Tom Davidson, Founder and CEO, EVERFI
Interviewer: Alan Murray, FORTUNE


Impact Initiative 2022 - Leadership In Action with Tom Davidson

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Impact Initiative 2022 - Leadership In Action 

broad based education is the foundation of a sustainable economy and thrive in society. The pandemic worsened existing inequities in America's education system with the learning progress of poor communities suffering the most. How can we improve the effectiveness and equity of our public education system? How do we impart practical knowledge like financial literacy? How do we support the communities most in need to discuss new approaches and how digital delivery can help? Please welcome to the stage Tom Davidson, founder and Ceo of ever five for a conversation with Fortune. Media ceo Allen Murray. Thank you. So, so tom everybody here has been bombarded with your brand. They sure as good here. They got it on their vest, they got the videos. So, so so tell us whatever five does. So ever five picked a series of problem sets that we think are highly underrepresented in the education system. So you think about health care, equity and understanding and navigating the healthcare system, financial education, mental health for kids around digital device, use, sexual assault prevention, other areas. So these are things that have been left out of the system for a long time. So we build out these fully digital programs that go into Tens of thousands of schools across the world. And uh, we do that in partnership with the private sector, pays 100% of the cost for 100% of the cost. So you don't charge the school systems, anything for the zero. Um, it really came out of in a former life. I was a state legislator, I spent a ton of time in the education system and I knew no matter um what I was gonna do in my life, I was never gonna show up at the West Ankeny School district and ask for, you know, $30,000 to fund something in a school district. So, so I love west Anthony by the way, you know, I'm sure, but you don't expect them to write you a check, right? Right. So, you know, so much has happened during the last three years. The pandemic people refer to it as the great accelerant. We saw e commerce accelerate, telehealth accelerate, so many sectors. I can't tell you how many ceos have said to me, we did things in six months that I thought would take three years, um, or some version of that, but the one sector that doesn't seem to have advanced and if anything fell backwards is education, Um which obviously is at the root of many of the social issues that we've been talking about here for the last 24 hours is your field. I mean, what is it gonna take to get the technology advances into education that have affected basically everything else in our society. So it's a great question. I think it's representative. I always tell people, I say um one of the saddest things about this work and I'm an enormous optimist um about what's ahead. One of the saddest things about this work Is that I tell people it's taken us 400 years in this country to so perfectly disadvantaged kids in so many parts of this country. It's taken a long time to get us here and um and it's a symphony that has happened, it's compounded for a long time and it starts with hunger and readiness and funding of schools and everything else. That's the foundation that we're building this on. So when you have something like a global pandemic that hits a lot of these kids, a lot of these teachers, they're starting from an absolute standing stop, right? And um, so what you had was school districts coming online for the first time, whatever. Now, there's been a lot of um great work and a lot of, by the way, bipartisan work on wiring schools, one of one laptop initiatives providing the access, but what you found in a lot of communities in this country is you were still at the infrastructure stage and not at the layering of like software and learning in these other areas, LMS systems and learning management systems and um it took people a long time to ramp up, I think the good news coming out of this, it was a blast um, in a lot of parts of this country of infrastructure investment, you're seeing more of that every day and I'm really optimistic of the fact that the Foundation was laid, it's gonna be really powerful for kids and we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but how important is the role of the private sector in, in driving this well. So here's the message that I would bring to folks. Um there are, you know, what, what you have to realize. This is one of the things that you learn along the way is this is a number one. It's a ground game. It's a, it's a hand to hand combat game district by district 16,800 unique school districts, the United States 188 of them in Alabama alone, making unique decisions on curriculum, making unique decisions um, in partnership with parents and others around what is being taught in those schools. And so what's um, the place that the private sector has a really interesting place to play is in these areas of what I call these like exoskeletal areas out of the core. So it's crazy to me that we enter, I mean who in the world understands how to navigate the healthcare system um in this country, when they get out of school, who in the world understands truly how to navigate the financial system. I mean, it's dynamic, It's changing. I mean, imagine what's coming at a 16 17 year old in the world right now is they're trying to navigate web three crypto payment systems Venmo, you know, traditional banking and beyond. So we teach, um I always say we teach driver's ed in schools for a specific reason. We'd like to not have crashes on every street corner. Um, it's amazing to me that we don't teach these things and um, and so where the private sector can come in as private sector can step in and actually, you know, whatever if I've done is we gonna network together 38,000 schools, mostly in very high poverty areas in the United States. Um and you can layer again and again on top of that network and go at these areas, so teachers and parents and others don't have to go harvest the parts of these things. So we've decided to start from kind of the outside in eventually you want infrastructure that will go in and reinforce the core, but right now you have to also respect the fact that education has been a local, localized system, a localized approach for the entirety of this country. My bet is it's always gonna be that way, and so you have to play within that system. Yeah, it's wild. It's crazy. Uh by the way, if anybody has questions or wants or comments for tom, please raise your hand now and we'll get a mic to you and I'm, I'm happy to get you in, but I wanna, I wanna ask about not just the what you're teaching, you're teaching all these life skills that people need to be successful that aren't traditionally taught in schools, but how you do it, um and the importance of technology and the importance of data because we've had a lot of conversations here over the last 24 hours about measurement measuring impact. That's a big part of what you're doing. So a couple of different things. Um you uh this is a pretty um I've never seen something that's more of a sprint in the marathon at the, at the same time, you know, so I'm a dinosaur and I, you know, I go into schools and every quarter I go and you know, I'm in schools all the time, but every time I go in I'm kind of like, wow, we're behind again is meeting the kids in the places that they were, want to be, where they live, the types of technology that they utilize, how they want to learn. So what used to be long form and short form, what used to be um done in front of the classroom is done on devices. Um and so number one, you have to constantly understand how to meet truly. It sounds kind of cheesy but truly continue to meet kids where they are and that's a faster clip than it's ever been. Um So number one is um just recognizing that you can't put somebody down, just have to be clicking through the kind of nightmare training that we all go through in our corporate learning side. It's got to be um multi platform, It's got to be um using audio video, it's got to be accessible. Um It's gotta run through a wringer of privacy standards and schools that are unique and changing and different every day. So I always tell people it's a pretty simple but not easy approach, but it's, it's got to be fully technology enable. It's got to be able to be done in the classroom, but more importantly, be carried anywhere um because of broadband issues and other things in school, kids need to be able to do it at home, parents need to be able to engage with it. Um and that's ever changing and tougher every day to keep up with it. And how about the metrics? How do you, how do you, if, if if someone in this room decides to partner with you to uh on mental health issues, for instance, how do you show that you're really having an impact? Sure. Um one of the things that we've done is engaged, um third party uh third party analysts and others who have come in and done and be testing around this stuff, We have to measure one of the things that we like to measure. For example, in financial literacy is just starting to actually build financial infrastructure kids after they finish our program. So can you open savings accounts? Can you measure whether their credit was different over time? Can you measure whether they compounded that savings over time? And so I think one of the things that we've learned in financial literacy is you just can't teach it. You have to kind of follow with the Yeah, yeah, fascinating. So the, the, you talked about, I forgot the number number of school districts, 16,800 in the US and how many in Alabama alone that have to do that again, But, but 187 in Mississippi, there are a lot of, of school systems out there. And, and one of the things that has clearly been happening over the last couple of years is is that those school boards, school system conversations are becoming more politic, they're becoming polarized just like everything else that has to, if you're teaching something like mental health or diversity equity and inclusion, you have to be caught up in the middle of those political debates. How do you deal with it? Yeah. Um, it's, it's been both a very, you're smart called out. It's um, it's, it's a big reality that we've had to come to in the last couple of years. Um, it's also pretty sad in some areas. I mean, we've had places where we've had firefights on like our basic, you know, we built one of the, I think it's just an amazing course on african american history that we've had in schools for 10 years and never had, um, uh, one word about it. And, and um, and now it's been caught up in some of these issues. Um, you know, at the end of the day, what I see about the really, really active politicization, um, politics has been put into this and I recognize the politics. Part of everything now is um is that it's really at the end of the day, really disrespectful to teachers in a lot of ways. I mean teachers are having to just whip saw back and forth around these parent debates and I think teachers um we don't understand what teachers face every day. I think that's been the most amazing reality that we face is that teachers are the ones who are calling out whether kids are getting their ears checked, whether kids are getting fed every day, whether kids are arriving in a position that they can learn every day now, they're navigating um you know, the crop dusting that's going on in a lot of places by parents coming in and out of um decisions around curriculum and what's being taught. So um it is what it is, we're gonna have to navigate it. Um but it's certainly something that's making us think state by state, almost county by county, in a way that we never have had to ever before. Um So in the conversations over the last day here, uh what has emerged for me is a sense that the e part of E. S. G. Is really got some texture and structure around and people are beginning to figure out the metrics and how and how you do it, but the s is still a kind of an undefined blob, um what's your advice to this group on how to think about their social impact? So one of the things that's really interesting around some of our partners, like a mass mutual Foundation or Edward jones, like interesting thing about what Edward jones is built is they've built this um growing national program around understanding like how marketplaces work for kids in places that, I mean literally this instruction has never been been built before, so you're seeing the scale that they're reaching, like they're gonna reach a million students in the coming year on that, I mean, so it's just this compounding fix. And when you think about something like the nightmare of F. T. X. Or the nightmare of, you know, these things that we're seeing um you see this under you see this girder being built underneath kids where they're learning the instruction of how marketplaces working these things. What I tell people all the time is there's an art of the possible to all of this that you can scale these things in a way that you never have before. It's incredibly powerful and optimistic for the country. It's great. Great to have that optimistic message. Thanks for partnering with fortune on the Yeah, that's great, I appreciate it. Thank you very much