Lean Lab leaders dissect recent politics spurring U.S. education engagement
March 17, 2017 | Startland News Staff
Editor’s note: In partnership with the Wide Ruled podcast hosted by Brainroot Light and Sound, Startland News hopes to offer its audience more avenues to learn about innovators in Kansas City. Opinions expressed in this commentary are the author’s alone.
Wide Ruled is a podcast on equality in education. Each episode showcases a struggle or triumph in working toward a better education system. In this episode, host Nathaniel Bozarth talks with Katie Boody and Aditya Voleti of the Lean Lab about the recent appointment of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education, and how it’s caused a spike of interest and activism regarding education.
Nathaniel Bozarth
The Lean Lab works closely with KC Social Innovation, Village Capital and the City of Kansas City, Mo. The program has supported 16 startups and granted over $100,000 to support ideas that have the potential to disrupt the education system.
Launched in 2013, the Kansas City-based education tech incubator engaged over 900 individuals in conversation on education innovation in 2016. In addition, last year marked the organization’s first step to go international, attracting entrepreneurs that hail from 28 different cities and three countries.
Listen to what Boody and Voleti recommend on what you can do to engage with education in your neighborhood.
Nathaniel Bozarth is a regional Emmy-award winning producer with Brainroot Light and Sound. Over the past three years he’s teamed up with Christopher Cook to create engaging documentary content on how race and immigration impact opportunity in America. Wide Ruled is Brainroot’s newest production on this trajectory. @bo_nathaniel
Featured Business
2017 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
Sock 101 ‘makes it work’ on Project Runway, secures $250K
Apparently, Kansas City socks have significant upside with investors. After an appearance on Lifetime’s “Project Runway: Fashion Start-up,” Kansas City-based Sock 101 recently landed $250,000 from two prominent fashionistas. Designer Rebecca Minkoff and Gary Wassner, co-founder of Interluxe Holdings, a venture capital group focusing on fashion and luxury brands, both invested in the sock startup.…
TFA, AT&T deal will expand computer science education in KC
Despite the growing number of computing job openings, only 1 in 4 U.S. schools offer computer science classes, according to the White House. To expand its computer science initiative, Teach for America Kansas City announced Monday that the organization received a donation of $100,000 from AT&T’s philanthropic arm, AT&T Aspire. The partnership’s goal is to…
Kansas program aims to create startups with public-private partnerships
A new Kansas program is tapping universities to incentivize residents to launch more startups through public-private partnerships. The Kansas Department of Commerce recently kicked off “JumpStart Kansas Entrepreneurs” in the hopes that it will spur economic growth in the Sunflower State via early-stage firms. “The program is designed to stimulate and grow the economy from…
Humanizing text analysis, Stride marches to international growth
Computers can do a lot these days, but they can’t process feelings. After all, that’s what sets humans apart from machine — right? Not necessarily it seems, as one Kansas-City based artificial intelligence firm is challenging that notion with its text-analyzing tech that not only identifies subjects but also a writer’s sentiment. A graduate of…