Nicole Jarbo: At unCommon Construction, students show up to a classroom on a construction site. Aaron Frumin: So, let's think about Josh. So, the first day that Josh shows up to a job site, it's just a dirt lot or a flat floor system. And on that first day, he and the rest of the team with our instructional leaders, build and stand all the walls to a house, or as many of them as they can in a day. Then the next week they come back and they're on the sheathing teams, so they're installing plywood on the outside of the house. Nicole Jarbo: During a semester, students build houses. Aaron Frumin: We really hang our hard hat, so to speak, on the development and demonstration of soft skills. We focus on teamwork ethic, problem solving, professional attitude, communication. Nicole Jarbo: Today, we've got Aaron Frumin, CEO of unCommon Construction joining us on the podcast. Aaron Frumin: We're a nonprofit apprenticeship program where students from different high schools get paid and they earn school credit for building a house or another project together. We sell the house and match their paychecks with a scholarship. Nicole Jarbo: I'm the host of Pitch Playground, Nicole Jarbo. We bring entrepreneurs on the show who are re-imagining the future of learning, and these founders get an opportunity to get advice to help them strengthen their pitch. Today, we've got Spencer Sherman, a principal consultant at Education First. Spencer Sherman: I think it sounds kind of corny, but it's what I believe, which is like I really want to make the American Dream real. The actual gears of how it works is stuff like this. It's college and career pathways programs, and they can make a huge difference in kids' lives. Nicole Jarbo: Remember that at the end of the season, you'll have an opportunity to cast your vote and one of the 10 entrepreneurs from the season will walk away with $50,000. Aaron grew up in an affluent community in North County, San Diego. Aaron Frumin: My dad's a doctor, my mom's a teacher, my brother's a journalist. Everyone in my family has postgraduate degrees. I went to a blue ribbon public high school that had every extracurricular you could ever want. It had a 400-seat performing arts theater, a huge football stadium, a daily video recorded student produced newscast, a newspaper, a yearbook, computer science, pottery, kiln, everything. But they did not have a wood shop, right? Which is interesting to find where I am today. And so, when it was time for me to go to college, it was never a question of whether or not I was going to go to school, just where. Nicole Jarbo: Aaron enrolled in the University of California, Davis. He was on track to graduate early, but something didn't feel right. Aaron Frumin: I had kind of what I refer to as a quarter life crisis. So, in January 2005, I dropped out of college, moved back to San Diego, started trying to rediscover myself, what I was interested in, who I was. About nine months later that year, I called the American Red Cross to donate $25 after Hurricane Katrina. Red Cross Volunteer: Thanks so much for your donation, Aaron. It means a lot. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Aaron Frumin: And it occurred to me with the operator that I could do what she was doing. And so, I asked her how that happens. Do I go to a phone bank? Do you forward it to my house? How does that work? So, I started as a Red Cross volunteer after Katrina, and that was really a catalyzing experience for me in getting me shaken out of that path and awakening into wanting to be part of something, part of something that mattered. Nicole Jarbo: Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters in the history of the United States. Over 1,000 people lost their lives and the storm displaced over a million people. Aaron Frumin: When I started with the Red Cross, it was locally in San Diego, I went to a family assistance center, answered the phones. After doing that for a couple of weeks from San Diego, my supervisor there said, "Hey, they're still asking us to send people to New Orleans." Nicole Jarbo: Aaron was 21 years old at the time. The experience of working on the disaster relief effort in New Orleans had a profound effect on him. Aaron Frumin: There were visuals that were shocking and jarring. Houses in the middle of the street that got shifted off their foundation in the middle of the street. Semi trucks that were in trees, like a semi truck in a tree, a horse in a tree for months, just watching it on the two trips that we would take to Venice a week. There was a horse in a tree for six months after the storm, just decomposing. We'd see it twice a week, waiting for someone to take it down. Just the volume of infrastructure damage in the built environment was the closest to a war zone that I'll probably ever experience. And just the way that everywhere you are is immersed in that. You turn down a street and you can't go any further because there's a house in the middle of it, and you go to back up and go the other way. There's a whole lot of layers to that kind of devastation, and it's not always as simple as what we see on the scrolling screen on a news station. In my work and life experience, there was something there that just planted a seed in me that's kind of grown with all these sort of branches in the way that it has, and I feel really grateful for having been part of it, and I hope that my participation made it better. Nicole Jarbo: What actually drives you? I mean, doing the work that you did, making the choices that you did, I'm very curious about what you believe that made you show up every day for these experiences, that made you center helping a community, an impact, over yourself. Where does that come from? Aaron Frumin: I think if I'm really being honest, there's a selfish motivator in that it makes me feel good to be helpful and to be of service, and I think that's true for a lot of people. And so, I kind of have grown to embrace that. I grew up sort of having access to the world. Our family traveled. Then I think as an adult, I want to be part of it in a way that feels meaningful to me. The year that I dropped out of college, I came across a quotation, a note that Arthur Miller wrote in the margin of a manuscript of Death of a Salesman, "The image of aging, and so many of your friends already gone, and strangers in the seats of the mighty, who do not know you or your triumphs or your incredible value. Above all, perhaps the image of a need greater than hunger or sex or thirst, a need to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world, the need for immortality. And by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one's name on a cake of ice on a hot July day." So, I take that with me in that our time here is ephemeral, and even the lasting impact that we may have is ephemeral if you look at the grand scheme of the world. And I'm motivated to leave a thumbprint on it that touches people's lives in a positive way. Nicole Jarbo: After his experience of the Red Cross, Aaron started working in construction. Aaron Frumin: I lived in a hotel behind a strip club in Downtown Reno, Nevada, and got put out to work every day on a whole bunch of different kinds of job sites. But I fell in love with the mental and physical rigor of that work, the social sphere that was so different from anything I'd ever been involved in and assimilating into that culture. And I was challenged physically, mentally, emotionally in a lot of ways through that work and community. Nicole Jarbo: From there, Aaron worked with AmeriCorps and then Habitat for Humanity. That's when he realized he had a knack for teaching. He signed up for Teach for America. He was a middle school reading and social studies teacher for three years in Colorado. Aaron Frumin: But the walls and constraints of a classroom never really worked for me even when I was at that high school that I described, and the ones that I was trying to operate within and create for my students wasn't working for either of us. So, I started thinking differently about the walls of the classroom and how both my students, but also me, as the instructional leader, could have a different relationship with those environments. And so, that's kind of like the morsel for unCommon of where that angst came from. And that was about 10 years of experience out in the world from dropping out of college to exploding out of a classroom. Nicole Jarbo: So, when did you first have the idea for unCommon Construction? Aaron Frumin: Yeah. I'd scratched around at brainstorming with people about like, "Oh, what would a this, or what would a that look like?" Just as conversations at the bar or whatever. But I never really saw myself as a founder or feeling a need to start anything or be in charge. But I was just trading stories with someone and I had a cool summer experience, summer job experience where I took students on an experiential travel community service and tourism trip in Southeast Asia. I was in the hill tribe regions outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand, and was swapping stories with another trip leader and she had cool experiences too. She's like, "Man, yeah, what are we doing with all this? What's it all for? Have you ever thought about that?" And I was like, "Well, I don't know. I guess, if I'm supposed to do anything, I'd build houses with high school students and use the profits to pay for scholarships for the kids who build the houses." So, it sort of struck me as an epiphany, literally. Nicole Jarbo: What's your elevator pitch for unCommon Construction? Aaron Frumin: The simplest one is, my name is Aaron. I lead unCommon Construction. We're a nonprofit apprenticeship program where students from different high schools get paid and they earn school credit for building a house or another project together. We sell the house and match their paychecks with a scholarship. Nicole Jarbo: Describe what a day looks like for a uCC student. Aaron Frumin: Well, a typical day for one of our students is that they just go to school. We are an after-school, extracurricular activity and internship or a job that they're participating in. So, we engage with students a couple days a week. The most substantial engagement they have with us in New Orleans is on a Saturday morning where they show up in the morning, we have transportation that gets them there. They show up to a job site. So, let's think about Josh. Josh applies for unCommon at his school. He has an interview. He gets a job offer. He's accepted. He gets all of his paperwork in. So, the first day that Josh shows up to a job site, it's just a dirt lot or a flat floor system. And on that first day, he and the rest of the team, with our instructional leaders, build and stand all the walls to a house, or as many of them as they can in a day. So, they leave that first day having transformed the environment into a three-dimensional structure that they can walk through, see where the windows are, the doors are and the bathroom's going to be and the bedrooms and all that. And then the next week they come back and Josh works with J'adore and they're on the sheathing team. So, they're installing plywood on the outside of the house with another team of a couple other students. They're shedding their school identities to become unCommon and work shoulder to shoulder across lines of difference on projects that are really rigorous and bigger than them. Right? So, then every Saturday they're adding a significant phase of construction on that project, installing windows, the roof is going on, our electricians and plumbers are coming, so they're getting exposure to all of these specializations and trades along the way. So, then by the end of semester promotion ceremony, Josh and J'adore, and Makeda, and the 20 or 30 other students who are part of that residential construction project, can give a tour of a completed house to their families and their teachers and other members of the community, that they've built with granite countertops and hardwood floors before we list it for sale in the market. And someone in our community is going to commit to a 30-year mortgage, the largest purchase, presumably, of their lives, on something that was built by teenagers and designed by teenagers in our community. Nicole Jarbo: The students walk away having been paid for their work, but they've also gained valuable skills that they can take into their future employment. Aaron Frumin: In place of textbook curriculum and credentials, we really hang our hard hats, so to speak, on the development and demonstration of soft skills. We focus on teamwork ethic, problem solving, professional attitude, communication. These are research-based frameworks that we've adopted, that are formative assessments of whether and how our young people are on track for success in work and life after graduating high school. Whether you're college or workforce bound after graduating high school, ultimately we have the same goals that we want you on track on a bridge from education to employment, right? A more equitable bridge from education to employment. Nicole Jarbo: Alongside building houses, the unCommon team also has an after-school professional development series called Framing Character. Aaron Frumin: When we say Framing Character at unCommon, we're referring to really two things. One is the overall enveloping culture. A lot of orange, high-fives, uplifting music, shout-outs, caught you being good, perfect attendance bonus. A lot of things like that is the culture that we're wrapping our job sites and our young people in. But then there are Framing Character activities, and these look like collaborative design sessions with architects, where our youth are co-designing the houses that they build with professionals in our network, or we're going to Lowe's or another material supplier to do a scavenger hunt for the materials that we're going to need on the job site the next week or the week after. And then, we're doing individual and team building activities. We're doing team challenges where they're building something together, or we're doing coaching sessions and case management around their particular pathway and what they're going to go on to do. So, that's what we mean around Framing Characters. Nicole Jarbo: Can you share one or two maybe favorite or breakthrough stories of impact that you've seen with the uCC participants? Aaron Frumin: I mean, our youth are just awesome and they're breaking stereotypes and expectations of the conception of jobs that may or may not start on or around a construction site or careers there. Right? This notion that construction is dirty and dumb, or that it's for boys only, or that if you're a disciplinary problem in class, maybe you'd do better in some blue collar profession, right? Instead of actually the school's not designed for your type of learning. Right? So, I'll share a couple. Hunter was a founding apprentice, so he signed up for our first semester in fall semester 2015, and he ended up doing five or six semesters with us by the time he graduated from Sci High. So, he graduated from high school and joined the electrical union, and he used his equity award to pay his union dues and get a headstart on his career. A couple years ago, he turned out as a journeyman electrician. Nicole Jarbo: Here's a clip from Hunter talking about the impact unCommon had on him. Hunter: Well, my trade of choice is being an electrician. I'm about to turn out as a journeyman, and so I'm in the union. That means that I'll be able to travel around America and work in other places and see other places, and that's one of the biggest reasons that I joined the union and wanted to be a part of it. I'm just glad that I got this opportunity. I'm glad that I met Aaron in the first place because I didn't know what I was going to do. It clicked for me that if I don't want to finish school and if I don't want to go to college, then this is something that I can definitely do and this can be in my back pocket for the rest of my life. Nicole Jarbo: The skills that Hunter honed with unCommon have helped him along the way after high school. Hunter: Showed me my perseverance. They showed me that I could stay in this work and I can actually do it. I had problems communicating before unCommon, and so, that was a big thing that stood out to me and that's what I learned through unCommon. Nicole Jarbo: Something else that is pretty cool about Hunter's story is that he became a homeowner at age 20. Aaron Frumin: And now he's renting that house out while he is out taking his journeyman electrician cards to go see the world. He's in Ohio working on a prevailing wage job, making I don't know what an hour, and banking it and getting to travel with all the skills and experience that he's accumulating. And I think that's really amazing for a kid from New Orleans to be able to do. Nicole Jarbo: Another example of a student who unCommon has impacted is J'adore. She was valedictorian of her high school and featured on an NBC News national feature. Here's some clips from that video. J'adore: My friend's reactions, they were like, "J'adore, are you serious? You're going to go inside construction? You're going to be sweaty. You're going to have all this dirt inside your hair." And I just told them it'd be something new. Being at unCommon, it really did help me to push out my comfort zone, sign up for leader roles, because I always second guess myself, and now I'm to the point where I don't have to second guess myself. I know that I can do it. Nicole Jarbo: J'adore gained a new sense of confidence with unCommon. J'adore: Being pushed out of my comfort zone with unCommon is going to help me in the real world when I'm just by myself, doing everything on my own. unCommon has helped me a lot with my mental state. It's a job where I cannot get on my phone. I have to focus on a task. If a person does have had a stressful week, swinging a hammer is a good stress reliever. Nicole Jarbo: J'adore was interested in design, so at unCommon her work leaned into that. She was assigned special projects for the house that were a little bit more artistic, doing things like tile for a bathroom or working on a backsplash. Her experience at unCommon helped her land a scholarship for the Cleveland Institute of the Arts, to continue pursuing her passion. Hunter and J'adore are just a couple of examples of students that unCommon has impacted. Can you just describe what's been the impact to-date of uCC? Aaron Frumin: Since founding, we've partnered with 15 or 20 local high schools and enrolled 500 or more apprenticeship positions through our program for young people who have collectively earned over $500,000 in pay and scholarships. We're at an exciting moment where we're going to be able to triple that annual impact through a couple of exciting initiatives to deepen our work and expand our programs in New Orleans. And then a couple of years ago, we also had our first effort for expansion to another city where we're partnering with students and schools and construction companies in Minneapolis, at the other end of the Mississippi River. Nicole Jarbo: What would you do with the 50K? Aaron Frumin: A $50,000 contribution right now would accelerate our expanded programs at our unCommon Campus, a 5,000 square foot facility that we're building here in New Orleans in the heart of the city, where not only will our high school apprenticeship program grow and expand and thrive in the way that it already is, but we'll be able to roll out new programs that engage even more students, more schools, and even an adult learner population in our community through that centralized hub. That place will also become our innovation lab, our symbolic and operational headquarters for the organization as we grow and expand to cities nationwide. Nicole Jarbo: We're pairing Aaron up with Spencer Sherman to talk through his pitch. Spencer started off as a public school teacher in New Orleans. Now he's at Education First, a consultancy organization that helps advance educational equity. He helps philanthropies, states, and districts build college and career pathways work. Spencer Sherman: I think it sounds kind of corny, but it's what I believe, which is I really want to make the American Dream real. The American Dream as this big, abstract thing. There's actually concrete, the actual gears of how it works is stuff like this. It's college and career pathways programs, and they can make a huge difference in kids' lives. And I saw it as a high school teacher when kids did the right thing in high school and had the right supports. Their lives are radically different than their parents' lives. I think every family has had someone, whether it was their generation, their parents' generation, their grandparents' generation, that really was the one that made it. And I think these programs help more and more kids make it. Nicole Jarbo: Spencer is here to help Aaron strengthen his pitch. They're going to dive into the community center that Aaron is building more deeply, what the impact and the value of it is, and how Aaron can best communicate that to potential funders and partners. This is their conversation. Spencer Sherman: First, I think just overall the focus on pathways, college/career readiness, career-connected learning and apprenticeship specifically, I think that's just a great place to focus. This is something I'm passionate about. I also think it's one of the few things nowadays that everyone is kind of excited about, and there's not a lot of agreement. Apprenticeship is one of the few areas where everyone's like, "Heck yeah, let's do it." So, I think that's fantastic. I really like your focus on opportunity youth and your equity focus is fantastic, and particularly that you're actually putting your money where your mouth is and doing the earn-while-you-learn model is something that I think is really important and a lot of folks don't know how to pull it off. So, it's really cool to see that you're doing that. Aaron Frumin: Somebody asked me, an advisor asked me early on, "What's the easiest way in your life for you to get money or the most consistent way that you get money?" And all I know is you go out and earn it. Right? Spencer Sherman: Yeah. Aaron Frumin: And so, the idea that construction as a business, being a construction company as a business, is a proven model, and so if we can operate more or less in that way and find profit sharing mechanisms to the value that we create by the virtuous cycle of our business model, if we can use that as a reinvestment tool, then we're not beholden ... It's not subject to the whims of one administration or another or one particular philanthropist or another. Nicole Jarbo: Something I've been thinking about a lot as I've been hearing the pitches on this podcast is resilience. Aaron's pitch is unique compared to the others we've had on this show. He's created a business that can generate profits. He isn't relying on philanthropy or other sources of funding. And not only that, the students that participate walk home with a paycheck. Aaron Frumin: We had a lot of people asking me early on, "Are you sure you have to pay the kids? Couldn't they just be happy for the experience?" And I was like, "No way. We're going to figure out a way to do this without giving other people an opportunity to even ask that question." Spencer Sherman: Yeah. I think it's really great. I'm glad you fought that fight. I think people often think if you're not paying kids, someone's paying the kids, and it has to be their parents then. And so, if their parents can't pay them, then that immediately skews who you can help. It's often hidden, and so by making it more explicit, you're much more able to help the kids that need it. I'll transition to talk about your community center, and I'm curious, can you just talk to me a little bit about, I love your core business model, connect the dots for me between your core business model and this community center. Aaron Frumin: Even if you just think about us as a construction company, a construction company of our size, building one to two houses a year, few hundred thousand dollars worth of work for clients, we're prefabricating stuff, we need a place to put our things. We have trucks and vehicles and tools and surplus materials. We need a place to gather and have meetings. Most construction companies of our size start thinking about where's their shop, right? Or, where's their garage? Or, where do they gather in the morning? We need a space where we can grow and evolve into something more, right? So, the first floor is a community space with a kitchen and pantry, after-school snacks, work on your resume, meet with a potential employer, continuing ed, lunch and learns for the industry. Upstairs is where we can manage everything. And then adjacent is a 2,000 square foot shop. And so, it's a multifunctional, really unique space for us to grow in a lot of different directions, including the one we haven't quite touched on yet, which is our expansion to new markets, which we started a few years ago. So, the campus, along with how we're deepening our impact in New Orleans, will become the operational and symbolic epicenter of the organization as we explore national expansion to new locations. So, those talented individuals who are leading the development of unCommon Construction in their home communities can come to New Orleans and incubate with us for what we call a builder in residency experience, and we can send them out for sprints to build the versions of their programs that will exist in their home communities. Spencer Sherman: As you're talking about it, I'm hearing a few different subcategories of use cases for why this center is useful. I mean, so everything from you got to have a place to store stuff, to you have a place to gather, to this could facilitate some earlier programming you can't do otherwise. The more that you can distinguish between those different cases ... Because what I think I see a lot for a lot of organizations is what I would call the field of dreams fallacy of if you build it, they will come. If you build it, they don't always come. And so, what I really push you on is using some user centered design and talk to, "Okay, here's the five things I want to do with this community center." For each one ... I mean, it's more clear for a storage facility than it is for engaging youth that have been disengaged from school previously. But talk to the people you're trying to serve directly and say, "What is your barrier to entry?" So, I think it's unbundling all those different particular uses and then talking directly to the kids because the kids are their experts in their own experience. So, the more that you talk to that expertise, like you have the labor market experts, but you also have the kid experts. Aaron Frumin: The human centered design, build, measure, learn, lean startup is in our DNA at unCommon. So, this campus facility is no different. I really, really appreciate that. I think one of the things we fall victim to, or I certainly do, is we've been thinking about and dreaming about this campus for so long that we do keep adding to like, "Oh yeah, when it's open, we can do this. When it's open, we can do this." So, we have a lot of dreams, right? And I think I definitely can identify with that notion of there's so many things that are possible. Let's figure out the things that we want to do really, really well, get those things down, and then we can start adding to it. Nicole Jarbo: As Aaron works to build the unCommon Community Center, he'll need to get clear on the biggest problem that the community center solves and lean into that in his pitch. Aaron, thank you so much for sharing your pitch on the show today. And Spencer, we appreciate your awesome mentorship and advice. Here are a few takeaways I want to leave you all with from the episode. First... Aaron Frumin: I think, if I'm really being honest, there's a selfish motivator in that it makes me feel good to be helpful and to be of service, and I think that's true for a lot of people, and so, I kind of have grown to embrace that. Nicole Jarbo: For many of us listening, especially those of us who are teachers and entrepreneurs, I think that this selfish motivator to help people can be a big driving force for us. As Aaron says, embrace that. Second... Aaron Frumin: Our youth are just awesome and they're breaking stereotypes. This notion that construction is dirty and dumb, or that it's for boys only, or that if you're a disciplinary problem in class, maybe you'd do better in some blue collar profession, right? Nicole Jarbo: Don't let the stereotype persona of any given industry cloud your judgment about who should be a participant in that industry. Lastly... Spencer Sherman: What I think I see a lot for a lot of organizations is what I would call the field of dreams fallacy of if you build it, they will come. If you build it, they don't always come. Nicole Jarbo: Be specific about the value you're offering. That will help to ensure that, well, they come. This has been Pitch Playground from 4.0. I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. Learn more about Pitch Playground at pitchplayground.com. Like this episode? Send it to a friend who you think might like it too. Next episode, we'll be hearing a pitch from Danette Buckley, the founder of a micro school called Dream Tech Academy. Danette Buckley: I've always had a passion for learning and just a firm believer in one size does not fit all, and that education should be flexible in how students learn, when they're learning, and where they're learning.