A note from our editor, Elizabeth MacBride:
Principal for a Day
Spring, Carlos Vazquez, the founder of Miami EdTech, sent an email to a bunch of people in the tech community asking them if they’d be interested in being principal for a day at a local high school.
Only one person wrote back.
That was Randy Raymond, a developer working for Google.
And that story – relayed to me and Skyler Rossi on our recent reporting trip to Miami — made me curious. Who was this Randy Raymond?
So, I met him for breakfast. Vazquez had said Raymond was trying to bring a Google program for high schoolers to Miami, and I wanted to understand what was driving this young Black man who graduated from Harvard in 2018.
The answer slowly emerged.
The son of two Haitian immigrants, a civil engineer and a nurse, Raymond had grown up in the upper-middle class in Florida.
His father had pushed his family up the ladder, earning a graduate degree here in the United States. Raymond’s grandmother was like a third parent to the family, the caregiver while Raymond’s parents worked. And his mother was a connector, wise to the right programs and credentials. As a promising high schooler, Raymond participated in Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute.
When he got into Harvard himself, he founded a startup; it felt like the thing to do. But. “I wasn’t solving something that was real,” he said. “I was feeling this emptiness.”
He graduated, got a job at Google, and went to work in New York City. He was making a good salary and having a lot of fun. He loved Google.
But still – that nagging sense of something missing. In the pandemic, he shifted to remote work, and then shifted to working remotely from Miami.
Last year, his grandmother died.
“My grandmother was all about acts of service,” he said. For her, the service included unconditional love for her grandkids — and a lot of food. “If you weren’t eating, something was wrong.”
Raymond said he’d realized that he wanted his life to include acts of service. For him, that meant solving problems that were real, “small” in his verbiage, where he could see the outcome. That wasn’t unlike his grandmother’s acts of service, I pointed out: feeding grandchildren so that they grew up to have a keen awareness of what it’s like to be fulfilled.
Raymond is now researching and investigating how he could contribute to helping young people. “I need faith, purpose and meaning,” he said. “I need to find a way to serve that is fulfilling and that is authentic to me.”
That’s why he volunteered to be principal for a day, so he could keep learning how to best contribute.
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Opportunity Alabama (OPAL) is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to connecting investors with investable assets in Alabama’s Opportunity Zone. OPAL is growing and has three new openings. OPAL is looking for qualified applicants experienced in accounting, communications, and commercial real estate.
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In this free course developed by entrepreneurship professor John Lynn, professors and other entrepreneurship educators get a curriculum and supporting materials based on the influential book, The New Builders.
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The Federation of American Scientists is seeking a lead to manage a growing portfolio of work focused on entrepreneurship and regional innovation, with a focus on helping regional actors access high-impact federal resources. Please spread the word!
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4. Render Launches Second Iteration of Reconstruct Challenge worth $750,000
Render has announced a new partnership with Access Ventures to award a second national prize focusing on addressing barriers to employment in the United States. Five winning innovations will receive $100,000 each, with one innovation receiving an additional $250,000 to scale further. The challenge is open to anyone in the United States as long as the beta test of the innovation takes place in Jefferson County, KY, or Floyd and Clark County, IN.
📅 Registration Deadline: April 29, 2022
📅 Application Deadline: May 27, 2022
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🔗 Link: https://www.reconstructchallenge.com/initiatives/employment
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