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Scratchwerk ^EDU
"Scratchwerk ^Edu," hosted by Ronnie King, CEO of Scratchwerk Tech and founder of the MyVillage Project, is a dynamic podcast at the nexus of Black communities, technology, business, education, and current events. Each episode dives deep into the role of emerging technologies in promoting equity, enhancing workforce development, and reshaping education.
Join Ronnie as he explores how technology can be leveraged to uplift and empower marginalized communities through insightful discussions with experts, activists, and innovators. From the practicalities of tech entrepreneurship to the impact of community-led initiatives, "Scratchwerk Edu" is an essential resource for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and social change.
Learn about the success of tech incubators such as "Coding in Color", which has trained over 2,000 students in emerging skills and secured over $800k in funding to support young Black tech entrepreneurs, and discover how initiatives like the MyVillage Project Community Fund has united organizations and disbursed over $4M to support 220+ Black-led nonprofits across the country. Tune in to be informed, inspired, and involved in reshaping a more equitable tech future.
Scratchwerk ^EDU
Beyond Traditional Nonprofits : Building Villages For Students
Ronnie King and Tia Leathers reflect on the evolution of the MyVillage Project from a modest $10,000 fund into a community-designed and tech-driven initiative across Florida. What began as an effort to support Black-led nonprofits has blossomed into an innovative ecosystem reaching 10,000 students annually through partnerships with 350 organizations in five communities.
At the heart of the MyVillage Project mission lies a profound understanding of our rapidly changing technological landscape. "Work is going to look completely different. Life is going to be completely different," King explains, highlighting why the project focuses intensively on mathematics, culture, and artificial intelligence. Their approach isn't theoretical—it's deeply practical. They pay high-achieving students (ages 16-21) to work 15 hours weekly developing custom AI solutions and educational tools for their communities.
The students' work represents a fascinating intersection of cultural awareness and cutting-edge technology. They're training large language models to understand vernacular expressions and creating educational video games like "Eternal Equations" where players solve math problems while battling enemies in space. These aren't just cool projects—they're addressing a critical need for diversity in AI development. As King powerfully articulates, "I don't want to leave it up to somebody else's AI model to determine who's a criminal or not, who's guilty or not, who deserves the job or not." The stakes couldn't be higher.
MyVillage Project's vision extends beyond education to reinventing how nonprofits operate, challenging the sector to move from program-focused to outcome-based approaches. Looking ahead to 2025, King envisions the MyVillage Project as both "a trusted resource for parents and organizations" and "a revenue-generating engine that pours money back into the community." For parents, educators, or nonprofit leaders who recognize the urgency of this work, visit myvillageproject.com to connect with this groundbreaking initiative in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, or Gainesville. The future is being coded right now—who writes it matters.
All right, so it's Friday, but a different kind, excited today to finally get the opportunity to ask Ronnie King some questions, because you usually just give us a little bit of what's on your mind on a Friday, but now I get to ask what's on mine.
Speaker 2:All right, we can do that. I like it.
Speaker 1:OK, do that. I like it. Okay, all right. So, ronnie, in a lot of our interviews we've heard people talk about my Village Project and all that kind of thing, and this is the Scratchwork EDU podcast. I don't know, have you ever said exactly what my Village Project is on this particular podcast and, if not, do you mind just kind of saying what people are referencing when they say that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I haven't necessarily on this platform, no, but so the my Village Project we actually started this, probably maybe 12 years ago. So we started the project as a fund, a donor advised fund, at the local community foundation here in Jacksonville. It was myself and a couple other stakeholders in the community. We decided we wanted to kind of pull our money together and start really supporting black led nonprofits that were doing good work in our community. We felt that there were a lot of nonprofit dollars that were being spent in the community. Some of it, for the most part, was going to help so-called Black students and families, but not a lot of dollars were going to Black organizations to help Black students and families, and so we wanted to kind of do our small part in changing that, and so we started that fund. First year we gave out, I think, $10,000 to 10 different organizations. But since then that fund has obviously grown into something much more than that and we've started up a nonprofit called the my Village Project to go with that fund, called the my Village Project, to go with that fund, and now we are actively trying to organize communities to create villages of support for students and families that wanted to make sure that they can thrive, and so we partner with 350 organizations across the state of Florida in five different communities. We're reaching about 10,000 students a year just by going out, making sure that we are organized and celebrating student success, celebrating parents for stepping up and really again just trying to create a village for these students.
Speaker 2:My background, obviously, is in technology. I believe that education is drastically changing. You can say for the better, for the worse, but I think regardless it is changing in terms of how we are teaching kids, how we are preparing kids for what is now an AI driven economy, and I believe in an AI driven economy. Work is going to look completely different. You know, life is going to be completely different and we want to make sure that our kids are prepared for that economy, that world. So everything that we do as a collective is really about encouraging students, giving them the confidence that they need but also the skills that they need to succeed in that society. And that's heavy in mathematics, that is heavy in robotics, that is heavy in AI and technology training.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now that you're in the nonprofit space, coming from technology well, still being in technology, but now you're kind of a nonprofit leader what do you think of the industry now that you're here?
Speaker 2:You know, I definitely come from a corporate I guess you can say background and I believe that we need nonprofits, obviously, we need the work of nonprofits, but I also think that the nonprofit sector is kind of can be stuck in the past sometimes in terms of our approach to change, in terms of the way that we measure success. Unfortunately, sometimes I think that in the nonprofit space, the program itself ends up becoming the thing that we all focus on and pull money around and try to stand up, as opposed to the outcomes. I think that a lot of the outcomes have been the same. We still got communities, particularly marginalized communities, in poverty. We still have health outcomes that are just too big to ignore, education, so on and so forth. So I really do think that we have to move. I think, actually, the economy is going to force nonprofits to move from just programmatic focus to outcome based focus.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then some of those outcomes. You talked about education and how. Maybe it's not necessarily preparing students for the future as you see it, especially being as exposed to technology as you are in the kind of latest developments or even what's to come. Will you be a little more specific about the ways that you are helping to prepare students, through the my Village Project or otherwise, for that more tech driven future that the schools may or may not be ready to prepare them for?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, first off, I'm big on scalability, I'm big on the numbers, and so I never want to pretend, like what we're doing to the my Village Project is the end, all be all, or that you know we are making all of this change. You know, in this, this huge global world that we are living in, but our small portion, our small contribution to this change, we are preparing students, particularly at the high school and college level, with the skills that they need for custom AI development, video game development which I think is a big deal in 2025, helping them understand entrepreneurship and all the things that come along with that, and the data analytics. We've had some students that received some gigs for data analytics. So we have about 65 students in our program. They are all ages 16 to 21. And so these students get paid literally 15 hours a week to learn emerging technologies and AI and those things.
Speaker 2:Very, very active, smart bunch. The students have to have a 3.0 GPA to get into our program, but they are absolutely building a community of their own, learning together, working together, figuring out some of these tough problems together and really building solutions that these grassroots organizations and our community can use with their new skills, and we are talking about again advanced AI skills that otherwise you know. Yes, they can learn it on their own, but to be able to learn it in this environment and apply it in their community, I think is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:Give an example of one of the solutions. What's one of the things they've come up with?
Speaker 2:Oh man, you know, really using large language models now to be able to train large language models on something that's very, very specific. You know, for instance, all of us have heard of chat GPT. You know you can ask it a question about a variety of different things and it can kind of spit something back out to you, but even the language that it gives back to you may not necessarily be the type of way that you would have said it. And so these kids speak in a different tone, a different vernacular and all those things than we do as adults. And so they are training large language models to respond to questions, how they will respond to questions. They are training large language models to understand language and questions that we otherwise would not understand.
Speaker 2:I'm at, I'm teaching these classes with these students four days a week and they're constantly throwing jokes out and words and things like that and you know stuff. I haven't heard that before. They all laughing on the call. Yeah, they, they do, they're going at it. And but again, to be able to embed that in a large language model, I think is a powerful thing and it allows them to kind of have something that they can use to talk to each other. That's really kind of.
Speaker 2:You know, one, one thing that stands out and the other really is these video games. I'm not a gamer, I do not play video games, but these kids absolutely do. We've had two of our students that recently created a math game video game. They call it Eternal Equations I think was the name of the game, and it's kind of a spaceship theme. You have to go in there and activate the spaceship and answer these questions while you're fighting off the enemy. So real, real creative stuff. That again, you know, you would think that, I don't know, I wouldn't think it would be as catchy as it is, but the students love it. So yeah, it's just little examples of that.
Speaker 1:I love it too, Just sitting in a couple of classes like it's addictive watching them and just engaging with them. You use the term large language model and I know that the listeners we have that are connected to tech already may know exactly what that means. And for our listeners that come from the education or community space or just are listening because they knew someone who shared it, Well, you just explain what large language model actually means.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, so I like to kind of break it down. Let's first talk about what a model is. So when we talk about AI, machine learning and you talk about these models, they're really just prediction machines. You know a piece of code, a piece of software that can predict things, and that prediction comes in a variety of different ways. That prediction might be I can predict with this self-driving car what is going to happen next and make adjustments. That prediction could be that Tia was on Amazon yesterday and she bought this soap bar of soap and I'm predicting that she's going to come back today and want to buy this other item. But it can also come in the form of predicting the next word that would come or the word that you would expect.
Speaker 2:And so when we talk about words and text and things like that, we typically refer to those types of models as large language models, because they're predicting text, they're predicting words. Hey, if I ask you a question, you know in our mind we're thinking that the chat bot, like ChatGPT or something, is thinking through these things, where they're really just predicting the answer that they think you want to hear based on the question that you asked it. Hey, finish this sentence for me, or can you tell me a little bit more about something? That model is simply just trying to predict the words that you would expect to see from that question. And so we again call those large language models, because they have been trained on a massive amount of data on language and how we talk, how we write, how we read, all those different things.
Speaker 2:And there's not a lot of companies that have the resources to train a large language model, because you're talking about the English language and all the different ways that we use it, and so you need a lot of resources to kind of train that. But once you have these large language models, you do have the ability to kind of what we call fine tune them, to add like little tweaks to them. And so where a large language model might not recognize the term my dog, that's my dog, you know, in a large language model maybe my dog might refer to an actual pet, and you know that's fine. But maybe you can fine tune that large language model to also include this, the context of hey, that's my dog, that's my friend, that's my friend of mine. And so there's a way to take these large language models, these LLMs for short, and fine tune them in a way that can be customized for certain domains.
Speaker 1:So you're teaching students to do that? Or is it the end user that's telling it? No, dog wasn't just a pet, it's my friend who trains it in that way.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, you need a developer. You know there's tools you can use, but for the most part, you would need an AI developer to train a large language model like that. And so, yes, these students are absolutely learning how to train large language models on specific sets of data and instructions. So, yeah, these are these students that are creating these models that they know their community would need. So it's kind of a true for us by us type of model. Yeah, no pun intended, but yeah, yeah, that's really what we're teaching them.
Speaker 1:OK, so how does that integrate with other systems or is it separate? So I guess I'm thinking about the types of language that the students would use. I guess, culturally things that we know what it means that other AI developers. Is that what it?
Speaker 2:would be Engineers.
Speaker 1:yeah, whatever you want to call them Engineers may or may not know to even include into their model when the students are creating. Is it something that we would be able to tap into and use just their model, or is it something they be feeding their information over into preexisting systems so that those systems that are more responsive to the types of language we use?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. Today, for the most part, our interactions with large language models are just a few companies. You know, we all know ChatGPT hopefully now right, but there's Microsoft Copilot and Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama, right. So there's a few other ones. But for the most part, we're all interacting with, like these, one or two large language models.
Speaker 2:But in the very near future, when you allow folks to kind of fine tune their models, yes, people can use those things in a variety of different contexts, and I would use kind of the website as an example. When the internet first came out, you probably had a handful of websites out there that everybody went to, and you know whether that was Yahoo or wherever. But now, right, there's websites for everybody to do all kind of different stuff and all kind of different things. My expectation would be that it would be the same thing with these models as well. Some websites would provide better information than others. Some models would do better than others, provide better information than others. Some models would do better than others, but, yes, these kids could train these models and make them available for folks like you or anybody else in their community, and I think that's going to be the norm.
Speaker 1:So, Ronnie, why do you care to do what you're doing? I'm sure you could take your super smarts and do something corporate and make all this money and take care of your family. Why is this work important to you?
Speaker 2:I mean for one. I believe this will be the way for people to make a lot of money. Moving forward, I'm not I'm not ashamed to say that I think that AI development isn't going anywhere. I think if you can get into that space, there is a lot of opportunity, both career-wise and business-wise, by being in that space. That's number one. But two, I think that when you think about AI and how much it's going to dominate our lives from work to play to social you name it the way that AI is structured and built it is really critical that we have diversity in the people that are creating those systems.
Speaker 2:And I know we've all heard that before.
Speaker 2:You know it matters who's creating the AI, and absolutely does, but I'm not sure people understand how critical it is that we have folks that look like you and I that are creating these tools that are going to be running the world, use to determine things like you know happiness and sadness and confidence and intelligence and availability and right all down the line, and those are such nuanced feelings and emotions and opinions that you need diversity in that space.
Speaker 2:And so sometimes you know when I'm thinking about these students and the ones that we're working with that are building these tools. I mean I literally look at them as like they're going to help save our lives in the future. I mean, that's just. That's literally how I feel. We have got to have more people that look like me and you in that space building these, these tools, because I don't want to leave it up to somebody else's AI model to determine who's a criminal or not, who's guilty or not, who deserves the job or not, who deserves the money or not. We need folks in this space that have different set of opinions, and that is being able to train these models on these opinions is like at the foundation of what AI is really about.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's March 7th 2025. Give your vision statement for my Village Project for three years.
Speaker 2:Oh, man, you know, the dream really is to have an entity that our community can come to.
Speaker 2:They can always come to this organization for help with funding. They can always come to this organization for help with resources. This is a place where parents can send their kids and trust that they will be supported by the village. Parents can send their students here to know that they are being trained for this new economy. They are getting all the advanced mathematics skills and the tech skills and the automation skills that they need entrepreneurship skills they need to be successful. So it's a trusted resources for parents and organizations and educators for that matter, but ultimately it is a revenue generating engine that pours money back into the community in a way that is strategic and in a way that again, can help not only help us thrive, but again, I see challenges ahead when you think about this new world and we need an entity. We need a place that's safe, that people can come and always be themselves. They feel like they can always have the funds and the resources and the support that they need to be successful.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So I'm going to ask you this final question. I know we have the podcast, so and we always like to tell people, download it wherever you get your podcast Spotify, Apple Downloads, Scratchwork, EDU but with the my Village Project and for those that are connected, I know that this vehicle is one that continues to kind of keep people informed and updates Our work week. Updates should give us the people that we're introducing our listeners to. But if there are people right now who are either attached to the nonprofit organizations that you mentioned, or you know they are nonprofit leaders and or they are parents who say I want to be a part of that vision, I want to make sure that my child is attached to such a ecosystem of support and resources for our community, how do they get connected?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, they can just obviously visit our website myvillageprojectcom and click the contact us form and reach out. But obviously you know we are available as well on LinkedIn and all the other platforms. Don't hesitate to reach out and get your kid involved. We are especially in our partner cities, so that's Jacksonville, miami, orlando, tampa and Gainesville, florida and all those cities. We have a strong foundation of organizations that are coming together, working together, so you can reach out to any of those typical nonprofits in that city, in those cities, and I'm sure they can get you in contact with us as well. And we would love and welcome any parent who wants to see their child not only excel in math and tech and all that kind of stuff, but just do it in a way that they are connected to their community, they are prepared to create solutions using their skills for their community, and that's that's ultimately the type of family and student that we want to be in the program.
Speaker 1:Awesome, all right, well, y'all, y'all heard it here first. We finally got to talk to Ronnie King and y'all have some other questions. We'll save those for another day.
Speaker 2:I kind of like this, I kind of like this format. We might do this every now and then.
Speaker 1:Go find us on social media, all of our platforms, my Village Project, to make sure that if there's something late and great that we put out there, you got to be connected to see it. But thank you so much, Ronnie, for letting me dig a little deeper today.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Thank you, tia, for bringing some life to these podcasts. You know this is an idea of mine for a while and I'm just glad we're able to finally start doing these things. And yeah, we appreciate your voice, your opinion on these podcasts for sure. I think this thing would be extremely boring if I was around here interviewing these folks on a week to week basis.
Speaker 1:That's not true.
Speaker 2:We need you to bring the light. We appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I enjoy every moment. All right, thanks, guys. Until next time.
Speaker 2:Take care, thank you.