How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

After retiring from professional soccer, Beverly Leon shifted her focus in a big way. In 2018 she founded Local Civics, an ed-tech start-up that uses game-based learning to encourage kids to strengthen their civic leadership skills. Her mission is to get students civically involved long before they're eligible to vote. She talked with Guy about the business model of an education start-up, how her business has responded to today's challenges, and why she thinks we need a more inclusive democracy. These conversations are excerpts from our online How I Built Resilience series, where Guy interviews founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week on Thursday, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show live to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses over this past year. And if you want to, you can join us every Thursday at 9 Pacific, noon Eastern on the How I Built This Facebook, Twitter, or to YouTube pages to hear the conversation and ask questions as well. And today, my conversation with Beverly Leon, founder and CEO of Local Civics, is an ed tech startup that's helping students build their civic and community leadership skills. Now, if you were just to take a guess at what

Beverly did before launching this company, professional soccer player might not be the first thing you'd think of, but that's exactly what she did. And we'll talk later on about how she got from there to founding Local Civics in 2018. So first of all, Beverly, how do you explain what Local Civics is to someone who hasn't heard of it? What does Local Civics do? At Local Civics Guy, we teach kids about power. We help them navigate and explore power.

We help them learn about their own power to create impact in their community. And through our goal-based technology, we help create individualized experiences for students to understand policies in their local community. build their own civic leadership and ultimately to define their own civic journey. How do we do this? We allow students to set accessible participation goals.

And this is either in your classroom, with your friends, with your teachers. They can use our platform to find events that meet those goals. So think about this like an event bright for middle and high school students. And then they can track their progress, set harder goals, set more challenging goals, and explore different parts of their community. So it's like it's a web-based platform, basically, and it helps to get students, and I think middle and high school students right now, right? It gets them to participate in local events that are happening in their community? Yes, exactly.

So setting the goal to participate is one of the key parts here. You can't just say, I want to be involved in community and jump right in, and it's really overwhelming. right? There's all these different spaces. If no one's brought you to those spaces before, I don't know about you. I don't like showing up to places without either a friend or a classmate. So how do you introduce young people into these really powerful spaces of community without creating that accessible on-ramp for them? And so through that platform, we can actually allow students to set goals that they can meet and then deepen their engagement once they've had that initial touch point to attend with friends.

So let's just think about like a practical example of how it would work, right? Because I think you've rolled this out in a few, and I think about 300 schools right now. It's still in beta. I mean, you're still building this and creating curriculum and things. But right now, let's say I show up to the platform, what could I do? Yeah. So in and right now it looks very different from what it looked like a year ago for when schools were open, there were events happening in our communities, but today on the platform for the

hundreds of users we have and hundreds of educators that are engaging, students can find events. So take New York City, for example. We have events that are either happening in the school community, student government meetings, student council meetings. We have events that are happening at the New York Public Library. We have events that are happening that are happening that, that are part of our civic infrastructure community board meetings that we should be plugging into as citizens, students can go onto our platform and they might get a goal from their principal,

from their history teacher, from their English language arts teacher to say, you have to get to two events this month. That's your homework assignment. They can then use our platform to choose which event they'd like to engage with. But the next step after that, after you get that first touch point of engagement,

you have a student that might go to the library event is to bring it back into your classroom. And the next goal is to say, I'd like to present at my library. I'm going to volunteer at the library. And so from there, you can actually start deepening your engagement once you've had that initial exploration or discovery. We've also launched our own event series.

So students can engage with events that our instructional team deliver. And so those are now all remote opportunities. So we bring in professional. elected officials to come engage with students, candidates running for office in their local community, youth activists who discuss about their community organizing. So, for example, we have the founders of teens take charge. They offer sessions on our platform that any young person can plug into and begin to grow, you know, that initial discovery of, you know, what does it

mean for me to be an active citizen? So it's a little bit like a fitness tracker for civics, education. You can, you can think of it like that. And it may be the athlete in me that this is a tool that, that I needed, right? These are the tools that, you know, you don't wake up and start running the 100 meter dash or running a marathon. It takes training. It takes practice in routine building, right? So you can think about it like that as if you're 12 years old, where do you start beginning to engage when you're 17 or 25, right? We're beyond the population and age group we work with. What does that look like for you to start? I know I mentioned earlier you were a professional soccer player. I mean, playing at the highest international levels in several countries, Italy, the

UK, I think Iceland. Tell me how you got to this idea for what you are doing today. What was it from your life that led you to want to create this? I grew up in this really small town, this red town in Blue Massachusetts, called Rundham. My family, my parents immigrated to this country in their early 20s. And so I'm a first generation American. You're one of the only black families in this town. And, you know, through my youth, I played sport. So sport was the transformative lever for me. It allowed me to be a part of community, to see my own power in community. So eventually as a young girl, I play soccer. But then I would go back and I would coach and mentor my younger self. That opened up opportunities and doors for me that I don't think would have been possible had

I not been engaged in sport throughout my whole life. Brought me to Columbia University or I was able to play at an elite level and continue to coach. I coached in Harlem. I coached for FC Harlan. I'm an incredible youth sports org. And when I graduated from Columbia, I actually got this, I landed this awesome job on Wall Street. On my weekends, I would continue coaching. And there was a moment where I'm telling young people, follow your dreams, you know, lean into your passions, all the while I'm not living my own. And there was a moment where I had to take a step back and say,

if I'm not willing to take this type of risk for my own life, who am I to ask a young person to actually dream big, right? So that was sort of, you know, what felt like the biggest risk of my life of leaving that, the comfort and stability of that job. And I moved to Iceland. I played in Iceland. And then I traveled to Italy, spent a year in Italy and then to the UK. But as I think about, I'm moving through different democracies, I'm moving through different communities, playing with women from all around the world, and coaching young people in all of these spaces. My time in Italy in particular was really challenging. It was very isolating. I could see the spaces of community I wanted to be a part of, but couldn't connect to them, right? And that immediately

reminded me, one, of growing up as this black girl in Rentham, right, where, you know, very much outsider perspective or what would feel like that as a young person. It also reminded me of coaching young people in Harlem that had this same sense of disconnection or disengagement with community that was right down the street. So I think that's really that feeling there was the seed of local civics. If I'm living my dream and being able to play overseas and live abroad and have these experiences, how can I use my gifts and passions and resources and channel it into a purpose to actually try to build community back home? Beverly, we are in the middle of a civics crisis in the United States. We've seen that unfold over the last decade and more.

People are very frustrated with how government operates. And in many cases, they're not always sure why it operates in certain ways. We got to a point earlier this year where many people believed that the vice president of the United States had the power to nullify an election, even though it is not a constitutional power. As the vice president, explain to the then president. This is a problem. We have a huge problem in America. How do you solve that problem?

How can we start to solve that problem through what you are creating? Yeah, Guy, you've named some of the biggest challenges facing our democracy. There's increasing polarization in our communities. We're seeing it every day on our computer screens, on our TV screens. And as we started to look at how we tackle this problem, how is local civics positioned to actually work on this in partnership with others, we started to see even, you know, what we're seeing are the symptoms that, right, how can we tackle that root cause? And we looked at some of the data. So 2016, you know, in particular for young people, only about 43% of my age cohort voted in the presidential election. So that's 18 to 29-year-olds. 43% showed up for one of our largest, our presidential election.

You can imagine what that number looks like down to our local elections, to our school boards, to our town councils, much lower. This year, we had a boost in youth turnout, right? And I think the numbers are coming out around 55%, but it's still too low. So one, our team is hyper-focused on how do we allow young people to see how important voting is. Two, civic knowledge, you're talking about what are our constitutional rights, what are the processes and laws that we've actually built as a country and community to ensure that we have equal representation and justice. And civic knowledge is at an all-time low.

It's around one and four adults can name all three branches of the federal government. So even at the most basic level, we're not informed about how our government works. and the powers we have as citizens. And what we're doing at local civics is the on-ramp. If you haven't been invited into spaces of power and community, you're not going to wake up at 18 and suddenly start exploring those places of power. And one of those rights we get granted at 18 is the right to vote. If you can think back to when you were that old,

did you understand all the spaces that that vote literally counted towards? And if you're not going to wake up at 18 and understand that, you're not going to wake up at 25 or 35 and understand that. So for us, at the root, it has to start in our schools. It has to start with our young people. And if we can provide that channel, not just the civic knowledge, we can provide a channel for them to also apply that knowledge and discover those spaces. It's going to be really powerful for a young person when they start to say, hey, here's an opportunity for, for us to create a change here. Where do I start?

Who are the stakeholders? What are the laws? And how does power work here? What is my power? And so at root, what we're trying to help young people do is find those opportunities, those assets, those civic spaces down the street. So when they're actually older and they can vote or actually even at their young age, they can connect it to our national level.

That's Beverly Leon of local civics, which, by the way, is a four, profit company, and when we come back in just a moment, she'll talk about how they make money. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. And one more thing, the New York Times best-selling book How I Built This is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out How I Built This, The Book, available wherever you buy your books.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Resilience Edition. And today my guest is Beverly Leon. She's the founder and CEO of an educational technology startup called Local Civics. And when I did this interview, lots of people watching live were writing in with the same basic question. Beverly, I'm getting some questions in from viewers about the business side of this, because you are a for-profit, right? I mean, this is not a nonprofit business. So you have to create a sustainable business model. Even if you are a nonprofit, you would.

Talk a little bit about the business model of your company. It's an ed tech company. It's a very competitive space. You've got to get into schools and to really scale it and you know, you've got to get to the school districts. tell me about how this could be a sustainable proposition. So the reason I went to Columbia Business School and to back of a bit, local civics, after I retired from soccer, I actually brought, you know, I went to study youth civic engagement at Oxford. I was going to go do a PhD.

As I started leaning into that research, I realized that, wow, this is way bigger than, the lens of sport that inspired me, that it had activated my civic engagement. And the question I couldn't get out of my head was, in what ways can we use technology to better connect young people to community? That was the first question I had asked, and how can we use this technology to build civic leadership? I knew at that moment when I was doing the research, I had to understand how to build a sustainable business, how to build a team, that's motivated and how to sell, generate revenues. So I brought that idea and really used Columbia Business School

to incubate local civics. I lived in a classroom in the South Bronx working with hundreds of students and hundreds of educators getting feedback just on the entrepreneurial, creating a product, right? So if we set aside our mission, which is a huge need and challenge we're facing as a country,

but how do we build products that really solve a problem? What job did we need to complete for students, our student users and our teachers, and then the schools that are paying us? And if we could listen closely enough, we could build a tool that would add value at each part to each of those different users. And what we found is that we're not just selling a technology product.

We're helping schools actually use data to inform their decision-making around school culture, use data to elevate their curriculum. What we also found is that educators needed training. So we also began engaging in professional development, and we generate revenue through that channel. And finally, we work in partnership with corporations who helps fund and sponsor some of this work, And on top of that, the core and the scaling methodology is through technology, right? We sell our technology on a per student basis.

So it's really an enterprise SaaS model, but we've done the deep work to say, are we adding value to schools and the person that's paying us? And if we continue to grow and scale that, we will actually continue to have a generate revenues. And in the past year, you know, we've been in. able to bootstrap our company through just a couple grants from Columbia, from different social venture funds to actually grow our revenues, you know, into the six figures. And that's something that, you know, we didn't take outside capital to accomplish that. And, you know, we're at an inflection point where we're looking to scale this and to engage partners that saying, hey, these are resources

that we need. And that's our business, right? We, that's our sustainability. revenue model that also makes achieving our mission a sustainable one. You know, one of the things that I was always very impressed with in Europe was you would see signs all over the roadways and in front of Public Works projects that would say, you know, the European Union is funding this project, your tax money is, you know, you see that in some states, in California, you see that. I don't know how much of an impact it has, but I do think that it is a small signal to try and connect people with what they do. Because as a citizen, you basically, if you're not engaged,

you're just paying taxes, right? And so it's hard to understand how, what your role is in a society. And I think that to me is one of the big challenges. The other huge challenge we have in the United States, and this is going to be really controversial. I think some people might totally disagree with me and want to, you know, bring up their pitchforks. I think we have too many elections. I mean, I live in California, and if you look at the ballot in California, it's really, really unwieldy. I mean, there are so many ballot initiatives. There are so many people to vote for for somebody who has to work all day, you know, to find the time to engage in civics and to really learn about communities is hard. It's hard work. Absolutely.

What I'm hearing you say that, what I'm feeling is that overwhelming feeling of how can I possibly inform myself about everything. everything that's happening. And there's a thread from there when we work with young people, there's that same, well, I don't know who I'm voting for because I need to study all the issues and I need to know everything about every position. And my first response would say, you know, we lean into critical thinking as students are starting to evaluate these, but even as adults, how can we use our thinking skills to say, what's happening here? How important are, each of these elections and how is it going to impact the values and the needs of my community, right? So even if we can't possibly understand each ballot measure, do you have the skills to

critically examine each one? I'm thinking back to my experience living in the UK. When I was at Oxford, you know, not just British citizens, anyone that lived in that city could vote on the city elections. I had just been transplanted from, you know, northeast English. down to Oxford, I knew nothing about the community. But the skills I needed to explore that were, can I understand what's happening here? Do I understand how the policy will impact what I care about, the needs of my community, the needs of the country? And so I would take the step back and say, there are many elections, but given the time, do you have the skills to think about each of those ballot measures as propositions and bills? And if the answer is, yes, you're already on your way

to being engaged for far too many people, that answer is no. They don't have the ability to actually think critically about the impact of some of this legislation and policy. And that's a problem. Beverly, do you think that there's over the past few years, there's been a lot of talk about our model, our model of democracy, and whether that model needs to be updated or even fixed? or completely changed. This is a serious conversation that has entered into the national dialogue. Do you think American-style democracy

is broken and needs to be fixed or do you think it's a matter of educating people about how it works? It's an interesting question. I do not think American democracy is broken. What I think has happened in America, American democracy and if we take a look to our founding, it's been extremely exclusive. It has not been an inclusive democracy. And we look at that at core amendments that have granted the right to vote

to black folks in our country, to women. If we take a look at what American democracy meant in 1776, it's not the perfect union that we actually needed it to be. So while I do not think it's broken, I think that we can create more inclusive pathways for our citizens. And until everyone is actually provided that on-ramp into our civic life, and so not just at the voting booth, but into spaces of power, we're going to continue to see this, you know, it's going to feel broken. But the opportunity I think we have in this moment and time is to actually open those channels up. And not just for, you know, our focus is young people.

So already we discount and disempower how young people participate. Well, you're 17. Just wait until you're 18. That's when you really can make a difference. That undermines and devalues actually the unique contributions every single person can have. And I think that carries on into adulthood. You haven't been invited in. If someone's telling you you're not important at 16,

why do you think you're going to be any more important at 26? right? When it carries forward. And so I think the shift that we can do and that we can all work towards is not fixing this broken democracy, but making sure that it's actually working. It's actually democratic. But it sounds like what you're saying is there is an opportunity now. Absolutely. And this past year alone, one of the things our team reflected on, not only was there a paradigm shift in how, you know, in education, right? We're an education company and that whole market shifted from the business side. We had a paradigm shift in this consciousness raising with social unrest. We had a historic movement for black lives. And the

opportunity is to create those accessible and inclusive spaces. We happen to do it in, you know, in the midst of a 2020 presidential election where the majority of folks could not vote in person. You know, our whole country had to innovate in order to achieve that. We had to figure out how to deliver a census, take a census count in the midst of this. At the same time, we had to engage young people that were moving into this activation point of now you can vote to educate and inform and ensure that they had those channels to engage. age. And so that, you know, that opportunity we can continue to innovate, but I do think there's a moment where the majority of our country is saying something has to change here and where do we

start. And for us, you know, our team will continue working with young people, but it's going to be in collaboration and partnership with at every other sort of entry point for this, for our democracy, really to be a thriving one. Beverly Leon of Local Civics, thank you so much for being here for joining us. Thank you so much, Guy. That's an excerpt for my live conversation with Beverly Leon, founder and CEO of Local Civics. If you want to see the entire interview or any of our past live interviews, you can find them on the How I Built This Facebook page or at YouTube.com slash NPR.

And if you want to join our conversations live and maybe even ask questions, They happen every Thursday at 9 Pacific, noon Eastern. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with help from Ferris Safari, J.C. Howard, Bruce Grant, El Manion, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you back here in a few days.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to Howellie. how I built this Resilience Edition from NPR.