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This article, written by Albert Hong, was originally published in Technical.ly Delaware.
What’s next for a “data geek” who cares about the future of Delaware’s education system enough to have started a nonprofit dedicated to empowering individual students?
Apparently, it’s targeting the root issue of the education system itself. That’s the goal of Atnre Alleyne’s new statewide nonprofit, DelawareCAN: The Delaware Campaign for Achievement Now, which he just launched yesterday with a blog post announcing the details.
In the blog post, Alleyne talks about how DelawareCAN is the result of his four years at the Delaware Department of Education, where he was a Harvard Strategic Data Project Fellow, and his most recent one-year fellowship with 50CAN: The 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, of which his new nonprofit is based off.
“We will engage a diversity of voices to advocate for education policies that truly benefit our communities,” Alleyne writes. “And we will work directly with policymakers and with legislators to ensure the education system we have is the the type our children deserve.”
We’re waiting to hear more about the org from Alleyne.
Delaware is the 10th state to join the national network of 50CAN, which has had local advocacy campaigns started in states including New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
It was 2009 when Alleyne and his wife Tatiana Poladko founded TeenSHARP in Camden as a nonprofit that implemented an educational “trickle-down” method of helping students realize their potential to succeed so that those students can pass that down to other students. They relocated their main office to the Community Services Building in Wilmington in 2015, where the organization’s work continues to be seen, like with Zachary Inniss, a 15-year old TeenSHARP participant who recently pitched his “Race for Change” project at the “I Have a Dream” Business Pitch Competition.
Having had the opportunity to speak with people across the state about education, Alleyne seems to have come to a realization that educational policies, and the conversations that happen around them, were not urgent or inclusive enough.
“This meant the policy conversations generally lacked a sense of urgency and often focused more on adult convenience than on students’ needs,” he wrote. “But what is clear every moment I spend with kids is this: students can’t wait.”