And what the counselor told me, which is something
that completely made sense to me,
when I thought about, again, my own background, was:
the parents didn't want their children going that far.
It seemed so far, so remote.
They were concerned about them. That something would happen to them.
The teens, themselves, said, "Well, what will we eat?
How will we be treated when we're there?
Will someone be discriminating against me?"
And so, what that made me realize was that these are teenagers.
And I realized they've already, in their mind,
decided what's possible and what's not possible for them.
So, when I thought about the work with Global Language Project,
we started when they were younger.
I said we have to go back to Elementary School,
before they've decided what's foreign, what's bad, what's good.
You know, what's accessible to them.
In our first group, we started in 3rd grade.
We started with 30 students in the 3rd grade.
Even at that age, they had already started
formulating who were good students and who were bad students.
That second year, we went back to Kindergarten,
because we know, in Kindergarten,
it's a clean slate for everybody. English is a new language for them.
Lesson 1 we were introducing Mandarin and Arabic and Spanish,
but what happened with that second year and that class was
we started teaching them in an imersive environment.
We had donors and people come in to view the classes.
And they would see all of these adults -
this is in Hamilton Heights in Harlem -
kids are learning to speak Chinese from the first day.
We had all of this donors and supporters come in to watch these children.
And they would say things like, "Oh, my Gosh,
I can't believe they are speaking Chinese."
"That's so hard"; "Oh my God, these kids are so smart,
they are so special. I can't believe this".
They're filming the kids, taking pictures. And this happens on a regular basis.
And, what the kids and the class started to believe was that they were special.
And sometimes, when you think about opportunities, like language;
or if you think about arts, or science or other programs
it allows children to figure out what they're good at.
And it also allows them to explore their horizons.
And, when I thought about the spirit behind Global Language Project,
it's about leveling the plan field.
It is about openning these children up to opportunities
that they might not have known existed,
but now that they do know it exists, it allows them to escape
what could've been their future trajectory.
This current year, what's been interesting... I felt like we were on to something
about giving them and exposing to careers;
we thought it's very important to give them fluency in a 2nd language
that they can use it.
What we did this year was very interesting as well.
We started introducing them to professionals,
who are working in the languages that they are learning.
So, we took them to International Law Firms,
we took them to Media Companies and, again, we had corporate people
talk to them about how they use the language.
So, it's not about memorizing a verb, it's about the utility of it.
It's about how you can connect.
It's about giving these kids a voice and words
and language that they didn't know existed before.
It's painting a brighter picture for them.
You know, in September, when we started this,
we asked the children, our 5th graders, unprompted,
the question that we've all heard before: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
And, at that time, we had one student - and I remember it was a mirror of answers,
but there was one girl, Naomi, they asked her:
"What do you want to be when you grow up?
Her answer was she wanted to be a hair stylist.
And if you go Upper Manhattan, where she lives,
on literally every single block, there is a hair stylist
and there is a barber shop, or a beauty shop.
And, again, there is nothing wrong with that idea.
You know, over the last 6 months, in March, we went back,
and, Naomi had been exposed to international attorneys
and media companies, to colleges careers, scientists...
we went back and asked her again what she wanted to be.
And this time Naomi said -
we are getting ready to do our big benefit called My Dream Speaks -
we asked Naomi again what she wanted to be
and, this time, unprompted again,
she has the microphone, she goes, "I want to be an international attorney,
helping my clients in Arabic and English".
And, I laughed when [she] said that.
It made me smile, because, at the end of the day,
whether she is a hair stylist using her language
or whether she is an attorney,
what really matters most is that she's expanded her possibilities, right?
Because, before you can be anything, you have to know that it exists.
It has to be in your realm of possibilities.
If you don't know it exists, could you become it? Possibly.
But it's not probable.
And that's what we wanted to do around languages.
When I look at this, I wanted these kids to realize the world was their oyster.
You know, part of this and part of my passion behind it,
you know, I shared with you about my grandparents.
You know, when I look at those kids and I look at statistics,
I take it personal, because I should have been a statistic, right?
I was a daughter of a teenager mother, who was a daughter of a teenager mother.
I had a 10 times greater chance of growing up poor than being successful.
And what they instilled with me, my grandparents,
which I want to instill in a generation of students,
is that the world literally can be their oyster.
You know, when I went from Corporate America
and decided to do a social venture, people said,
"But the problem in Education is so vast.
How do you actually think that you're going to make change?"
And one thing I say to the people in this audience is: change is relative.
In your lifetime you can impact one life, that literally can mean the world to them
and their future generations and how they show up in their community.
The other piece of it is, when we talk about
social enterprise and why it's so important
is what I've been able to do with Global Language Project
is to take the thinking and the learning
that I had in Corporate America to grow departments,
to make tens of thousands of millions of dollars of profit for corporations.
Be able to take that thinking to some of our most pressing issues,
to address and help some of our most precious assets - our children.
When I look at you, I'm just inspired and I'm encouraged
and think of how much that we'll be able to do together,
when we start looking at this, as a business.
We start taking some of those methodologies
that made corporations so successful, that have made them sustainable.
You know, the curriculum I talk about that we teach,
we also sell nationwide and that funds our programs
in the most neediest schools, so we can make sure that we are doing this work
and we are able to continue to do this work.
And so, again, I encourage you to think differently about this.
My thing is languages and that's how I tackle,
broadening these horizons,
there could be a number of things that you can do,
but what we do need in terms of education
is we need that innovation.
We know that if you don't innovate, you die.
You know, you look at what's happened in technology and other industries,
everyone is innovating, except education.
So, we do need social entrepreneurs to address this.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)