FirstRoot teaches financial literacy by giving students real money to invest in their schools. Our software platform guides students (and their teachers) in creating ideas to improve their school, refining these ideas into specific proposals, determining the costs of each proposal, voting on the best proposals, and tracking the implementation of their ideas.
Deal Highlights
CEO with prior exits
The soul of their solution is Participatory Budgeting (PB), a democratic process endorsed by the United Nations that has been used thousands of times worldwide.
Successfully completed pilots at high schools in California, Indiana, and New York. Presently planning and/or producing additional pilots in schools in the US, Mexico, India, and France.
$150M secondary school market and $350M elementary school market
FirstRoot Meets the Needs of All Stakeholders
Their solution includes a complete offering for all stakeholders:
• They provide a gorgeous, easy to use, secure, and internationalized application that runs on any modern web browser and supports local languages and currencies.
• For teachers, they provide training on Participatory Budgeting and complete, standards aligned Financial Literacy curriculum that is ‘ready to use’.
• For students, they provide a fun and meaningful way to do more than just learn financial facts: Using their app enables students to gain credit for community service and bolsters their resume for college and/or future jobs.
• For parents, they provide a secure platform that allows them to engage in the community.
• For administrators, they provide all of the necessary security, compliance, and operational controls to make sure our app can be used with minimal overhead and disruption.