Career Connected Learning with the TGR Foundation

Cyndi Court, CEO of Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, joined me to discuss the organization’s education work. It was an eye-opening conversation, as we talked about different components of career-connected learning and its benefits to students and employers. Cyndi shared stories of student’s journeys through their programs and the Foundation’s plans for the future. I loved her framework to organize career-connected learning as “learning about work, through work, and at work.” Have a listen or read the transcript and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think through how we accomplish that, I am tremendously excited for our guest today. She's the CEO of the TGR Foundation, none other than Cyndi Court. Cyndi, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cyndi Court:

Thanks for having us, Michael.

Cyndi’s Journey to the Work 

Michael Horn:

You bet. So, before we get into the work of the foundation and some of the labs that you're running and scaling, just tell us about your own journey into the TGR Foundation and what attracted you to this opportunity specifically

Cyndi Court:

Yeah, I'm an educator. I did my education degree many years ago in Toronto, Canada, but I fell in love with the after-school space when my husband and I moved to Tampa, Florida. I love the creativity that happens in the after-school space. I love the fact that we can come alongside both schools and be great partners, supporting schools and local educators, but also come alongside families and provide wraparound services in the after-school space. I've spent the majority of my career with the Salvation Army and over a decade with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The national office for Boys and Girls Clubs movement, I was their chief development and marketing officer. This opportunity appealed to me because of the big differential in what Tiger is trying to do here.

The mission is very clear. It's about empowering young people to pursue their passions through education. We run programs during the day, and we have kids come in from local schools all over Anaheim. While they're getting hands-on creative STEAM curriculum, their teachers are getting teacher education. We have this beautiful 35,000-square-foot facility with the latest technology. It’s not just used after school; it’s used all day long. This partnership with schools and communities was incredibly attractive to me.

Career-Connected Learning

Michael Horn:

That is exciting. What an opportunity. When I hear you talk about it, I always think after school and these wraparound areas are what I would call in our research areas of non-consumption, where the alternative is nothing. You can often reinvent the space and give students opportunities they otherwise never could have. Start to describe that. I know in these learning labs you do a lot of work with career-connected learning and employer-based partnerships. When you're talking about exposure to passions, you are not kidding. There are a lot of opportunities for kids to have those experiences. Tell us about that work and what it looks like.

Cyndi Court:

We've started and actually done career-connected learning by exposing young people from under-resourced communities to careers from the very beginning. Starting in fifth grade, our STEAM curriculum is designed so that kids are introduced to careers available to them. We know that 11% of the future jobs and the 11% of the growth are in the STEAM area. We want to make sure they’re prepared for those. So it’s begun from the very beginning as far as exposure. We do pre and post-assessments, measuring our students' engagement with us. They often tell us in our post interviews that they learned about a career and felt more confident in their skills to pursue that career. Now, we're beginning to be very intentional and target the teen population, which is tough to serve. It's more expensive, and it’s hard to attract and retain them. But we're being super intentional with those high school students. They get exposure through our curriculum and real-world opportunities to meet professionals from different careers in kind of one day career fairs. These career opportunities are where we have professionals come into the learning lab and share what their career path looked like and just expose them to different opportunities.

I'm a first-generation college student, the first in my family to graduate from high school. So I know firsthand, often kids from under-resourced communities don't even know these careers exist. So there's a lot of work to be done just exposing them. We call that learning about work.  So how do we help students learn about work? Then we go deeper with them, with pillar three of that program for our high school students, where we help them learn through work. One of our marquee partners is Providence Healthcare on the West Coast. Very large healthcare system, 52 hospitals, and one of the biggest employers on the West Coast They brought their professionals in and gave us a challenge that they’re having around doing community assessments in under-resourced communities in their health system. We gave this challenge to our young people, did a six-week curriculum in the classroom, and they were split into teams to solve the problem for Providence Healthcare asa competition. So they were actually learning through doing the work. They came back, Providence evaluated them, and it was a great way for them to understand some of the careers and actually do the work. They were out delivering healthcare assessments in communities.

The third pillar of our program is learning at work. How can we help them secure pre-apprenticeships, internships, prepare for mock interviews, and build their resumes and LinkedIn profiles, even as high school students? Some careers require college, some don’t. We help them understand the credentials they can pursue. We’re trying to be intentional and wrap around the whole career-connected learning area.

Employers Partner with TGR