Keck students look forward to Hult Prize regionals

A team of graduate students from the Keck School of Medicine of USC is looking forward to competing in the 2015 Hult Prize regional finals in March with an idea that focuses on bringing tutoring services to low-income urban neighborhoods.

In November, the team won the competitions quarterfinals, which included 16 teams from a wide array of disciplines at USC. It challenged student teams to come up with a solution to the pressing issue of early childhood education in poor communities.

TEACH for Tots, the business name of the winning team, included global medicine graduate students Nour Al-Timimi, Tanwe Shende, Gunnye Pak, Farah Zerehi and Narineh Ohanian. Competition sponsors included the Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative.

“Our solution for the case is something similar to having a pre-K in these urban slums. Our curriculum will take place at home by recruiting students from local communities with an emphasis on having girls as the tutors because in these areas many of them most likely don’t go to school or even have the opportunity to work and are most likely caretakers for their younger siblings,” Al-Timimi said.

Though the team lacked hands-on exposure to business cases, TEACH for Tots used group expertise on educational and global issues they have confronted both in the workforce and their studies.

Ohanian, who has been a tutor since high school, elaborated on the group’s winning strategy.

“All of the tutoring will take place in the home. Children will be broken out into groups of 1- to 3-year olds and 3- to 5-year olds,” she said. “Our tutors will work with a curriculum that is preset and meet a couple of times a week. This type of exposure to education early on in the children’s lives will be very helpful longer term in breaking the poverty cycle.”

The tutoring service will be fee-based with hopes of financial assistance from partnerships with global NGOs or other organizations willing to sponsor the cause.

The group will focus on building a base of tutors who will be seen as mentors in the community and small business owners in their own right.

“The average age of our tutors will probably be somewhere between 14 and 17 years old,” Ohanian said.  “One main challenge for us will be building trust in the community since we will be coming in as outsiders. We plan on having coordinators in the area who can help bridge that gap. Churches, for example, are very well respected in some of these communities. Our coordinators would be able to introduce our services to them who would then be able to connect us with those in need of our services.”

The competition was spearheaded by Anzal Adam, a senior majoring in accounting at the Marshall School of Business and campus director of the Hult Prize Initiative at USC. Adam was able to garner enough support from the Marshall community to get the competition recognized by the university even though she had a small window of time.

“One of my main objectives for the competition was to get students to become more conscious about social issues,” Adam said. “A lot of people are talking about participating in the next one already and with the contacts that we were able to make for this past year, I am confident that our awareness level is high and our next competition will be an even bigger success.”

The TEACH for Tots group has chosen to participate in the San Francisco regional finals because of the geographic proximity to USC. Other locations for regional finals included Boston, Shanghai, Dubai and London.

Following the regional finals, teams are selected to move to an accelerator program with an end goal of being ready to present at the final round in New York. The event will take place at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, with the winner taking home $1 million in prize money and full operational support to launch the team’s new social enterprise.

[Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Tanwe Shende’s name. The story has been updated with the correct spelling. The Daily Trojan regrets the error.]