M/WBE Spotlight: Q & A with WhyMaker Founder Liz Gallo

Liz Gallo. Courtesy of WhyMaker.

Karp Strategies had the privilege of sitting down with Liz Gallo, founder and CEO of WhyMaker, an MWBE-certified organization dedicated to supporting educators with professional development to connect their students with innovative, modern, and relevant education. She shared with us her teaching philosophy, WhyMaker’s approach to equipping teachers with relevant and transformative training and resources, and her vision for the future. Liz brings a decade of teaching experience that informs her team’s outreach and program development.

What inspired you to found WhyMaker?

I taught technology education for ten years. I started WhyMaker to help kids have better school days by training their educators on modern and innovative teaching strategies. I left the classroom and started doing professional development with teachers to help them understand how to teach in a creative, project-based way so that students are engaged in what they are learning, they are proud of what they’re doing, and they feel connected to their community. 

Why do you find cultivating a STEM-minded approach to education so important?

When you create something and you actually physically have it, or you can physically see it, that’s impactful. It’s important that the results of students’ work isn’t only a test grade that gets thrown away, and it’s key to know that there’s no one right answer for everything. I want students to have the opportunity to make things that they choose rather than feeling like there is one correct answer. Kids often get stuck in this world where they feel like there’s one right answer, and they only want to have one right answer, and that’s not how the real world is. Prepping kids for that reality is important to me. 

Can you walk me through the process of building and expanding WhyMaker?

Over the past six years, we’ve grown pretty expansively, and we are on track to train over 1 million educators by 2032. We are actively working to find educators to work with, and something that’s helped WhyMaker grow so much is our MWBE status. Once we got certified as a women-owned business in New York State, we were able to receive new grants and work as a subcontractor on other grants. That helped us expand our business and grow significantly. With these grants, we can expand our capacity to provide professional development for teachers, write lesson plans and activities for students, and facilitate community outreach with educators and students. 

How did you get involved in STEM education specifically?

In college, I found the math/science/technology education department, and I learned about design thinking as a way to teach students. As soon as I learned that and went through my first project, I had this “ah-ha” moment where I thought, “this is how we should be teaching all of our children,” with a problem-solving, critical thinking, and project management methodology where they’re coming up with creative solutions to real problems and they feel like they have an impact on the community. 

That’s how it all started, and then throughout my career, STEM has taken off as a way of teaching and a way of thinking about teaching, and it has become highlighted in our culture as well. It’s an honor to be able to work with students and teachers to provide them with that knowledge and foundation to head into the world of work that is STEM to solve some of our greatest challenges and to work on some of our biggest projects that we face as a world. 

How do you get connected with the schools and teachers you work with?

Everybody that works at WhyMaker was a teacher and worked in schools, so we understand what it’s like to be in a school and be a teacher. We make a serious effort to communicate with teachers in many different ways, reaching out to them and providing benefits to them because they deserve it. We give teachers stipends for attending our professional development. We give them resources to take back to their classrooms. We make sure that they have time to sit and think about the applications to their classroom. And most importantly, enjoy their learning experience with us. We have a really robust network of educators who follow us and stay connected with us, and engage with us on a regular basis. We love providing for them whatever we can. 

What does success look like for you and your company?

What we know is when we train one educator, we talk to an undefined amount of students. We’ve set the goal of training 1 million educators by 2032, knowing that will impact an infinite number of students. Success for us is getting good-quality, job-embedded, practical, professional learning activities and products to teachers—that is all that we want to do. What’s important about the work that we’re doing is we’re not doing just for select teachers. We’re doing it for every educator because every educator can enhance their teaching to provide students with really impactful experiences. 

How has the emergence of new technology like offshore wind and AI affected your programs?

We’re doing a lot of work now with AI, focusing on professional development around AI for teachers. We’re looking at how teachers can use AI to help with management aspects of their classroom, as well as how AI can help students with disabilities. We’re looking at how we can provide a universally designed education for all students using AI. We’ve also been doing professional development around what AI is and how it works. We want to make it less scary for teachers and show students how they can create things with AI. Our work will help students become aware of the need for diverse groups of people to enter careers that are available within the AI space. 

Regarding the clean energy space and offshore wind, it is huge along the eastern seaboard and it is a revolutionary industry that is going to evolve significantly. We’re going to have so many different people working in these careers, and we’re going to have so many people who are working in this space in atypical and less expected ways. There’s so many different careers that exist in this space, and people are going to need to be trained and skilled to work in that industry. As an MWBE, we are working on supporting companies to grow their workforce by talking to educators and sharing pathways to jobs and careers in this industry. 

Oftentimes, we talk to teachers about careers for their students because we want students to understand what their skills are and what they are passionate about. Maybe you’re really good at small machine maintenance, and you’re passionate about clean energy. We can put those two things together to find you a career in this space and get you some exciting and rewarding options. 

Amidst all these new developments in the field, how do you get the resources to train teachers on such topics?

To provide information for trainings, we’re constantly listening to educators, observing classrooms, hearing from school leaders, and doing research to develop new ideas and topics. We all work together as a team to identify the needs and best practices for teaching educators cutting-edge, relevant, timely content.

On the industry side, we work with a lot of subject matter experts to understand what it’s like to be in a given career, and then translate that for students. A lot of times those subject matter experts don’t know how to talk to teachers or students, but we do. So we often act as the teacher translator between the subject matter expert, company, or organization and the educators. 

How do you envision the next five years for WhyMaker?

We’re continuing in this clean energy space—there’s a lot of work to be done there and we’re eager to continue to do that work. We are going to continue to support educators in their instructional strategies with tips and tricks to work with students to get them engaged in their learning and make school the best part of children’s days. Also, we’ll continue to talk to teachers about ways of changing their pedagogical framework of teaching so that it is more hands-on, project-based, and community-focused. 

What do you see as the most prominent unmet needs in education right now?

Something that we discovered through some of our training is that students seem to lack the confidence that they need to be successful. We heard this from many teachers in many fields, where once students feel like they can do something, a very basic thing, they feel like they don’t need to learn any more to be better. Once there is something challenging, they shut down, and they don’t know how to persevere. Something we’re going to be working on in the next few months is creating professional development around building students’ confidence. We want to work with teachers about how they can talk to students when they are struggling through a difficult challenge or when they shut down and won’t persevere. We’ll explore how teachers can break down challenges so that students can feel success and want to keep growing. 

We think this is a result of a culture of instant gratification in our children, a pandemic where school was just something to move through, and a school system where there’s only one right answer. Schools, teachers, and students have been trained to get the one right answer with no alternatives—all other options are considered completely wrong. It’s a combination of all those factors that built this culture in our students, as well as the teenage mind that may want to just take the easy way out. So, we’ll be working with teachers to figure out paths through that to support kids amidst those challenges. 

Is there anything else you would like to highlight?

I just want people to know that we are available, as a MWBE,  to partner with them in this space to have a significant impact. We think the future of education is private public partnership and we are ready to be the intermediary. We want to support community outreach, we want to support teachers being the leads in career awareness in emerging industries. It’s important to us to work together to create these new pathways to empower students and educators to build the tools and skills for successful learning. 

WhyMaker works to design the future of education, creating impactful opportunities for educators and students to empower them to engage in purposeful, project-based learning. You can learn more about their programs and resources here. 

M/WBE Spotlight: The Wilkinz Group

Mr. Dwayne Wilkins grew up knowing he wanted to create opportunities for businesses and residents of New Jersey. His grandfather was one of the first African American police officers in Montclair, and his grandmother led efforts to enforce compliance with affirmative action in the construction industry. They also played a prominent role in the community and civic life of Essex County—together, these two influences taught him the power of politics from a young age. But while civic duty was part of his upbringing, he did not consider the potential for offshore wind to provide the opportunities he sought for his state until 2022.

A string of events and his extreme curiosity led Mr. Wilkins to the offshore wind industry. As Operations Manager at a small carpentry firm in Newark, Wilkins was eager to help the minority-owned business scale up. Attending a luncheon, he heard leaders from New Jersey’s Governor to Newark’s mayor detail the opportunities for businesses in Atlantic City. A few days later, he received an email from the NJ Economic Development Authority highlighting business opportunities in Atlantic City, specifically in offshore wind. The rest is history.

Within a few months, General Electric selected Mr. Wilkins to attend the Business Network for Offshore Wind’s annual IPF conference in Atlantic City. He had started his own firm—The Wilkinz Group, a Newark-based consulting firm focused on business development and community engagement in underserved communities in NJ. In 2023 he returned to IPF, this time leading a panel.

As Mr. Wilkins sees it, the offshore wind industry provides a “soup of opportunity”: bringing together developers, government agencies, and small businesses who can support these major projects. The industry will need the support of local businesses and their workforces, and cities like Newark are primed to provide exactly the inputs required. Wilkins, a lifelong Newark resident, is keenly aware of all that his state and city have to offer. From colleges like Rutgers and NJ Institute of Technology; to the busiest seaport in the country; to a rich cultural diversity across each neighborhood, Wilkins stands poised to stir this soup and serve up opportunities in Newark and beyond.

When asked about what success looks like for his business, Wilkins barely pauses. For him, it looks like helping other people and creating a healthy ecosystem for the next generation so that they grow up seeing opportunities like those available in the renewable energy sector. Longer term, his dream is even more specific: imagine a rich grandpa sitting on a porch (surely in NJ) and sharing his connections, opportunities, and knowledge with anyone who stops by to ask for help.

At the end of the day, Mr. Wilkins is a connector. As he continues to teach business owners and locals about opportunities to join the emerging offshore wind industry, he will inevitably reach his goal of helping others through the opportunities he opens up. Learn more about Wilkins and his work at thewilkinzgroup.com.

M/WBE Spotlight: L+L

Liz Seibert Turow and Leigh Mignogna in their Brooklyn studio. Photo by @kelseyannrose.

Choosing a design partner is not easy. When it comes to aesthetics, everyone has an opinion on what looks best, but clearly conveying a community and its goals visually takes a lot of skill. L+L, a women-owned design firm, has just that skill. Karp Strategies was lucky enough to work with L+L on a project for Cooper Robertson, Return to the Riverbend, a riverfront master plan for Middletown, Connecticut. It was L+L’s campaign identity that set the look and feel of the engagement materials and final plan.

Becoming L+L

L+L is a multi-disciplinary design studio started in 2015. But their story stretches back to when L+L wasn’t the name of a studio; it was just shorthand for Liz and Leigh, two graduate students completing their coursework at Pratt Institute. As the pair drew closer to earning their degrees and worked the requisite hours together in a studio, they began to consider creating their own firm. Although both designers had existing positions, they each slowly extricated themselves to start L+L.

Today the firm has grown to four employees, with Liz and Leigh each brainstorming, reviewing every project, and bouncing ideas off one another to prevent the type of self-reinforcing feedback that comes from working alone. They view themselves as communicators and translators who help their clients by taking complex ideas and content—and finding a way to visually explain it to their audience. Far beyond artistry, the pair reach out to stakeholders and community members to ensure that their work correctly reflects the communities their deliverables represent and inform.

The duo enjoys tackling diverse projects, from brand and product strategy to user experience and interactive design and everything in between. Still, Liz and Leigh were particularly eager to work with civic design and urban planning organizations. Through The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s (CUP) Public Access Design fellowship—where they made this guide to help people who’d been arrested retrieve their belongings—they gained confidence in their ability to partner with other subject matter experts and realized an interest in working alongside similarly impactful organizations. Soon, they had expanded their work to other socially minded projects, from an online knowledge repository for Code for America to the design of a full brand system for the civic tech nonprofit JustFix.

Get it Back guide created for the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Creating Middletown, Connecticut’s Riverfront Master Plan

In June 2021, the City of Middletown, Connecticut, selected a consultant team led by Cooper Robertson (and supported by Karp Strategies and Langan) to help create a riverfront master plan. From the start, the City saw this undertaking as an exciting opportunity to reverse the impacts of urban renewal, support forward-thinking economic growth, and build a new waterfront grounded in the goals and needs of local Middletown stakeholders. To inform the plan, Karp Strategies led a market analysis, economic development analysis and strategy, and thorough community engagement.

L+L created a set of brand guidelines and design templates to clearly articulate the thoughts and feelings of the community and the future they envisioned. Cooper Robertson then took all of the analysis and input—including over 1,200 stakeholder comments—and transformed it into the beautiful and inspiring plan that exists today. The final plan reimagines a 200-acre stretch of land along the Connecticut River as vibrant and accessible new city districts with significant open spaces and a broad mix of uses. The plan includes photographs, graphics, maps, and even images of sticky note comments from community engagement meetings, all laid out in an easily digestible format.

Detail of Return to the Riverbend Master Plan.

To learn more about L+L, visit their website or on Instagram or reach out at shoutout@landl.us to sign up for their newsletter.