Short History
Teach To Learn began in 2017 as an online continuation of on the ground arts project management, education, performance, and research in a wide array of music schools and community organizations throughout South and Central Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and the United States. The founders sought to create an artist network based on social values, musical excellence, and cultural authenticity. They began with a simple idea: that music is at the core of our shared history as human beings and a powerful tool to be leveraged for increasing capacity, addressing inequality and access to education, strengthening diplomacy, and improving quality of life.
The initial conceptual basis for the artist network was to create cross-cultural conversations between peers by matching young adult musicians who played the same instrument, but were located in different countries. The participating musicians were self-selecting and connected at their mutual convenience to collaborate and discuss their ideas over an indefinite period of time. A mentorship model using the same basic premise emerged concurrently, where teenage musicians in conflict zones and resource poor world regions received ongoing online instruction and support from western music educators. The earliest iteration included about 50 musicians from 20 different countries and was essentially a loosely structured experiment which provided valuable insights into communication and artist cultivation across time-zones.
Shortly after their experiment began, the founder's brought their idea to a friend and colleague who was just starting an MBA program at MIT Sloan. He also happened to be a great musician who had just spent five years working in microfinance throughout East Africa. His experiences in Africa resonated with the founders own efforts working as educators in South and Central Asia during the same period of time. He saw the value and virtue of their idea and agreed to join their team by advancing the project through opportunities and resources for MIT entrepreneurs. As a team participating in the Sandbox accelerator, they codified their artist network into marketable programs for grantmaking and fundraising, incorporated and received non-profit status, and won the 2018 MIT Creative Arts Competition.
Enthusiasm about their idea began to wane as the sustainability challenges of their newly codified programs began to mount. However, in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic caused schools across the country to shut down and teachers scrambled to transition to remote learning. One of their programs flourished as schools remained closed and the communications technology they had been using for years became more widely adopted. This new traction in earned revenue caught the attention of a senior business executive and data scientist with a passion for the arts and world cultures who began advising them about how to think about scale, technology, and fundraising in new ways. They have been continuing to pursue their ambition that they might one day be able to build a fully realized company.
The Problem
There is an immediate need to support the knowledge of artists preserving and advancing cultural traditions. As important and meaningful aspects of non-mainstream music and art continue to diminish, and the digital transformation continues to accelerate, humanity is losing essential ways of understanding and perceiving the world through our shared history. It is critically important to pass on cultural, artistic, and historical knowledge to the next generation through constructive thinking and direct engagement, and to financially support the artists and practitioners devoting their life to the vitality of this knowledge.
Our Solution
Culture Connect is a supplemental arts and culture enrichment program featuring a live-streaming traditional musician in a connected classroom or community space that targets the K12 and Creative Aging market verticals in the United States. The artist network includes 40 traditional musicians, representing 25 distinct world cultures and countless areas of musical specialization. All artists are recognized subject matter experts in the customs and traditions found within their own cultural heritage. The majority have advanced degrees in music and are active performing artists. The Culture Connect artist network can be adapted by request to create meaningful experiences for audiences of all ages.
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Culture Connect integrates with existing activity calendars and classroom schedules. The program aligns with national academic standards for the arts, history, and social sciences, widely adopted frameworks for social emotional learning, and best practices for improved wellbeing in seniors. Classroom teachers, school leaders, and activities professionals customize the program to align with their classroom or community goals and actively participate in each exchange. Teach To Learn places a heavy emphasis on cultural authenticity and artistic excellence in hiring the traditional artists that make this program possible.
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Executive managers administer the program through a coordinated workflow between clients, staff, and in-network artists. Clients provide their budget, calendar availability, and subject preferences. Once a client calendar is confirmed, a staff member is assigned and a secondary workflow involving automated calendar reminders, video / audio playlists, lesson plans, and relevant links corresponding to the cultural subject are sent at regular intervals to clients via email and text. Assigned staff also oversee and drive audience engagement through active participation during each exchange.
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The audience connects remotely from their own personal devices or in a physical space with a shared screen. Culture Connect exchanges create authentic, meaningful human connections between audiences and artists from a diversity of cultural backgrounds that transposes to strengthen identity, advance economic mobility, improve academic outcomes, nurture creative and constructive thinking, and support mental health.
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To date, the founding team has coordinated and delivered more than 250 Culture Connect online exchanges in ten schools and three retirement communities across the United States. The program has harnessed the power of individual artists, their music, and the world cultures they embody to reach thousands of students and seniors, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from clients and participants. Although we operate at a project scale– the Culture Connect Program is profitable and the revenue generated by the program continues to grow year over year.
The Problem with Our Solution
There is no direct competition to Culture Connect, which suggests that there is insufficient consumer interest in traditional arts and culture more broadly. Comparable arts and culture programs are almost always downstream of major institutions such as museums, universities, or performing arts organizations. These institutions often have endowments or internal funding sources which allow them to operate outside of the competitive marketplace by offering their services for free or at significant discount.
Building a sustainable revenue model around an experiential arts and culture learning program in the K12 Education and Creative Aging markets is a formidable challenge. Although the market size of each vertical is massive– there are considerable barriers to capturing revenue. Revenue flows in our target markets are typically based on contractual relationships with publishing conglomerates and government agencies, procurement and restriction requirements, competition for budget prioritization, channel partnerships with technology companies, and stewardship from major institutions. These barriers apply more directly to K12 schools, but similar assumptions can be made for acquiring new clients in each market. Companies of our current size and scope are simply not considered competitive.
School systems and retirement communities are self-contained ecosystems with varying degrees of bureaucracy. School teachers and activities professionals are often overburdened and have limited budgetary discretion. Even small budgetary decisions usually require a complex approval process that can unravel a classroom teacher's enthusiasm and willingness to try a new product. Experiential programs that involve interactions between students or residents with outside individuals are heavily scrutinized, and administrators with budgetary discretion often prefer spending on items that retain monetary value over experiences. For example, a set of congas is more appealing and easier to approve than an online workshop with a Cuban percussionist. Further, student and resident outcomes are difficult to track quantitatively because teaching and learning within the arts has intangible qualities that are impossible to define and measure. Sales cycles in both markets are long and slow, and the adoption of experiential programs requires a patient, highly personalized approach to client cultivation.
Teach To Learn does not own or license any significant proprietary communications or ecommerce marketplace technology. We leverage technology and services which are inexpensive or freely available. While this is a successful strategy for controlling costs at our current stage of development, it constrains our ability to test, market, sell, and scale the program, as well as our ability to create a more dynamic online experience for program participants. Even with a sufficiently scaled artist network and optimized customer journey, scheduling would remain a bottleneck because the program is delivered in real time.
Some Numbers
The Culture Connect program has generated just over 60K in revenue. The operating team is two people who work on a part time basis while balancing other full time jobs. There is a champion client in each vertical that both renew around 10K worth of programming year over year. These clients are committed to helping us to develop and test different program iterations and pricing models. Artists and assigned staff are compensated equitably on a per service basis at $125 and $25 respectively. Without any significant marketing or solicitation effort, Teach To Learn has received about 40K in grant funding and has raised 50K in individual contributions. In 2022, our website was mentioned in a viral social media thread authored by a prominent journalist (Netflix / Radiolab) which was viewed by more than 20 million twitter users. This viral traction resulted in 130K in crowdfunding donations that are currently in the process of being ethically dispersed to a single beneficiary and subject of the viral thread for their music education.
Note: The tweet linking to the donate page on our website was deleted to cap the influx of donations
Resting Potential
At the core of the Teach To Learn brand is authentic cross-cultural human connection, artistic excellence, and global cultural traditions.The most valuable asset the company has is the unrealized potential of the artist network they have assembled. Successful artists create things that people want to buy or will pay to experience, and the process of creating great art is something that consumers are interested in and will pay to learn about. In a scenario with capital and a full time team, there is an exciting myriad of pathways for converting a network of successful artists into revenue. Paywall content, social media monetization, in person events, made for TV documentaries, subscription services, professional development services, services for homeschool networks, advertising and corporate sponsorships, and viral crowdfunding campaigns are a few examples. The network can expand to include practitioners of all types of traditional and modern art forms, and variations of the Culture Connect program can be derived to meet the needs and preferences of consumer demographics interested in our mission and vision. Because we have a global focus and operate remotely, models that incorporate the local economics of where artists are located would allow us to control costs and scale more effectively.
Note: Expanded catalog limited to musical traditions and does not included historical or other cultural subjects