Lauren Jobs, Steve’s wife who inherited his immense fortune, has been busy doing “stuff” with it, and her approach is to do something more than just “philanthropy”. We featured a post about her “Emerson’s Collective” back in 2015.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Laurene-Powell-Jobs-is-investing-in-media-education-sports-and-more.-What-does-she-want-The-Washington-Post.pdf”]“I’d like us to be a place where great leaders want to come and try to do difficult things,” Powell Jobs told me recently. “I think we bring a lot more to the table than money. … If you want to just be a check writer, you’d run out of money and not solve anything.”
One of the projects Emerson has been involved with is the XQ Institute, which made a splash last year with:
In September, an arm of the collective and Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry Foundation co-opted the four major networks in prime time to simultaneously present an hour of live television, featuring dozens of celebrities inviting the nation to reconceive high school.
PSA’s approach does resemble Lauren Powell Jobs approach to pursuing innovation in education. If schools are the way out, what does that look like? PSA interviews help to discover tools to solve problems.
Of course Emerson’s projects are well funded with entrepreneurs with the ability to disrupt spaces causing social change.
With the focus on the competence students achieve and the knowledge “relevant to employers of the future”, we wish Emerson’s projects well to develop grass roots tools to change lives.