You’ve just begun your first year as an Echoing Green Fellow. What has the experience meant to you so far? What are you most excited or hopeful for?
[While] not to say I don’t get validation out of the work I do, but getting an Echoing Green Fellowship is validating. I feel like Echoing Green is very intentional about who you select, and so knowing that you’re selected, [you’re like], okay, “I’m really making an impact.” So it’s definitely an honor to be here. I’m most excited about the community and growth. Being able to grow as a leader, being able to grow as a person, and also gain a bigger community of people who are [also] doing systems change work. It is lonely. I was talking to some other nonprofit friends—it’s lonely when you’re doing systems change work because you have to have a different mindset than most people. You have to look at a problem and throw your all into it, even when it’s draining a lot from you. And so, when you’re in those spaces where you have other people doing the same things, it’s energizing.
What is your favorite time of day?
I would say between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. That’s when I have the most energy to get stuff done. That’s definitely my favorite time. After 2 p.m., if it’s emails, I’m a loss. . .
Other than, you know, laying in bed to go to sleep—then that’s a great time, too.
Since 2023, more than 20 states have adopted “bell-to-bell” bans, which prohibit students from accessing their cell phones during the school day. A Pew Research survey published this past summer found that nearly half of respondents (48 percent) supported the bans, but some critics have suggested they could be detrimental for students juggling school with outside duties, like jobs or looking after younger siblings.
The governor of Georgia recently signed into law a bell-to-bell ban for public high school students, which will go into effect in the 2027–2028 school year. What do you make of this trend in general and how do you expect the coming ban to impact your students, given that Empowr programming takes place during the day?
I know it’s controversial because there’s always outliers, right? There’s always the one kid who’s in this very unique situation. But being in the schools, I can tell you this is the right move. The kids will say, “I need to use it to contact my parents,” but they’re texting during class, they’re getting on TikTok, they’re making videos. It’s not just being used to contact their parents, and so for that reason, it is definitely 100 percent beneficial for them to be banned.
I can see the effects it has on some students during class. I can see the difference when they get in trouble and have their phone taken away; now they’re focused, versus when they’ve been on TikTok all day, their attention span is just shot.
So, I’m excited about it. My students are not excited about it. They call me an old man, but I tell them, “Hey, I grew up without cell phones in school, and we handled things just fine.” If your mom needs to get ahold of you, she can call the front office. We grew up without phones in school, and we still had to handle those same responsibilities. The responsibilities themselves aren’t new. You’re never going to have a solution that works completely for everybody. So, if this works in 99 percent of use cases and [in] 1 percent it doesn’t, we have to adopt it and find a solution for that 1 percent.
What was the last book you read?
Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell
How has the proliferation of AI changed Empowr since you launched in 2019? Moreover, considering that post-undergraduate job obtainment is a key part of Empowr’s premise, are you concerned about the decline in entry-level hiring, including in the tech sector, which some attribute to AI?
That’s a great question—the proliferation of AI has actually advanced what Empowr was going to do. I always wanted to get more into this inventor state we’re in now, with our build program. The students come in [and] they have to think of an issue in the community and then create the solution. They thought of food insecurity, and I was like, “Okay, we’re going to build the most advanced [possible] garden that doesn’t require human intervention.” That requires more than just software development, which AI is good at. It requires one ideating [on] how this [product] works in our community, and then physically building the product; things that AI can’t do as of yet. Maybe in 20 years, when they have robots that can move and that have enough motor skills. That [building and invention focus] does future proof a lot of that work that we do. [And] that was what I always wanted to get into, but [Empowr] started with soft, pure software development and app development. So, with AI, I was like, “Okay, it’s time to make the switch.” It’s time to move from just app development, which AI will take over, to something that’s more involved, and to me, this is more community focused, anyways.
The decline in entry-level hiring—that’s why it’s so important that we actually get students paid internships while they’re in high school. While other kids are graduating college or graduating college with zero years of experience, or maybe [just] one or two internships, our kids have been working since age 16—and they’ve been working for big names like MIT and Microsoft. Being able to say, “When I was 16, I was working on MIT’s open-source software infrastructure.” That’s a really great foot in the door.
During the summer, I like to fly my students out to one of our partners, like a tech company. For our last one, we went to Los Angeles. We visited TikTok, and we’re talking to them, they’re developing a relationship with their head of internships. So, when they’re in college, they can have a better chance of securing those [opportunities], and those internships typically lead to jobs. We do everything we can to make sure we have that extra foot in the door. We are also finalizing our track to become a registered apprentice, so we can start hiring even more students ourselves to do internal work [for Empowr]. Our students have had a job since they were 16, and it makes it much easier with so many years of work experience.
What are you doing tomorrow?
I have meetings with potential donors in the morning, and then after that, my kids [Empowr students] and I are finally going to set up the classroom for the new year. They’re 10th graders. They’re going to work [and] they’ve got to build their space. I’m more of a supervisor, and they have to decide everything. They love it and hate it, but I love it.
What is your ultimate vision? What would it look like when your work is “complete”?
I think it can be completed, but I think, ultimately, [my vision] is a redesign of the education system. We don’t do STEM because I think this is the ultimate thing every kid should be learning. We do STEM because that’s my background, and so it is the easiest thing [for me] to teach and to secure those pathways in.
But school should ultimately be a pathway for students into careers. Right now, school is more of a factory for students to be at the whim of whoever is president at the time, and whatever their political agenda is, and, unfortunately, to meet whatever the state’s metrics are, which are typically graduation rate. That sounds good until you realize that means they’re going to push kids to graduate when they’re unprepared.
And so, I imagine a redesigning of the school system to where the community is more involved. It’s the center of the community; where we have pathways for every student to try out different careers and then secure jobs and internships in those careers, where companies are coming and looking for the next talent.
I want it to be a center for local entrepreneurs as well. Around 30 percent of the classrooms in Atlanta public schools are empty. Yet, if you talk to a lot of these schools, they’ll be like, “Well, we don’t have enough money.” And those kinds of problems can be addressed if you merge them with the needs of the community; [for example], many of these parents struggle with daycare, so why don’t we have a daycare in-school? We can make sure more of our kids have access to that essential pre-kindergarten care, which parents need, and which the kids, who are falling behind, [need].
I’ve been working on how schools can redesign themselves to be more self-sufficient, to be less at the headwinds of political storms, and instead something that’s more community centered, so everybody benefits.
