Thank you for visiting IMPCT indiegogo campaign. However, we are no longer taking donation. What we want to do is to have you make a real impact investment!
IMPCT Investment Platform will be online in early 2016. Please visit our FB"impct.co" for more updated news.
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You can also visit www.playcares.com to experience our testing website.
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Thank you everyone! We made it!
2015 Hult Prize Winner!
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Check out our 8 month
"Hult Prize Journey":
Thank you! ¡Gracias! 謝謝!
Thousands of people like you are already making an
#IMPCT! By contributing, spreading the word, sending us messages of support and
offering to join us, it all brings us closer to accomplish our vision by 2020:
Real early learning opportunities for 10 million children living in urban slums.
We do this by allowing anyone, anywhere to become an investor in sustainable
ECD schools in urban slums through our revolutionary impact investment platform. We implement these education projects from start to finish, ensuring they realize their full social and economic ROI. We train and
empower mothers to become edupreneurs and provide them with an age-appropriate curriculum to positively engage children 0-6 with guided play. Our schools include a full nutrition program to feed children's hungry developing brains. Here are some of
the facts we considered in the IMPCT solution:
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IMPCT - Building Sustainable Early Childhood Development Schools
For us education isn't a gimmick. It isn't a
technology. It isn't a product. Early childhood development (ECD) involves children
in a safe environment, being guided through the learning process by qualified
teachers. ECD is nutrition to prime the brain for learning. It’s playing and
socializing with other children. In short? Early Childhood Development must be holistic.
The only way to bridge the gap between the
"developed" world and urban slums is through real education. This is
IMPCT's mission. We want to build sustainable ECD schools that are community
run but globally owned. The heart of our solution is a revolutionary platform
that enables impact investments into urban slum ECD schools. How does it work?
- We find capable people to own and operate
sustainable education businesses in urban slums and our unique platform
lets anybody, anywhere (YOU!) invest in their success.
- We retrofit existing informal day-cares with the help
from our great NGO partners to keep costs low and provide a safe
environment for children to learn.
- We work with all our ECD schools on an ongoing
basis to ensure they meet education and operation standards.
- Our investors receive a portion of the school's
profits to reinvest in more schools. The community keeps the rest to
reinvest in themselves.
Education for the world’s poorest is everybody's
business; IMPCT lets you invest in it.
Our Inspiration: Rosita
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We met Rosita, a single mother, during a recent trip to the slums of San Salvador. To make ends meet she runs an informal daycare, taking care of a few children in addition to her own. She makes a couple of dollars a day per child; just enough to provide the basics for her family. She has no training and runs her daycare out of her humble home.
We asked Rosita: “Why not expand and take care of more kids?”
She answered: "I have no money, no space, how could this be possible?"
Financing in Urban Slums
For Rosita, and millions like her in the slums, there
are simply no viable options for scaling up and improving their existing small
businesses. Many are struggling to feed, house, and educate their own families
let alone be able to set aside money to reinvest in themselves. Charity might
provide temporary relief or an occasional skills training programs, but it
certainly won’t build Rosita a school of her own. Even if Rosita is one of the
lucky few with access to microloans, there’s almost no way her school would be
economically viable with their typical interest rates. With only these options,
talented and entrepreneurial individuals like Rosita have no ability to finance
businesses providing potentially vast social and economic benefits for their
communities.
Equity: The Missing Link
Equity investments are the foundation of modern
developed economies. Imagine where Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Uber would be
if their only option to obtain funds was through microloans at 50% interest! At
these rates even the best of projects wouldn't be possible. Equity capital is,
in a very real sense, what put the “developed” in “developed world”. For the
working poor in urban slums, however, there is no such option. Despite this
enormous financing handicap, people like Rosita have already been able to do so
much with so little. We only dare to imagine what they could do given the same
privileges we enjoy in the “developed” world.
The IMPCT Platform - Enabling Impact Investments for Education
Extending access to low cost capital is the heart of
the IMPCT solution. This concept is what will allow us to scale into thousands of
ECD schools across the world. Our platform will allow anybody, anywhere in the
world to make impact investments in promising urban slum edupreneurs and their
education businesses. By financing these schools with your capital we do two
important things. First, we decrease the cost to open and run a school; this
allows thousands of sustainable schools to be built and be profitably run on
affordable tuition alone. Second, we raise massive awareness about urban slum
problems by directly aligning the interests of investors everywhere with the
people in these communities.
This concept is so powerful because it means the
profits generated by the schools can be reinvested into growth or increasing
quality instead of being used to cover interest payments for loans. The social
AND financial ROI from these education businesses stays in the communities who
need it most. Our investors receive a portion of the profits as a dividend,
credited back to them on our platform. They can use these proceeds to reinvest
in more deserving projects, creating a truly sustainable and positive
investment cycle.
Our Early Childhood Education Focus
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The research is clear: access to affordable early childhood education is one of the single biggest drivers of economic and social success in urban slum communities. In the long term, every dollar invested into ECE provides a staggering 7-13$ in return. Although we believe in our platform’s ability to develop any social business, our initial focus will be building ECE schools. Why? Two reasons. First, everything starts with childhood education. It's the foundation upon which a strong community is built. Second, investing responsibly means more than simply making sure capital gets into the right hands. It means giving that capital the highest chance to build a successful business. Our current capabilities and partner network are tailored to building successful education projects. Our investors can rest easy knowing that their capital will realize its full social and financial potential.
The IMPCT Curriculum - Inspired by Paulo Freire
IMPCT is much more than just a financing platform, it offers its edupreneurs EVERYTHING they need to ensure their students get a quality education. This starts with a curriculum designed for the unique and challenging urban slum context.
Unstable home lives and a dangerous environment mean many children in urban slums are what traditional educators would consider severely "at risk". ECE is pivotal for these kids because proper guidance, socialization, and a nurturing environment mean that they can grow and develop correctly. Keeping them on track developmentally leads to increased attendance in primary school, lower gang membership and violent behaviour, and an overall increase in the number of meaningful life options they have.
We looked into many existing curricula, and while they all show some promise, none of them are particularly well-suited to this context. For this reason we have been hard at work developing our own completely unique curriculum based on the work of Brazilian Paulo Freire. Why? Because Paulo Freire's philosophy of education was developed while he worked teaching language in Brazilian urban slums dealing with precisely the context we are. Our curriculum seeks to teach positive values rather than basic knowledge, and does so through guided play with other children at our schools. By teaching our children to interact positively and respectfully with other children we make it more difficult for them to be assimilated into the violent gangs prevalent in these areas. By teaching them to value learning over knowledge we keep them in school and give them the tools to overcome the myriad problems facing them because of their environment.
The IMPCT School - Context Appropriate, Up-Developed
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The IMPCT school (and home) has been developed in collaboration with local NGOs, professional architects, and civil engineers with direct academic and practical experience constructing sustainable buildings in urban slums around El Salvador. There are some urban slum contexts where it is possible to acquire legal permits to build these from scratch; these opportunities will be exploited first and represent years of growth for IMPCT. There are other slum contexts where such permits to build new structures are extremely difficult to get. For these scenarios we have a second solution that leverages renovation and incremental building to turn existing houses into quality safe facilities. Because all our of schools use community labor and materials they proceed identically to the thousands of buildings renovated and built every day in these communities.
What about cost? Our civil engineer has delivered us a complete cost breakdown and bill of materials for our 5x8 scratch school design. The estimate? About $15,000 all-inclusive. We've already got offers from local businesses to deliver subsidized or free materials for projects within our targeted communities. Using recycled materials from within the community decreases this cost even more. The bottom line? Safe schools and residences for our edupreneurs for under $10,000.
The IMPCT Solution - Delivering Value to ALL Stakeholders
IMPCT has a clear value proposition to all stakeholders in urban slum education. Actually, through our revolutionary platform we drive change partially by creating NEW stakeholders (investors).
These investors get a personal, no overhead, and sustainable alternative to the charity black box. They get to see exactly what happens with their money at every stage of the school building process. They get updates on its operations and financials. They even get a small dividend according to their initial investment when the school achieves profitability. They can choose to reinvest this dividend in more great projects if they wish. The IMPCT platform redefines the relationship between givers and receivers by replacing one-way giving and dependency with a purely positive investment cycle. IMPCT ensures the full financial and social ROI of these projects gets realized with its start-to-finish hands-on approach.
Edupreneurs get a complete business package. Financing to develop their home into a school, IMPCT-led training for themselves and their chosen teachers, a full and appropriate curriculum to deliver to students, and ongoing support from IMPCT field agents. They receive a steady salary plus a share of the facility's profits to deliver a vital social good to their community.
Parents get a safe, affordable and accessible school to send their children to and they can rest easy known it's operated by a trusted member of their own community. They can even chose to attend free seminars (offered by local university practicum students through our schools) on health, nutrition, and education for their children. Daily tuition rates are always under a day's salary so there is no opportunity cost to sending children to our facilities. Some parents may even chose to act as our teachers, earning them a significantly above average salary while they watch over their own children.
Children get the safe, nurturing environment they need. Qualified teaches and caretakers guide them through an appropriate play-based curriculum. Tuition includes a healthy daily meal with micronutrient supplementation so their brains are fed through this crucial developmental period. They receive myriad positive socialization benefits from playing and leaning with other kids their age. Through this they learn how to interact respectfully with others; potentially keeping them in school and out of violent gangs.
Finally, IMPCT receives a portion of the equity in (and associated profit sharing from) the schools it helps build. By making the building of education our primary revenue stream we ensure that our organization grows responsibly and with a strong focus on our ECE mission. Education isn't a cost of doing business for IMPCT, it IS our business (and our edupreneur's businesses!) We're a social enterprise dedicated to building social enterprises with the power of microequity.
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What You Get
We thought long and hard about the kind of perks we could offer that would mirror our mission. That's why you will notice most of our perks link you to the positive impact that will be achieved with your contribution. Every dollar will directly go towards enabling schools in underserved communities. To ensure that the benefits don’t stop there, everybody who donates more than $10 will receive a $5 credit on our platform so that once it’s up and running you can use this money to invest in future deserving projects. We also have T-shirts so you can proudly talk about the school you own, something that will only be possible through our platform! Check out our perks for more information.
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The Impact
With your help we can completely revolutionize the way social businesses are built in urban slums. Once our platform is up and running, every new project will allow to:
- Up-develop an existing residence into a safe and nurturing ECE school for 20-25 children. The school will specialize in one age group; 0-3 or 3-6.
- Provide full a full nutrition program for those children.
- Create 2-3 skilled teaching jobs.
- Help a deserving person own a business that creates economic and social value.
Risks & Challenges
We known that we can make a real difference. We’re working with everybody from local NGOs, to education professionals, to venture capitalists to ensure that our plan is implementable and our targets reasonable. However, there are always unseen events that could have negative effects.
School costs and revenue can only be estimated so well in advance. Major deviations from these estimates would require our funding requirements or timelines to be modified.
There could be a challenge with initially populating our platform with quality projects. Our initial capitalization will determine our initial geographical reach.
- It's possible that we run into regulatory problems with implementing our platform. We've already talked with leading lawyers and crowdinvestment experts in the field and have a clear path forward that will minimize these costs and allow anybody to frictionlessly invest through our platform.
The IMPCT Team
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We're four friends from the NCCU Taiwan IMBA program who, eight months ago, decided to start an incredibly journey to do what we could to help the world's poorest children. We here at IMPCT believe that experience and cultural diversity are key factors in the success of a social enterprise. With over 20 years of combined relevant experience and four very different backgrounds we think we have what it takes.
Juan Diego Prudot - Honduras - 28
Juan Diego comes from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He's a software engineer by education with 10+ years of experience in IT project implementation for local banks and microfinance institutions in rural areas. JD will be using his deep knowledge to ensure successful development of the revolutionary IMPCT investment platform.
Taylor John Scobbie - Canada - 28
Taylor is from Calgary, Canada where he studied dual Finance and Philosophy undergraduate degrees. Taylor has experience in strategy, IT, and web marketing consulting. He'll be using these skills to effectively scale IMPCT's business throughout the world and build a vibrant community on the IMPCT platform.
An-Nung Chen - Taiwan - 29
An was born in Taipei, Taiwan where we were all lucky enough to meet her. She has multiple degrees, including an MFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has years of experience in operations, running one of Taiwan's largest food importers and wholesalers. An knows the value of operational efficiency and will help IMPCT implement its low cost resource sharing model.
Andres Escobar - El Salvador - 28
Andres comes from El Salvador but studied business management at Lousiana State University, USA and Jean Moulin University in Lyon, France. Andres brings incredible field experience working for major telecoms in marginal communities across Latin America and Africa. Andres has done all of IMPCT's amazing graphics, videos, and branding. He also has a deep appreciation for the necessity of a solution to be culturally appropriate so will be helping ensure IMPCT's schools are responsibly developed in each target community.
Thanks to Our Great Partners
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We'd like to thank a few very special partners.
Taipei Angels, Taipei's premiere VC group. Your support has helped us more than we can say. Thank you so much.
FUSAL and FEPADE, El Salvador's largest education NGOs. Thanks for helping us reach out into the slums and show us that the people there are worth investing in.
TECHO, Latin America's largest NGO builder. Thank you for helping us conceptualize our up-developed school. We look forward to building the first one with you this summer!
National Chengchi University (NCCU) and The Taiwanese Ministry of Education. Thank you both for your project and financial support and help in developing our unique curriculum.
UN World Food Program. We really appreciate the consultation on our school's nutrition program.
Thanks to the Hult Prize Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative
Without the great Hult Prize competition this project never would have come about. You guys helped us plant the seed that has blossomed into this powerful idea. Thank you!
IMPCT in the Media!
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We invite you to look at all the newspaper appearances here:
