I was a classroom teacher long before I was a full-time entrepreneur.

And like a lot of teachers, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the gap between what we say we want for young people and what school actually gives them the opportunity to practice, and I found myself pondering:

What if education did more than prepare young people to succeed within the world as it exists? What if it helped them recognize that they have the capacity to contribute to what it becomes?

That question followed me out of the classroom, and eventually became The YOU Power Project™.

For the past several years, our team has been exploring what happens when young people are not simply taught about entrepreneurship, leadership, or problem-solving, but are given real opportunities to apply those capacities. They identify problems. They make decisions. They create things. They test ideas. They work with other people. And most importantly, they discover that what they know can actually become useful to someone else.

We have worked with young people, educators, municipalities and community partners, learning and refining as we went. Over time, I became increasingly convinced that the real opportunity was much larger than a program itself.

The competencies we were watching young people develop already sit inside education frameworks all over the world. Skills like: Creativity. Collaboration. Communication. Critical thinking. Agency. Adaptability. Problem-solving, and so the problem was not that education systems had failed to identify them.

The harder question was how to make them happen consistently inside everyday learning, and how to see the growth that happens when they do.

That became the next problem we wanted to solve.

Our team is now developing a platform that sits alongside the curriculum educators are already expected to teach. It helps a teacher take an ordinary lesson and create small opportunities for agency, entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and real-world application within it.

Then, in the background, it begins capturing signals of the competencies students are actually using.

This is not more/ new curriculum, and it is certainly not “just” another Learning Management Software (trust me, I wanted nothing but to avoid building new tech-for-tech’s sake). It is an attempt to connect what education systems put into policy with what students actually get to experience.

I am over the moon to share that after A LOT of work, we are getting close enough to show global education leaders what that could look like in their school systems.

Yes, I said, “GLOBAL”...

Over the past year, I have been in conversation and co-ideation with educators and education leaders in Kenya, a country in the midst of a significant transition to Competency-Based Education. Conversations that began with curiosity and have gradually become much more serious.

We have been asking whether some of what we have learned through The YOU Power Project could complement the work already happening there, particularly around helping educators translate competency-based education from new curriculum pages into powerful lived classroom practice.

I want to be careful with the language here because this matters deeply to me: We are not trying to "bring" a Canadian solution to Kenya. If this work ever becomes globally useful, it cannot be built that way.

It needs to be shaped by different systems, different educators, different realities, and different ways of thinking. It needs to be challenged. Some of our assumptions will be wrong. The technology needs to work in places where connectivity is inconsistent, and resources look very different from one classroom to another. Most importantly, the people who understand those environments need to help shape what this becomes.

That is why what is happening now feels so important.

We have been invited to travel to Kisii, Kenya for an education convention that will bring many of the people involved in this work into the same place. We have also been encouraged to use the surrounding days to sit with education leaders, demonstrate the technology, hear their response, and begin exploring what real pilot environments might look like. The message from our partners has been clear:

Get the technology ready.

Put it in the hands of education leaders.

Let them see it.

Let them challenge it.

And begin identifying where we can test it in real environments.

That is why I am opening this campaign now.

I want to be really clear that this is not a campaign to pay for a trip to Kenya. The trip is one piece of an opportunity that has opened much faster than we expected. What we need now is the capacity to meet the moment.

We are raising this catalytic funding to move our technology from development toward demonstration-ready, and to use this extraordinary window to move from prototype toward real-world pilots.

Your support will help us:

1. Complete the demonstration experience.

Our development team is working to ensure that we can demonstrate the educator experience, student experience, entrepreneurial enhancements, competency visibility, and the larger potential of the platform.

2. Develop for real-world conditions.

We are exploring low-connectivity functionality so that what we build is not dependent on perfect infrastructure. Funding will help us prototype, test and demonstrate those possibilities.

3. Equip the team to demonstrate the technology in the field.

This includes the devices, presentation equipment, and technical infrastructure needed to demonstrate the platform reliably in real education environments.

4. Co-design potential pilots with education partners.

Rather than arriving with a predetermined implementation model, we first need to listen. We hope to identify several distinct pilot environments that allow us to learn what works across different educator and learner contexts.

5. Advance conversations with long-term partners and funders.

The goal is not to crowdfund this entire global education transformation, but to employ community support to help us reach the next level of evidence, readiness, and partnership required to engage institutions capable of supporting responsible scale, including foundations, education systems, and global development partners.

We are already beginning conversations with organizations operating at that level, and this campaign helps us to make the most of those conversations.

And there is one other reason I decided to do this publicly: I want to take you with me!

We hear polished stories about entrepreneurs and innovation after the thing has worked. We hear about the pilot that became the company, the meeting that changed everything, or the idea that eventually reached millions of people.

We rarely get to see the part in between. I am in that part right now.

I am a former classroom teacher looking at something that began as a question about my own students and wondering whether it could contribute to a much larger conversation about education.

Of course, there are parts of what we are building that need to remain protected. Our technology, intellectual property, product development, partner conversations, and confidential work will be treated accordingly.

But there is still so much of this journey that I can share.

I can share what I am learning as a founder. The questions education leaders are asking us. The realities we encounter when an idea meets a different education system. The assumptions that get challenged. The relationships that shape the work. The experience of navigating pilots, partnerships, funding conversations, and international collaboration. And, where appropriate, the moments when something we hear causes us to rethink the direction we are taking.

And I especially want to share what happens when people from different countries stop thinking about education innovation as something one system exports to another, and start asking what they might design together.

For those who want to follow along, I am creating AN EXCLUSIVE community around this next chapter. I will share reflections before we leave, perspectives and experiences from the trip where appropriate, and what we learn as the work continues afterward.

We have built enough to know there is something here.

We have tested enough to know that the underlying approach can change how young people experience learning.

Now we have an opportunity to put the work into a very different context, alongside people who can make it better, and find out whether what began in one classroom can become part of something much larger.

If you would like to help us cross that bridge, your contribution will go toward getting the technology demonstration-ready, testing low-connectivity functionality, securing the equipment required to demonstrate it well, travelling to meet with education partners, and doing the work required to turn promising conversations into credible pilots.

If contributing financially is not possible, sharing this story, making an introduction, or simply following along matters too. I think this next part is going to teach us a lot, and if we are right about what is possible, I want the people who helped us get here to be able to say: “I watched that happen.”

Jessica Flynn

Founder & CEO, The YOU Power Project™

Want to go deeper?

This campaign represents the next chapter of several years of research, implementation and learning. For those who want to understand the thinking beneath the work, we invite you to explore:

The Capacity to Contribute

Our larger research, framework and implementation overview exploring why education systems must move beyond preparing young people to participate toward developing their capacity to actively contribute.

The Missing Foundation of Foundational Learning

Our white paper exploring the relationship between foundational learning, learner agency, competency development and the conditions young people need to apply what they know.

A System-Level Approach to Future Readiness

A deeper exploration of the research and systems thinking informing the technology and implementation model we are building.

These documents are not required reading to support this campaign. They are there for the educators, researchers, funders, policymakers, and fellow systems thinkers who want to dig deeper into the work behind it.

We have built the foundation.

Now we are asking our community to help us make the most of this next step.