The education ecosystem is failing to properly prepare our kids with the 21st-Century skills needed to thrive in adulthood. Schools are struggling to teach academic topics and non-profits are struggling to engage teens, with only 11% of high schoolers enrolled in after-school programs. This has led to widening opportunity and achievement gaps on a national scale. While this is a national problem, there is a lack of scalable, high-quality impact solutions to positively engage our teens. What is engaging our teens is technology, with 95% of teens having smartphones, where they spend over 8 hours a day on average. Unfortunately, teens spend most of this time on social media, which has proven negative consequences for teens. Ambition provides a rare opportunity to leverage the power of technology for positive impact.

We envision a world where there are higher college graduation rates, higher lifetime earnings, fewer avoidable health crises, larger net worths, higher life satisfaction rates, and more. Simply put, we want to create a future where people are happier, healthier, and more successful. To achieve this vision, we inspire, educate, and equip teens with the skills needed to be more college-ready, career-ready, and adult-ready. We focus on key indicators like GPA, school attendance, involvement in extracurricular activities, and a wide range of other key indicators. We are working with Stanford's School of Education to identify and measure outcomes.

Ambition is a collection of bite-sized youth development courses designed for teens. Each course is 7-days long and takes ~15 minutes to complete lessons for the day. Lessons are interactive and consist of videos, quizzes, skill-building activities. After completing each course, teens are rewarded with $20 gift cards that reinforce the value of their time and effort. Ambition incorporates the following design elements to appeal to teens: 1. Mobile. Meet teens where they’re at. 95% have smartphones. 2. Incentivized. Reinforce the value of teens’ time and effort. 3. Achievable. Give teens tasks that they can realistically complete. 4. Personally relevant. Make it relevant to teens’ lives and ambitions. 5. Culturally relevant. Create a sense of belonging for teens of color. 6. Safe & private. Allow teens to open up without fear of judgment. 7. Autonomous. Allow teens to choose their own development path. 8. Asynchronous. Allow teens to complete lessons anytime they want. 9. Self-paced. Allow teens to complete courses at their own speed. 10. Bite-sized. Appeal to teens’ short attention spans. 11. Intervaled. Give teens time for processing and practice. 12. Interactive. Make lessons engaging for teens. 13. Topic diverse. Appeal to teens shifting interests. 14. Vertically aligned. Allow teens to go deeper into a topic if they want.

We partner with educators and topic experts around the country to develop our course curriculum. These are educators who have worked with teens and have experience delivering content around these topics. Ambition works with these educators to ensure quality.

We partner with schools and nonprofits in low-income minority populations to recruit teens. We focus on these communities because this is where high-quality youth development opportunities are most lacking.

For teens, taking courses on the Ambition app is free. This is possible due to the generosity of our Ambition Angels. Each $25 donation covers a reward and program fee for a teen to take a 7-day course and get a $20 gift card reward. The more you donate, the more students can learn and earn!