In Episode 93 of the Charity Charge Show, Stephen talks to Erin Mote, Executive Director of InnovateEDU, whose mission is to eliminate the opportunity gap by accelerating innovation in standards aligned, next generation learning models and tools that serve, inform, and enhance teaching and learning.
Stephen and Erin Mote talk about creating expertise throughout organizations by including diverse leaders in discussions, giving and receiving social capital to uplift others, and finding the 80% that we have in common to move missions forward without getting stuck on trying to agree 100%.
Erin Mote is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of InnovateEDU. In this role, Erin leads the organization and its major projects including technology product development, work on data interoperability and data systems, and an urban education Fellowship for new educators.
She leads the organization’s work on creating uncommon alliances to create systems change – in special education, talent development, and data modernization.
An enterprise architect, she created, alongside her team, two of InnovateEDU’s signature technology products – Cortex, a next-generation personalized learning platform, and Landing Zone – a cutting-edge infrastructure as a service data product.
Erin is also the co-founder of Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School with her husband Dr. Eric Tucker. She is a recognized leader in technology, mobile, and broadband and has spent much of her career focused on expanding access to technology in the US and abroad.
She has led ground-breaking initiatives, including scaling wireless communications to the developing world, developing global and national strategic technology plans, and working with the country’s leading technology companies.
Erin has served in an advisory capacity to the White House/OSTP’s US Ignite Initiative, the Obama Administration’s Global Development Innovation Policy, the State Department’s TechCamp program, and the Obama Administration’s intra-agency process for Rio 2.0 and Rio+20.
Erin served as the founding Chief of Party for the USAID Global Broadband and Innovations Alliance – a $19.5 million global technology expansion project.
Erin has served in senior positions with CHF International and Coulter Companies after starting her career as the Director of External and Strategic Relations for Arizona State University.
A recognized leader in alliance building, Erin serves in an advisory capacity for several leading international organizations including Digital Promise, SXSWedu Launch, XPrize, and the Barbara Bush Foundation.
She is an Aspen Institute Socrates scholar and a proud alumnus of the University of Michigan.
Erin Mote on creating expertise throughout organizations:
We also believe it’s really important to create expertise. Oftentimes one of the things that we’ll do is sponsor other leaders to be able to participate in conversations so that it’s not always the CEO of an organization that we’re inviting to the table.
We might invite somebody who’s more junior or somebody who hasn’t yet had that opportunity to share their voice. This particularly impacts women and people of color.
One of the things that we do is stipend folks to participate in some of our projects where we’ll be working on large scale infrastructure.
We provide a stipend because usually they can only get permission to participate because they’re bringing revenue into the organization.
It’s important for us to always be asking, “how do we expand the social circle we operate in to further increase our alliance building work?”
About InnovateEDU
InnovateEDU is a non-profit whose mission is to eliminate the opportunity gap by accelerating innovation in standards aligned, next generation learning models and tools that serve, inform, and enhance teaching and learning.
InnovateEDU convenes students, teachers, entrepreneurs, and designers to re-imagine and reinvent education by putting students’ and teachers’ needs at the heart of design.
The organization is committed to massively disrupting K-12 public education by focusing on the development of scalable tools and practices that leverage innovation, technology, and new human capital systems to improve education for all students and close the opportunity gap.
They address trends in education, including: growth and use of technology and broadband infrastructure, advances in the learning sciences, the societal drive toward personalization as an aspect of education innovation, and widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
They do this by bringing together an uncommon alliance of students, teachers, designers, and technologists to participate in short cycle innovation to improve student achievement and solve challenges in education, particularly for low-income students.
