Christopher King is the founder of We Are Marcus (WAM), an education technology venture that creates scalable character analytics for students of color to affect suspension rates and substance abuse disorders.
We spoke with King about the importance of education technology for creating opportunities for Black kids.
What is We Are Marcus and what is its mission?
We Are Marcus aims to cut the 16M missing mentor gap in half by 2025. WAM is a tech venture dedicated to providing Black male role model stories digitally in middle and high school enrichment settings. We launched WAMpro in 2018 to also provide character analytics to help intentionally develop Black youth on our platform.
I founded WAM with a vision and a dream to scale the positive outcomes associated with the mentoring effect. Initially, through research in my immediate network, I found that most Black and Brown youth had difficulty finding representative role models, especially those whose stories were relatable and immediately useful. This seemed solvable and I got to work designing a tool that might address it with the idea of testing features and learning along the way. I then developed an idea for a social enterprise that would help address this issue — shout-out to the friends that helped early on, namely Jamel Mosely, Lamont Carolina and Yemi Adequnmi. Years later, I enlisted more help from a key team member, Gustavus Shaw II, who helped upgrade our work.
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