Is 'Connect a Million Minds' Improving STEM Skills?

By Phil Preston

In an increasingly technical world, there is a shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills in the workforce. I asked Time Warner Cable’s VP of Community Investment, Milinda Martin, about the impact of their flagship Connect a Million Minds program.

In a recent announcement, Symantec committed to engaging one million students in STEM skills by 2020. Time Warner Cable has been on this path since 2009. It saw the lack of STEM skills as a constraining factor on its future workforce and decided to look for win-win outcomes.

Phil Preston: The Connect a Million Minds initiative appears to work on many levels. It is framed as a philanthropic project, however it also has elements of shared value because, indirectly, you are improving your future workforce, the competitiveness of American industry and your own business prosperity. Can you tell us how the focus on STEM skill development came about?

Milinda Martin: We selected STEM for a variety of reasons, and you have hit on one in your introduction: We need STEM-educated workers for our industry. We know that the U.S. is not training enough students in these skills to the point where there is a gap between open positions and skilled workers taking them -- not just in cable, but in all STEM-dependent industries. However, that was just one reason why we chose Connect a Million Minds as our philanthropic platform.

We also want to positively impact communities, and we know that STEM jobs are high paying and can lift a family out of poverty. We feel that financially stable communities not only are better for the individuals that live in them, but also for the businesses that provide services to them.

PP: Can you tell us how the program works and the number of young minds ‘connected’?

MM: When we launched Connect a Million Minds in November 2009, our goal was to donate $100 million in cash and in-kind support to raise awareness around STEM. We launched several initiatives to achieve this, including:

• Hands-on STEM experiences, solely in the after-school space, and targeted at middle school youth. To reach these early teenagers, we work with nonprofit organizations that develop programs based on what kids love – music, sports, video games, fashion, movies and TV, and social media – and provide hands-on learning to those areas, so that we can make the connection between what they learn in the classroom, and how it is applied to their passions. Our goal is to show kids that, if they want a career in the things they love, they should seriously consider staying with mathematics and science.


• To date, we have donated more than $200 million in public service announcements, stressing the importance of STEM skills for our nation’s youth.


• We built an online “Connectory” that allows nonprofit organizations to publicize their after-school STEM programs and parents to research after-school programs near them. Our Connectory, which is housed on the Connect a Million Minds website, has approximately 5,500 nonprofit partners, posting almost 12,000 STEM programs across the country.


• We created a pledging campaign, to ensure we were measuring our results. Parents, teachers, nonprofit providers, caregivers, museum volunteers and many more can pledge to connect a child to a hands-on STEM experience. While we hoped to collect one million pledges by November 2014, we actually passed the milestone in May 2014.


• We engaged our employees in volunteering to help us deliver the program. So far this year, more than 20 percent of our employee base has signed up to volunteer, and they have donated more than 15,000 hours year to date.

PP: Is there a move afoot to measure longer-term social impacts?

MM: We ask every nonprofit partner to provide measurement of our program partnerships, and this includes not only how many kids participate, but also pre-program and post-program surveys on their engagement and knowledge with respect to STEM. We have also worked with several national partners to create curricula that can be utilized by any nonprofit, so that we are providing hands-on STEM experiences, even in areas where we do not operate or with organizations we do not directly fund. This is all meant to increase our nation’s awareness of the STEM crisis and to provide informal learning opportunities for all communities.

Measuring long-term impact, when we focus on the middle school age group, is a challenge. We have anecdotal evidence that kids who go through our funded programs sign up for high school math and science, but tracking individual performance beyond the length of the after-school program is difficult and costly for our partners. What we do know is that kids who participate in our funded after-school programs graduate from high school at greater rates than those who do not attend. In fact, some of our nonprofit partners have 100% high school graduation rates in communities that have nearer to 40 percent graduation rates overall.

PP: Congratulations on your success to date. It is certainly encouraging to hear about proactive community engagement strategies and the rationale for doing so.

Image credit: Connect A Million Minds website

Phil Preston helps employees and businesses devise community engagement strategies. He can be contacted via phil@philpreston.co or followed @PhilPrestonTwit