Mission & theory of change

Here is the bet.
Here is how you
would know we lost.

Some children hear cost, margin and risk discussed at a kitchen table for eighteen years before anyone calls it a subject. The rest are expected to buy it later, compressed into two years, at graduate school prices. Young Innovators for Change exists so that children whose families have no business background reach adulthood able to act on money rather than be acted upon. The subject is not financial literacy, it is economic agency: price, cost, margin, risk, credit and ownership, met early enough to change what a child can see.

So we write that material and publish every page of it free: mathematics and science across Grades 1–12, and leadership, entrepreneurship and financial literacy from Grade 3 up. The barrier was never what a child could understand. It was whether anybody put it in front of them.

This page is the argument rather than the brochure. What we think the problem is, what we actually do about it, what would have to be true for that to work, and the specific results that would tell us we were wrong.

The problem

The head start
is handed out
at home.

Nobody sits a child down and teaches them how a price gets set. It is absorbed, at a table, across years, in a household where somebody already knows. Which means it is a distribution problem wearing the costume of an aptitude problem.

A child in a household that runs a business hears cost, margin and risk discussed for eighteen years before anyone calls it a subject. A child in a household that does not hears none of it, then arrives at adulthood expected to make the same decisions with none of the practice. Both children then get told the difference was talent.

The same pattern shows up earlier, and more quietly, in mathematics. By the end of second grade a child is expected to add and subtract fluently within twenty. The standards also ask for argument, structure and perseverance, but in most classrooms those are carried on the back of computational work, so a child who is slow to regroup gets fewer chances to argue, to notice structure, to be seen reasoning. A narrow skill quietly becomes a broad identity.

Our answer to the first of those is to stop compressing it. The ten-year pathway sets out which ideas land in which grade, what is written and what is not, and the published research the design leans on, including the paper that argues the whole category does not work.

What we actually do

Build it properly.
Then give it away.

The library is published, not aimed. Every year of curriculum is free to anyone who finds it. A teacher who wants more mathematics for the students in her class who ask for it should take it, and that is how this organization started. It also tells us nothing at all about who receives it.

The program is aimed. It runs in one place, with a roster, for the students the mission names, and it is measured. A download cannot name anyone. That is the whole reason the program exists.

Write the curriculum ourselves

Not a workshop series or a licensed kit. Full years of material, week by week, mapped to the standards a class is already teaching that month, with an honest status published on every grade band we have not reached yet.

Publish all of it, free

Workbook, answer key, research paper, adoption packet. No email wall. A school that never speaks to us can still run the program.

Remove every barrier to trying

No cost, no devices, no subscription, no training week. Crayons, counters and a photocopier. Programs that require purchase get adopted by schools that can purchase.

Measure honestly, publish either way

We have pre-committed to the outcomes that would show the program does not work, and we will report them if we see them.

Theory of change

From what we put in
to what we hope changes.

Read left to right. Everything to the left of the outcomes is something we control and can report on today. Everything to the right is a claim we have not yet earned, which is why it is written as intent rather than achievement.

Inputs
  • 468 weeks of curriculum, written in-house
  • A teacher, an aide or a caretaker willing to spend the time, which is the input we do not control and the one that decides everything
  • One instructor, and volunteers where we have them
  • Printing, materials, and a small seed fund per team
  • A published research base, including the paper that argues against us
Activities
  • Publishing every year in full, free to anyone (running today)
  • A delivered program with a roster, five to six weeks, real money (not yet run)
  • Family sessions where the student teaches the adult (not yet run)
  • Teacher orientation and support
Outputs
  • Students enrolled, and weeks actually completed
  • Ventures launched, priced and sold
  • Family sessions attended
  • Materials downloaded and reused
Short-term outcomes
  • Students computing margin and unit cost on their own numbers
  • More willingness to plan and to act, which is what the research points at
  • Wider participation, not just the fast ones
  • At least one money practice changed at home
Long-term outcome
  • Adults who can price something, read a cost, judge a risk and understand what owning a share of something means
  • and who can help a household decide rather than watch it be decided

The two right-hand columns are shaded because nothing in them has been measured. The evaluation design that would test them is published in full on the evidence page.

  • No cohort has run. The delivered program described on this site is designed, not delivered. Teachers using the free material on their own are not a program we ran, and must never be counted as one.
  • We do not know who downloads the free materials, and we will not describe them as low income until we can.
  • Nothing here has been measured. The evaluation design is published. The results do not exist.

Load-bearing assumptions

What has to be true.

Every theory of change rests on assumptions. Most organizations leave them implicit. Ours are listed here with the specific way each one could fail.

That an adult with the book in front of them will do the part the book cannot do.

This is the assumption the whole organization rests on and the one we control least. A year run without conviction is a stack of worksheets. We can make the material short, correct and free; we cannot supply the thirty-five minutes a week, and no amount of curriculum quality substitutes for a person who cares whether the child in the third row understood it.

That what a child learns about money reaches the household behind them.

The one randomized trial that found this ran in Peruvian high schools with a short course. If it does not transfer to a compressed program here, half the reason this organization exists does nothing.

That an opt-in program does not simply gather the students who were already going to be fine.

If it does, we widen the gap we set out to close and this becomes another gifted program. It is the likeliest way for us to fail while appearing to succeed.

That real stakes and spacing hold an effect after the program ends.

The largest meta-analysis in our research list found financial education effects negligible 20 months out. Our answer is to spread the material and attach it to real money. Neither has been tested.

That a school or expanded learning site will run a program from an organization with no track record.

This is the assumption we are testing first, and the one most likely to fail.

Our standard

What we will not
say about ourselves.

  • Any number of students served that we cannot produce a roster for.
  • Any outcome we have not measured, however plausible it sounds.
  • Any advisor, partner or endorsement we do not have in writing.
  • Any claim that our programs raise test scores. We have not tested that.

This is a policy, not a slogan. Every factual claim on this site is held in a single file, and anything not in it does not appear on the page.

Everything above turns on one classroom.

Teachers are running this material on their own already. What nobody has done is run it with a roster and measure what happened, which is why everything to the right of the outputs above is still intent rather than achievement. We can finish the curriculum alone. We cannot finish the argument alone.