Speaking
I speak about what happens when a child is given a real decision to make, and what we learn by watching them make it.
Financial education is assessed by whether a student finished the lesson. The largest study in the field found those programmes explain about one tenth of one percent of what people actually do with money. The problem is not the teaching. It is that we agreed to measure recall instead of behaviour, and a field that cannot prove it works will keep being funded on faith.
An after-school programme in Washington, D.C. fed me, tutored me, and put me on payroll in the sixth grade. By my teens I was teaching other children there. The argument I make from that is not sentimental: the children I grew up with were never short on ability. What some of them were short on was a door.
Most businesses that fail did not fail at the idea. They failed at the layer beneath it — pricing, offer, operating rhythm, the parts nobody photographs. For founders and operators, on building something that can hold the weight of its own growth.
I am early to this. Twenty years of rooms — boards, schools, foundations, congregations — and, before any of them, stages: I came up a musician and have shared them with artists I grew up admiring. The nerves are the same. I am putting my hand up for this one. If you are building a programme and one of these fits, tell me what the room needs.
Continue exploring
Jazz, classical, gospel, hip-hop — and why each one stuck.
The painters I lose hours to, and what they taught me about nerve.
The places that rearranged how I see things.
Talent Is Everywhere. Opportunity Is Not.
How hip hop sent me from making art to looking at it — and what changed when I owned a share.