World We Dare to Imagine Part Three


Enlighten to Empower

Our mission is to inspire future generations to follow their dreams through educational empowerment.


I have been passionate about education since I began working with Há Esperança the summer after my freshman year at USC. Há Esperança is a social business organization based in Brazil that provides educational materials to children in the favelas of Rio and offers supplementary learning opportunities. Their work was particularly important during the pandemic when kids could no longer go to schools, but also had no way to attend remotely. While working with them, I got to see and was inspired by the impact education can have on the lives of children. This desire to have an impact on equal educational opportunities has followed me throughout my college career and I particularly love the idea of helping to inspire the next generation to follow their biggest dreams. This led me to the creation of Enlighten to Empower.


Enlighten to Empower ultimately aims to provide more equitable education opportunities for children within the United States, with hopes to expand into other countries. In America, there is an extremely large disparity between the highest and lowest quality school districts. Children are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, à la the American Dream, when differences in funding, quality, and curriculum are all working against them trying to achieve their dreams. Enlighten to Empower hopes to ensure that those dreams can be achieved by providing students in less fortunate school districts with passionate and inspirational educational leaders. 


Enlighten to Empower, unlike other leading educational equality programs, namely Teach for America, will prioritize the student experience. While Teach for America is present in 50 different regions and over 9,000 schools, there are some core issues with their mission execution that Enlighten to Empower hopes to make a better effort in. The main issues Enlighten to Empower hopes to address are as follows: 

  • Passionate personnel: Coming into the program, only 1 in 5 Teach for America teachers are interested in working in education later. With no actual passion behind what they are doing to help their students, how are children expected to grow a passion for learning themselves? Enlighten to Empower will prioritize passion for education in those that are working with students so they can feel cared for and believe that their dreams can be achieved. 

  • Student Representation: While I did not experience Teach for America teachers, one of my best friends is very familiar with the program. She has told me numerous times about how it was very hard to connect with teachers since they were not representative of the student population they were educating. Enlighten to Empower strives to prioritize hiring educators who come from similar backgrounds--and ideally the same places--to students so they can feel comfortable in their educational environment and grow closer to their love of learning. 

  • Educator Retention: My friend has also told me about low teacher retention rates due to the use of the Teach for America program. Enlighten to Empower hopes to avoid this type of churn by not only allowing educators to work in their “hometown regions,” but by signing them to longer term contracts for the benefit of students. This will also help to ensure that the teachers are passionate about educating the next generation. 


Ultimately, Anima Mundi should support Enlighten to Empower as it aims to make a lasting impact on future generations through education. Enlighten to Empower hopes to start by making an impressionable impact on local communities, with hopes of expanding to reach all districts within the United States and achieving parity in the U.S. education system. Once these efforts are on their way to being achieved, we hope to expand outward to other countries to provide equity and inspiration. The next generation is the future and inspiring them can only mean great things for us all. Our goals all directly align with AMDP’s mission of addressing some of society's most pressing needs and would thus make Enlighten to Empower a quality investment.

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