Dear Braven Supporters,
To our students, volunteers, higher education partners, employer champions, philanthropic supporters, and board members, I hope you feel so proud. Together, we are launching Braven’s next five-year strategic plan to dramatically expand high-quality, human-centered career preparation for low-income and first-generation college students!
This next phase builds on Braven’s proven model, which has served more than 14,000 students across eight geographies and is delivering encouraging results. By embedding a credit-bearing career course within colleges and universities, powered by volunteers and employer partnerships, we ensure students launch into strong first jobs.
Over the next five years, we aim to work directly with 50,000 students—unlocking an estimated $8 billion in additional lifetime earnings—while enabling the 650 schools that educate 75% of the country’s low-income and first-generation college students to access world-class career preparation.
Our work is grounded in a simple and unshakeable conviction: incredible talent exists everywhere, and if you provide college students with access to career navigation skills, networks, confidence, and experience, the next generation will graduate with a strong first job and a path to economic mobility.
Our 5-year plan will require $333 million in investments, of which we have $146 million in commitments from our employer partnerships, innovative higher education partners, and philanthropic champions. The remaining $187 million will come from existing and new higher education partners (9%), employer partners (45%), public funding and new revenue sources (12%), and philanthropy (34%).
Amongst these philanthropic champions is The Audacious Project! Braven has been named a grantee of The Audacious Project, which is housed within TED and backs bold solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. We’re grateful that Audacious sees the power and potential of this plan.
Below, you can read more about where our North Star will point us. We’re thrilled to step into this next chapter with you and grateful for the support and belief you had in us and our country’s young people to get here. Thanks to your partnership, together we will reopen the path to the American Dream!
With appreciation, awe, and hope,
Aimée
Ideas as Tools for Action
As a former sixth-grade teacher in New Orleans, I’ve always been curious about how John Dewey thought about learning as understanding ideas, knowledge, and values through their practical role in human life. One of the core pillars of Dewey’s pragmatic approach is that ideas matter only insofar as they help us transform the problems around us: ideas are tools for action.
My love for pragmatism didn’t develop slowly over time; it’s something I was born into. The day before my older sister Rebekah was born, my mother planted tulip bulbs in front of our house in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, a neighborhood many call desolate. When the flowers bloomed in the spring, neighbors asked about them. The next year, they planted their own. Within a few years, the block was filled with the bright colors of tulips.
That was my mother. She had a way of getting simple, practical ideas to take root. When she believed in the potential of a place or a person, she made it visible. And from the very beginning, before I was even born, I was wrapped up in that way of seeing and doing. And this led me to believe that some of our country’s most pressing challenges are also the most solvable.
For more than 80 years, the bachelor’s degree has been the most reliable path to a strong first job and the American Dream: a home, financial security, and the peace of knowing your children can build the lives they desire. Today, that return on investment is breaking down. Millions of young Americans are earning degrees without getting clear access to opportunity that would put them on a path to economic mobility, and the 1.4 million low-income and first-generation students who enroll in college each year are experiencing this gap the hardest.
And yet, the bachelor’s degree remains the surest path to economic mobility–and the default choice for wealthier families. And wealthier schools, which educate many of our wealthier students, are doubling down on that bet with vigor. This is a solvable problem. Our charge is to reopen the four-year degree as a true pathway to opportunity for all students.
For the past 12 years, Braven has worked alongside innovative higher education and employer partners to prove this is a solvable problem by ensuring promising college students develop the skills, networks, confidence, and experience they need to translate a bachelor’s degree into strong economic opportunity. And we’ve seen an extraordinary impact to date: 3,400 new students entering our course annually; 14,000 students over time proving what’s possible (we started with 17 students at San Jose State University in 2014!); nine higher education partners across six states; and 75 employer partners in our community. Those 14,000 students, and their families and communities, are projected to see an estimated $2.24 billion in increased lifetime earnings. This is transformative not just for these students and their families but for their communities and the country.
What we’re imagining is this proven and tested impact on a bold scale–nearly five-fold over the next five years–creating roughly $8 billion in increased lifetime earnings for 50,000 students. And, then igniting that growth with systems-level change: influencing the broader policies and practices in this country that help shape the college-to-career transition, impacting the 650 schools that serve 75% of all low-income and first-generation US college students.
That is the opportunity before us. Here’s where we’re focused in the next 5 years:
1. Scale what works: Expand our evidence-based model
We will grow from 3,400 new Fellows per year across nine institutions in 2025 to 15,000 students per year across 25 institutions by 2030, reaching over 50,000 new students in the Braven community over five years–without compromising outcomes.
Our growth will build on what works: regional focus, deep school-level and school-system partnerships, and integration with employer talent development. While early growth required school-by-school expansion to refine our model, we now have a proven partnership playbook and dedicated higher education partnerships team. As a result, we are increasingly pursuing system-level partnerships and partnerships with key networks of schools to unlock multi-campus adoption. We are also expanding our work with Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), building on strong partnerships with Spelman College and Delaware State University, where shared mission, leadership networks, and aligned student outcomes create growth opportunities similar to public university and state system expansion.
2. Shape the field: Shift practices, policies, and funding toward stronger career outcomes
We are building toward a future where career outcomes are as central to higher education as access and graduation–supported by funding incentives, stronger employer-college collaboration, and practical knowledge. Today, most under-resourced colleges already do more with less to enroll and graduate students. Even when institutions want to launch students into strong first jobs, the financial, human and technological resources are often insufficient. We will focus on three reinforcing strategies to help change this reality:
3. Strengthen for scale: invest in systems, tools and innovation
Braven will invest in infrastructure that makes our model easier to adopt, more efficient to deliver, and more valuable to partners. We’re automating operations like volunteer matching and reporting, program data analysis, and backend operations.
We’ll also continue to innovate on our model to deepen its value for partners. On the employer side, we’re enhancing the Leadership Coach experience by aligning it more closely with companies’ internal learning and development priorities–increasing its appeal as both a volunteer opportunity and a talent development tool. We’re also creating more opportunities for hiring managers to connect directly with students in ways that support their real workforce needs.
For higher education partners, we’re making the experience better aligned with varied academic calendars, credit structures, and local contexts and needs. As a natural evolution of our model, we will also explore ways to strengthen the full suite of schools’ career services offerings through programming across the student journey (e.g., first-year orientation) and tools like analytics dashboards to better track student needs and offer support. These new offerings will help us deepen and scale our support of our higher education partners.
You can read our more detailed 5-year plan here.
Learning by Doing:
John Dewey argued that learning happens through purposeful action, followed by reflection. Put simply, we learn by doing and by paying attention to what happens next. This idea really resonates with me, because I am a doer, not a dreamer.
My mother understood this long before I ever had language for it. When Rebekah and I were babies and toddlers, she served on the board of the Englewood Urban Progress Center. She brought us to meetings, sat us up on the table, and went to work: effectively lobbying to bring a health clinic to the neighborhood. We were far too young to understand the policy details, but we were absorbing something deeper: that change is made by people who show up, test ideas, and stay long enough to see them take root.
She was onto something. Rebekah went on to become an officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (thank you to all former USAID workers for your service!), supporting communities around the world. And you know my story. Research has since confirmed what my mother intuited, and what I see every day at Braven: experiences that invite people into real work, real responsibility, and real reflection shape who and what we become. It is why I’m always telling young people, including my own teenage children, to commit to doing: play a sport with discipline, work a job that allows you to learn a business at the ground level, volunteer in a role where your absence is felt and the work truly matters.
This belief is embedded in how Braven operates and how we will continue to grow. Above, I shared our five-year plan. It is thoughtful, rigorous, and the result of enormous care. But if I’m honest about what the next five years will really look like, they won’t be linear.
We’ll test boldly, reflect honestly, partner deeply, and pivot quickly. Some parts of the plan will unfold exactly as imagined; others will change in ways we can’t yet predict. We’ll have wins that propel us forward and failures that teach us faster than any memo or case study ever could. We’ll be relentlessly pragmatic.
The ongoing commitments of our regional and national donors, employer partners, higher education institutions, and the catalytic support from The Audacious Project, give us the chance to do exactly that–to learn by doing on an epic scale.
I am asking you to join me–whether it be through your time and talent as a volunteer, through helping us grow our network of employer and higher education partners, sharing internship or job opportunities with our Fellows, or contributing directly to our plan.
Together, we can build a proof point for first-generation and low-income college students that career-connected learning is not a luxury, but a core part of college, and that it can be effective, scalable, and transformative.
Today, we have enough bulbs to begin to plant widely–and the audacious pragmatism, incredible partners, and resolve to tend what grows. Together, we will grow the American Dream for this generation.
