I'm pretty excited to help make this happen — from talking to Jack at Founders' Circle it seems pretty clear that his main bottleneck is coordinating volunteer labor while working remotely, and that getting a bunch of them together in person for a week would be extremely high leverage
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Center for Educational Progress: Volunteer Incubator
Not fundedGrant
$0raised
Project summary
Education in the United States is systematically broken. Education schools and policymakers repeatedly prioritize fashionable but destructive ideas such as removing advanced classes rather than policies that raise the ceiling and help all students progress as far and as fast as they can. The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on changing that, pulling every lever available to reorient the education system around the pursuit of excellence: effective ability grouping, defense and expansion of selective public schools, science of learning, and painting a vision of just how far we could reach in a system serious about excellence.
Since launching CEP, we've become the unexpected hub for a distributed network of excellence-minded education reformers. Our coalition includes people who worked on major policy initiatives such as the push to return 8th grade algebra to San Francisco schools and the fight for effective admissions at Thomas Jefferson High School, the innovators behind schools such as Alpha School and GT School, Telra Institute, John Paul Prep, and Oakland LEARN, people who worked on DARPA Digital Tutor, and others who have been working around the edges of the education system to carry the flame of excellence. Given our positioning, I strongly believe that there is nobody better-positioned than us to spearhead this movement.
The problem: these high-impact people remain siloed, duplicating efforts and missing critical coordination opportunities as we work to get our movement off the ground. Virtual coordination has proven insufficient for the level of strategic alignment and momentum-building required to transform American education. We believe a proper in-person meeting can transform America's most promising but fragmented education excellence movement into a coordinated force.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
We will convene a one-week intensive incubator bringing together our core team with twelve carefully selected operators: proven school founders, board members who've won policy battles, researchers with implementable insights, and advocates with track records of systemic change.
Goals:
Transform isolated efforts into coordinated strategy by mapping the full landscape of excellence-oriented initiatives and identifying highest-leverage collaboration points
Solve the volunteer management bottleneck by identifying and training a distributed leadership structure
Accelerate knowledge transfer between operators who've solved similar problems in different contexts
Generate concrete deliverables: policy templates, school founding playbooks, parent organizing guides
The in-person format is essential. Complex strategic alignment, trust-building among operators accustomed to working alone, and the creative collision necessary for breakthrough insights simply don't happen over Zoom.
How will this funding be used?
Total budget: $30,000
Venue & accommodation: $15,000 (housing for 15 participants @ $100/night for 7 nights = $10,500; dedicated workspace = $4,500)
Travel: $7,500 (airfare for 15 participants @ $500 average)
Meals: $5,000 (working meals to maximize productive time @ $25/meal, 2 meals/day)
Operations & materials: $2,500
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
The team is me (Jack Despain Zhou, the writer behind Tracing Woodgrains), Lillian Tara, and Thom Briggs. We have not handled similar projects in the past; one reason we intend to start with a small-scale incubator is to build experience and expertise for handling larger-scale conferences in the domain should opportunities arise. We intend to run this in coordination with Ricki Heicklen, the mastermind behind this year's successful Arbor Summer Camp, getting whatever operations help is necessary to ensure a successful, smooth event.
If it goes well, we expect to run similar small-scale in-person events in the future as well as potentially larger conferences.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
Primary risk: scheduling conflicts preventing full attendance. We'll mitigate this by securing tentative commitments from core participants before finalizing dates.
Partial failure scenario: we convene 8-10 participants instead of 15. Still valuable, but reduced network effects.
Complete failure is unlikely given committed participants and secured operational expertise. Any unspent funds return to general operations supporting our core mission.
How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?
We have raised $100,000 from GT School, a school for gifted and talented students where the students have a slogan: "We will be the last humans smarter than AI." With our existing funding, we are filling our short-term salary obligations and paying contributors to our flagship publication. We remain generally funding-constrained.