In Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech, he called out the need to train 100,000 STEM teachers in 10 years. Hearing that call, Talia Milgrom-Elcott started 100Kin10 and made it her mission to transform President Obama’s vision into reality. Using the insights she shares in this episode, she hit that goal in eight and a half years.
Understanding that complex problems have interconnected roots she took a network approach, bringing together people already working on the key problems to collaborate and apply their collective knowledge to bear to break new ground. Along the way she created a methodology of identifying high leverage “keystone challenges” where efforts will have the most impact.
Today, Talia has expanded the vision to Beyond100K, where she is working to end the STEM teacher shortage by 2043. She also opened up the Starfish Institute where she advises other nonprofits such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies and many others to solve tough systemic problems.
