Educational entrepreneurship is one of America’s most powerful engines for change, yet many promising and innovative ideas struggle to grow due to government red tape and other barriers. To combat this challenge, State Policy Network invites promising entrepreneurs to bring their projects to our LaunchPad Workshops. These unique initiatives bridge the gap between groundbreaking ideas in education to sustainable, scalable implementation.
The workshops address critical needs in our educational ecosystem by connecting visionaries with policy experts and operational advisors who can help promising concepts blossom into innovative solutions. These connections ensure that solutions in education don’t remain isolated successes but become blueprints for nationwide transformation.
The first workshop of 2025 was held in Atlanta, Georgia in late March and brought together five promising educational initiatives, each addressing critical gaps in America’s educational landscape:
- 8 Million Stories, a 2024 Pathways to Prosperity Prize Winner, is led by Marvin Pierre and focuses on developing credit recovery programs for Houston-area high school students who might otherwise never graduate. Their work provides essential stepping stones for vulnerable students to build successful futures and break cycles of poverty.
- Georgia Black Home Educators Network, under Nicole Doyle’s leadership, is working to formalize and expand services to homeschool families and co-ops. Their strategic expansion plans aim to support more homeschoolers throughout Georgia and eventually nationwide through their Flourish Network.
- Microschool Educators Academy, an offshoot of the Ferguson School, specializes in helping teachers transition from traditional single-grade classrooms to multi-age microschool environments – addressing a critical staffing challenge as microschools proliferate across the country.
- Team & Table(formerly Microschool Masters), launched in 2024 by Coi Morefield, provides essential educational materials and back-office support for microschool leaders, many of whom struggle with operational aspects while focusing on educational excellence.
- National Association of Black Microschool Leaders, launched in 2024 under Nicole Stewart’s guidance, helps microschool leaders build sustainable educational communities by addressing the unique needs of families working to break generational cycles of poverty.
The workshop connected project leaders with 27 advisors, including nine representatives from SPN’s 50-state Network and national partners. This diverse assembly of expertise created a uniquely productive environment for the project owners, who received targeted feedback and strategic guidance on how to identify and tackle challenges ahead of them.
“This is my favorite event to attend,” shared Keri Hunter from Stand Together. “It’s so helpful for project owners, and for me, to see needs.”
The workshop format emphasized practical outcomes over theoretical discussions. Project owners engaged in focused working sessions with advisors who provided insights from policy, educational, philanthropic, and operational perspectives. This cross-pollination of ideas opened pathways for future collaboration.
As education choice continues to expand across the country, workshops like this demonstrate how SPN’s 50-state Network cultivates practical solutions that address real-world challenges. While federal education policies often grab headlines, it’s these state-level innovations—driven by passionate entrepreneurs, supported by policy experts, and amplified through networks like SPN—that are transforming educational opportunities for American families.