ABOUT FEL
Family Engagement Lab is a national nonprofit that catalyzes equitable family engagement and student learning in historically underserved communities. Our work builds partnerships between teachers and families by bridging classroom curriculum and at-home learning, and facilitating ongoing communication and collaboration.
Mission: To ignite the potential of millions of families to support their child's learning.
Traction: FEL has measurably increased family engagement in learning for over 45,000 students, through partnerships with major school districts in the country (e.g. Louisiana Department of Education, Oakland Unified, Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, and Baltimore City Schools).
Nationally Recognized: By eminent academic institutions such as Harvard University, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and J-Pal at MIT.
Founded: 2016
Total Funded: $7M
Funders: Top K-12 education foundations who specifically fund us for our technology approach, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Guggenheim Network for Social Innovation and the NewSchools Venture Fund.
Team size: 8
Location: Remote (with Pacific Time overlap)
LEADERSHIP TEAM
Vidya Sundaram, CEO & Co-Founder
Elisabeth O’Bryon, Chief Impact Officer & Co-Founder
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WHY WORK WITH US
Mission Driven and Founder Led:
FoundersVidya Sundaram (CEO) andDr. Elisabeth O’Bryon (Chief Impact Officer) are leading a highly qualified and motivated team committed to using technology to benefit our nation’s most vulnerable students, with a focus on children living in poverty, children adversely affected by racism, and multilingual learners.
A Non-Profit with Product-Market Fit:
Family Engagement Lab is a unique non-profit that acts like a start-up. As a non-profit, we’re able to access funding to disrupt educational inequity in communities neglected by for-profit education vendors. We build products iteratively and in collaboration with our users, and have dramatically improved learning outcomes and long-term opportunities for underserved students.
Significant Social Impact:
This is a pivotal moment for FEL as we expand our impact across the public school system. We’ve done the research and found our product-market fit, now we need a tech leader who can help us scale!
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THE PROBLEM
Students from low-income families, students of color and multilingual learners together comprise a majority of US students, yet are significantly underserved by public education systems. The pandemic has widened income and racial disparities, with students in high-poverty schools projected to experience 5% lower income during their lifetimes (Hanushek and Woessman, 2020).
Inequalities in how schools engage with families contribute to the disparities, leaving underserved families eager to help their children succeed in school yet lacking the resources and information to enable them to do so.
OUR SOLUTION
Family Engagement Lab (FEL) catalyzes equitable family engagement and student learning by bridging classroom curriculum and at-home learning. We help schools and teachers share relevant and timely tips and activities aligned with high-quality literacy and math curriculum, fostering a deeper connection between families and their children’s learning.
Our core program, FASTalk (Families and Schools Talk), gives educators a simple and accessible way to communicate via text messages to adult caregivers in their preferred language, leveraging content sequenced through the school year. Over the last five years, FEL has measurably increased family engagement in learning for over 45,000 students.
Our Technology
We offer a mobile app (iOS and Android) for teachers to review, compose and manage their messages.
Our backend infrastructure runs on AWS (EC2, RDS, SES) and handles message translation (using Google Translate), routing (Twilio messaging services), and importing data from school district information systems.
Our Data-driven Approach
Founded by a multilingual team that includes two female founders – one of whom is a child of immigrants and a person of color with lived experience similar to that of our community – FEL’s work is shaped by the perspectives of the families we serve.
We use data from our FASTalk tool, along with interviews, focus groups, and surveys to continually refine our approach. Over the last five years, FEL has measurably increased family engagement in learning for over 45,000 students, not only satisfying and engaging parents but also giving students greater confidence and ability to succeed in school and beyond.
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EXCITING OPPORTUNITY FOR A KEY LEADERSHIP HIRE
We are excited to welcome our first Head of Technology to support our mission of advancing educational equity. As a key member of the leadership team with scope across engineering and product, you’ll lead strategy and development of our products, internal tools, data, and back-end infrastructure. Reporting to a CEO with a technical background, you’ll be empowered to innovate and explore new tech to drive scale and deeper personalization for greater impact.
Responsibilities Include:
Preferred Qualifications
OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE
CULTURE AND VALUES
As a company with a strong commitment to making schools more inclusive of students and families from underserved backgrounds, we care deeply about creating an organization where diverse perspectives can thrive. We are a very high performing team, and we hold ourselves and each other to high standards. At the same time, we are collaborative & supportive, allowing us to tackle challenges together.
BENEFITS
FEL offers competitive base compensation. Our benefits include generous vacation and holidays, top-tier health/dental/vision coverage, inclusive parental leave and 401(k) with up to 4% employer match. We take a remote-first approach with flexible hours (9am - 2pm PT overlap) and 1-2 team offsites to bring everyone together.
familyengagementlab.org
