YES International Summer Service Program Design for High School Students using Lean Startup

YES Prep Public Schools is a group of public charter schools focused on serving students from low-income communities across Houston, Texas. One requirement of all YES students is summer school between grades 5 through 10 and two mandatory summer internships between grades 10 and 12. Due to financial concerns many students who desire to do an international internship cannot afford any available programs offering such internships. In 2005, we introduced a new, internal, international summer service program for YES high school students to satisfy our summer internship requirement. This paper focuses on the process and results of designing, implementing, and modifying the program using the Lean Startup methodology through its first few years before it won a national award for its character-building work. Index Terms Service-learning, Secondary education, International and community development, Lean Startup


Iɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛɪᴏɴ
YES Prep Public Schools is a group of public charter schools in Houston, Texas.Founded in 1998 with one school in Southeast Houston, it has grown to 16 6th-12th grade schools serving 11,600 students across Houston 1 .YES specifically focuses on students from low-income communities and works to provide equal access to excellent education for all students of Houston.Unlike KIPP, another public charter school program started in Houston, YES has decided not to start schools nationally across the country until it first can reach that goal in Houston.Even though it is local to Houston, like KIPP it has achieved national fame as an excellent, trendsetting public charter school district 2 .
YES has several components that form its model for each school 3 .First, YES utilizes an extended school day compared to the traditional US school day that ends between 2 and 3 PM.At YES, students attend school for the entire day, roughly through 5 PM.Second, YES students are required to stay after school for tutorials until 6 PM, for any subject in which they have a grade lower than a B. Third, YES has an extended school year.That means that between grades 5 and 10, students attend mandatory summer school.And between grades 10 and 12 students must fulfill two, high school, summer internships.Fourth, there is an extended school week with mandatory Saturday School which can be used for service work or extended tutorials.
The next set of components of the YES model relate to processes.First, all YES teachers are given a mobile phone, and YES students are not allowed to come to class the next day with their homework incomplete.When a student is unable to complete a portion of the assignment, the student, must call the teacher for help.The student is not allowed to attend class the next day with incomplete work if the teacher has not been called.Second, YES students study in a small integrated school with roughly 100 students per grade.
The last set of components of the YES model deal with student enrichment and expectations.First, during the summer before school starts, all students sign an annual, three-party agreement between a YES teacher representing the school, the parents, and themselves.At any point when a problem arises, YES can point to the commitments made to remind and ensure that both students and parents do their part to ensure student achievement.Second, all students receive college counseling from the 6th grade.As part of that counseling, all students take week-long spring trips to visit colleges and universities in a region of the United States.Third, students attend a district-wide Signing Day, in which all students watch and applaud YES Prep seniors from all schools stand at the podium one by one and announce what college or university they will attend by holding up a university shirt or jersey, similar to the NBA or NFL draft.Third, one of the defining points of the YES model is that all students are required to gain acceptance into a 4-year college or university in order to graduate.If a student does not, then a student must remain at school at least another semester until acceptance has been gained at some college or university.Last, the name YES stands for "Youth Engaged in Service," and YES prioritizes service and service-learning.All students must complete service hours each month in order to graduate.
Each year, there are YES high school students who wish to extend the local and regional service that is required throughout the year, to international service by completing the high school, summer internship requirement in another country.However, given the communities from where YES student hail, the fees for high school, international, summer service programs is prohibitive 4 .Because of this, the author wanted to create an internal, home-grown, YES program that would enable YES students to experience international service-learning during the summer without prohibitive costs.
During the 2005-2006 academic year, the author traveled to El Salvador for a week during the YES spring break in March 2006.He traveled there to understand what life was like for a friend serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV).However, his PCV friend was intrigued by the YES Prep Public School model, and invited the author to bring a group of students back to El Salvador during the summer of 2006 to do service work internationally.
The relationship with the PCV and the invitation provided an opportunity for the author to create a free program for YES students allowing them to experience life in another country, serve internationally, and fulfill the high school summer internship requirement at the same time.The difficulty was that the invitation came three quarters of the way into the school year.The fall semester was completed at the end of December, and spring break fell in the middle of the spring semester.There remained only a half-semester.If the PCV had invited the YES students in the summer of 2005 to visit in the summer of 2006, there would have been a year of preparation.Instead, when the PCV invitation came, there were only 9 weeks left in the school year.
The author moved forward despite the short time frame and began to design and implement a program to achieve the goal of providing a free, service-learning opportunity to YES students over the summer in another country.In order to accomplish this, among the many unanswered questions, the three largest questions had to be addressed first.
1. Would enough students be willing to go on such a trip? 2. Would parents allow their children to go on such a trip? 3. Would the school support such a trip?
The remainder of this paper will detail the methodology and process used to design this program as well as the results achieved.

Mᴇᴛʜᴏᴅᴏʟᴏɢʏ
The most important factor in determining which research methodology to use is the research question 5 .Initially, it may seem that due to the need to uncover qualitative findings such as the needs and desires of the YES students as well as the obstacles blocking those needs and desires, we would use Human-centered Design (HCD) [6][7][8] .However, in this specific case, the author is already and consistently, deeply immersed in the context and lives of the students, school, and parents, so their needs are much more clearly known by the author than an outsider who must use temporary contextual immersion as an ethnographic research tool [9][10][11][12] .This is not to say that qualitative research is useless.Rather it is not the area of deepest need from a design perspective.The main questions stated in the previous section, instead, focus on the value of such a program.They seek to find out if the program is valuable enough to a student that the student signs up.Is the program valuable enough to a parent that a parent would allow her or his child to go on the program?Is the program valuable enough to YES that YES will support it and allow teachers and students to prepare for overseas trips?These are questions about the value proposition.Qualitative research methods like interviews are bad at determining the value proposition of a proposed idea.People may tell you that they will use some product or service, but when the product or service is created, they actually do not use it.Instead, the best method of testing value propositions is with actual experiments 13,14 .Therefore in this work, we employ a design experimental methodology 5 which is part of a broader Design-based Implementation Research (DBIR) framework 15,16 .
Specifically we chose the Lean Startup methodology 13,14 .First, whereas HCD can be used to design anything, Lean Startup is more narrowly used to define a product or service.Sometimes it can be used to design a program as long as the program has some product or service offering.In other words, the program must offer some value that a potential customer can reject and decide not to commit time, money, or something else of value.Following that reasoning, it would not make sense to use Lean Startup to design an organization, for instance, because the employees or staff of the organization have no choice (other than to quit).In contrast, in the case of an international summer service program, students can decide not to sign up or apply; parents can decide not to allow their students to attend; and YES can decide not to allow teachers to take students on these trips.
Second, Lean Startup uniquely focuses on proposing and testing value proposition with potential clients or customers.This fits the questions we proposed.Additionally, Lean Startup does include some qualitative discovery to understand the problem and need, though its array of discovery methods is not as robust as those detailed in HCD 7,8 .However, since the author is immersed in the context of the students and familiar with their needs and desires as well as hopes and dreams and obstacles, this did not pose a problem.

Lᴇᴀʀɴɪɴɢ Tʜᴇᴏʀɪᴇs
Instructional design is an oft misunderstood area of work.Though it is possible to work within a narrow band of instructional design such as solely designing e-learning, full or holistic instructional designers are polymathic in their experience and background.In a holistic instructional design process, a designer does not know the format that the education will take; the format is an outcome of the design process.An instructional designer is presented with a design challenge in which she must not just uncover the content that must be learned due to the demands of a task but also the format, duration, frequency, mode, and type of delivery.This means if she determines the best format is a video, she will engage in video design; if the best format is a game, then game design; a piece of software, then user experience design.Instructional designers can design any type of experience to create or foster learning, even an educational service or program.
In this work and paper, we engage in program and service design.We are designing an educational program which should foster learning.The challenge for our specific program is that there is not one set of learning objectives for all students in this extracurricular service-learning program.Instead, each student has individual, personal goals.The objective of the program is to enable and create an international service experience which gives students the opportunity and time to meet those personalized learning goals as well as learning additional, unplanned things.We then developed learning theories about what type of program would enable such learning.
In DBIR, learning theories both guide and emerge from the research and design.Therefore, even though we anticipated that learning theories would emerge through future cycles of the Lean Startup process, we initially theorized about what would make an effective educational program to enable student learning.
Broadly, our work aligned with general, researched learning theories.The proposed service trips are examples of educational experiences that include student-centered learning, projectbased learning (PBL), experiential learning, socio-constructivism, and expeditionary learning 17- 20 .But still, within the context of our specific, proposed program, we had local learning theories that drove our work.
First, we theorized that students must know the language, at least conversationally or at an intermediate level.So much of a people group's culture is embodied or contained in the language.According to anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the way we think and view the world is determined or influenced by our language 21 .Likewise we know that the relationship works the other way as well, that our language can often be determined or affected by the way we conceptualize and view the world.Therefore, in order for students to learn as much of the culture as possible, it was important that they be able to communicate with locals in the town they would visit.Moreover, since almost all personalized learning goals for the students involved interacting with people, it was truly imperative that the students be able to communicate verbally with local people in the country they were to visit.
Second, learning would be maximized if students had already mastered the project skills needed for their primary project.Since the time abroad would be short (1-2 months), it was important that students could start working immediately upon arrival without losing 1-2 weeks for training.One week could represent 25% of the time of their trip for a 1-month trip.By doing project preparation, the work would start sooner, and students could possibly finish working sooner or complete more work, allowing for more time learning about the culture through exploration.
Third, in addition to project preparation, relational preparation is paramount to maximize learning.As stated earlier, most of the learning would come through people interactions.So it would be helpful to arrive in the country and already know a few people.Even more, it would be helpful if the learning through people started before the trip began.Because of this, we designed the program to include pen-pal letter writing between student participants and two community children in the country to be visited--one the same age as the participant and a second child younger than the participant.
Fourth, we theorized that the perfect size of each trip teams was 10-12 students in order to achieve good group dynamics.This theory was not based on group dynamic research but simply by the experience of the author and other teachers in the school.For groups larger than 10-12 students, division into smaller subgroups naturally occurs as cliques form often leaving out some students.Any less than 10 students, and the learning between students is minimized as students miss out on relationships they could have had.A group the size of 10-12 allows the team to still feel and be close with all the other students and still hold the potential to avoid cliques.
Finally, the power of reflection in learning, especially service-learning and expeditionary learning, has been researched 22 .The question before us was the frequency of reflection.Due to the vast amount of novel experiences we believed the students would experience each day, we theorized that daily reflections would maximize learning and retention.

Pʀᴏᴄᴇᴅᴜʀᴇs and Mᴇᴛʜᴏᴅs
A majority of people familiar with the Lean Startup methodology can quote the slogan describing the iterations within the methodology: Build-Measure-Learn (Figure I).However, in reality, there are steps that should be taken before starting the Build-Measure-Learn steps.We, therefore, used a more robust process with 6 steps (Figure II).This section will go through those 6 steps as we applied it to the design of an international, summer service program for high school students in the US.From our Value Proposition Canvas, our primary and target customer are YES high school students, especially 10th -11th grade students as 12th grade students may have pre-university or pre-college plans and 9th grade students may have plans to attend YES summer school.The major pain these students have is a lack of money to fulfill the summer internship requirement internationally.There are many programs offering international experiences, but they are too expensive for a majority of YES high school students.Interestingly, this pain fights against their desire to stay and be near family or the lack of experience outside their city.Yes, some students have never left the city, much less the state, or the country.
The solution we could create is YISS -the YES International Summer Service program, a home-grown program that allows students to participate in a free, international service-learning trip that counts for their internship requirement.In preparation for the trip, students would participate in language-learning, project training, and pen-pal writing meetings.During the trip students would work on a tangible, primary project most of the time, something they could touch or take a picture and show people what they created.They would also do numerous secondary project of any nature (tangible or intangible).All work would be done during a 5-day work week.Each weekend, students would sightsee around the country.Reflections would happen each night to capture and increase learning.
It is important to note, that though YES high school students were our primary and target customers, in order for the program to occur, parents and school leaders also had to find value in the program and give their permission.Their approval would allow students to travel and receive internship credit.For that reason, we created a Value Proposition Canvas for the parent segment (Figure V) as well as the school leadership segment (Figure VI).Creating each proposition highlights the tension between students wanting to travel abroad and parents wanting their children living close whether for college, trips, or when they are adults.Secondly, there also exists a tension between the assumption that the school will pay for the program and the lack of funds the school experiences in its work, requiring it to fundraise in addition to funds received from the state board of education.

Customer Discovery
Because the author is daily immersed in the context of the target students already, he had a good sense for their feelings about international internships and the costs.He held these conversations informally through mentoring, advising student groups, counseling, and teaching.However, he also formally polled 177 students and held interviews with 8 other students, 100% of whom said they would be interested in such a trip.Only 4 students had done an international program before at all, and 98% of students mentioned the costs as prohibitive.

Value Proposition & Enumerated Hypotheses
After the customer discovery through conversations, polls, and interviews, the right side of the Value Proposition Canvas (Figure IV) remained unchanged.This was expected because the author and designer had already been in constant communication with the target population.As a result, the left side also remained unchanged as it still represented our best guess of what would best solve the problem of not being able to participate in international internships.
In order to create hypotheses which we'll use to design experiments, we followed three steps.

Convert highest priority assumptions into hypotheses.
A defined value proposition, especially visualized through the Value Proposition Canvas, can be helpful to illuminate particular assumptions.So we examined that in order to create our list of assumptions (Table I).

Students
Students wanted to travel or do their high school summer internship abroad.

Parents
Parents would allow their students to travel internationally for 1-2 months.
School Leader YES would allow students to travel internationally with a school program.

School Leadership
YES would support the students financially so they didn't have to pay for the program.

Students
Students would maintain pen-pal relationships.

Students
Students could learn a language at an intermediate level during the year before traveling.
Program 10-12 students is the best size for learning teams for each trip.

Students
Students could adequately prepare for the project work during the year before traveling.

Students
Middle school students were not prepared or mature enough to participate.
Program Daily reflections will maximize learning.

Program
Students should have a physical, tangible primary project for the bulk of their work because it's difficult for them to feel a sense of accomplishment with a service like spending time with people in hospice care.

Program
Students should follow a work week with sightseeing on the weekends to maximum productivity and sense of accomplishment.
School leadership YES would grant completion credit for their internship requirement to students who participated in YISS.
In order to prioritize the assumptions, we used a two-by-two matrix to map all initial assumptions (Figure VII).The x-axis measures certainty (how sure we are that the assumption is true) from completely uncertain to completely certain, highlighting that any statement lives on a range of certainty rather than a binary variable--certain or not certain.The y-axis measures the criticality or risk of the assumption.How fundamental is the assumption is to the viability of the product or service idea?

FIGURE VII Assumption Grid for YES International Summer Service Program
Next we chose the highest-priority assumptions to test, first, since we don't have time to test all assumptions.In Lean Startup, we prioritize the highest risk and most uncertain assumptions 25 .We do this because these are the assumptions about which we are most unsure and simultaneously carry the highest risk for the program.In other words, we're not sure if they are true, and if they are not true, the program won't and can't work as it is envisioned.They are fundamental to the program idea itself.We need to find out as soon as possible if these assumptions are true or not, so that we don't waste time and other resources creating any part of it without knowing it will only fail.
From our assumption grid, we chose the five assumptions in the top-right corner (Figure VII) to test and translate to hypotheses.The goal is to make sure each hypothesis statement is specific, measurable, and testable.Using an if/then framework, we have translated each assumption into a testable hypothesis (Table II).

Assumptions Hypotheses
[Students will choose to sign up for the program.] Parents would allow their students to travel internationally for 1-2 months.
If we created a program application with a required permission slip and made it available to all 400 high school students, at least 20 would returned a signed permission slip.
YES would allow students to travel internationally with a school program.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow us to offer the program to kids with full support including receiving donation checks written for the program.
YES would grant completion credit for their internship requirement to students who participated in YISS.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow students to count the trip as one of their required two high school summer internships.
YES would support the students financially so they didn't have to pay for the program.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership including the cost for the program, YES would pay all student fees to enable students to participate.
Students could learn a language at an intermediate level during the year before traveling.
If we offered a program to YES high school students and accepted 10 students to participate as a team traveling to one country, over the course of the year, 100% of the 10 students would take language classes and achieve an intermediate level of proficiency in order to communicate over the summer.

Build: Minimum Viable Product
Even though we did not map the first bracketed assumption (Table II) in our Assumption Grid because we felt we knew our customers well enough, we still placed it in our hypothesis table in case we were wrong.The reason we build a minimum viable product and run an experiment is that sometimes potential customers say one thing in an interview, but act a different way when it is time to commit time, money, or some other precious resource.An experiment is a better way to test customer behavior and the true value of your proposition 13,25 .For our program offering, the application would serve to test both student willingness to go on the international trip, as well as parents' willingness to give permission.
To test each hypothesis in Lean Startup, we build a Minimum Viable Product or MVP."Minimum" means we use the least amount of effort and resources, building it as conveniently, efficiently, and quickly as we can."Viable" means that it has the essential features of the complete or idealized product, program, or service; or, at the very least, it conveys a sense of the experience one will have with the full version."Product" means that there must be some exchange of "currency" 14 .Whether money or time or an email, the potential customer must make some sort of commitment beyond just words.This is one reason why Lean Startup is specifically for products and services or a program that offers a product or a service; the customer must have an ability to reject the offer and not commit money or other resources.
There are three large categories of MVPs: explanation MVPs, artifact MVPs, and experience MVPs.Experience MVPs deliver the experience of the product or service as conveniently and cheaply as possible.Artifact MVPs are physical models or mock-ups or storyboards of the product or service idea.Explanation MVPs give a sense of the experience by showing what it might be.Examples include a sales pitch, video, landing page, or even a brochure or flyer.All the initial, low-fidelity MVPs we created for the YES International Summer Service (YISS) program are Explanation MVPs (Table III).

Hypotheses MVP
If we created a program application with a required permission slip and made it available to all 400 high school students, at least 20 would returned a signed permission slip.

School announcement 2. Flyer 3. Application
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow us to offer the program to kids with full support including receiving donation checks written for the program.

Conversation with leadership
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow students to count the trip as one of their required two high school Conversation with leadership summer internships.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership including the cost for the program, YES would pay all student fees to enable students to participate.

Conversation with leadership
If we offered a program to YES high school students and accepted 10 students to participate as a team traveling to one country, over the course of the year 100% of the 10 students would take language classes and achieve an intermediate level of proficiency in order to communicate over the summer.

HOLD: Later Stage MVP
It is important to note that we did not create an MVP for the last hypothesis about language proficiency because it had a lower priority and precedence compared to others.In other words, if the other hypotheses failed, it would not matter if this one succeeded.Secondly, the only way to test the language proficiency was to put students through a language program for a language they needed to know for a future trip.In other words, we would have to offer an actual trip in order to test it.So this was designated as a later-stage MVP for a later experiment.
Because the second, third, and fourth hypotheses all relate to YES leadership, we created one MVP -a conversation and did them simultaneously.Of course, if YES leadership required us to create a formal plan, proposal, and slide presentation, we would have done that.However, in Lean Startup, our goal is to spend the least amount of time to get an answer to a question.In this case, the minimum explanation was a conversation and the leadership accepted this.Our guess is partly because YES has a culture of teachers taking students to university tours in one region of the US each year.So out-of-state trips were not new.
The first hypothesis has three parts to it, and that does connote order.We started with an announcement, then later a flyer, and then finally an application.It is important to note, that we could not evaluate the success of the hypothesis until the application MVP had been sent out and we began receiving applications.

Measure
Our initial hypothesis about student interest and parent willingness was correct (Table IV).We received over 100 applications.We believe we would have received more; however, we included a pre-requisite that a student must have As and Bs in all their courses.We didn't want the program preparation to take time away from needed academic growth.
Additionally, the school agreed that the program was a good idea and gave their "full support" according to the principal.Full support included counting the program as a high school summer internship.However, we misinterpreted the fullness of the term "full support."The principal did not mean any financial support.In fact, without saying so, he meant zero financial support.To compound matters, by the time we had discovered the school would give no money, the announcement had already been made multiple times and students had seen the flyer already.The author and another teacher helping with the program had a decision to make: either cancel the program or modify the financial model.The decision was made to move forward with the program in an effort to honor and keep our word to the students who had an expectation that the program was happening.

TABLE IV Exᴘᴇʀɪᴍᴇɴᴛᴀʟ Rᴇꜱᴜʟᴛs
Hypotheses RESULTS If we created a program application with a required permission slip and made it available to all 400 high school students, at least 20 would returned a signed permission slip. 1.
[QUALITATIVE] People were excited in class whenever the announcement was made.I received too many questions and had to cut them off after 5 minutes.This happened for 5 days.2. I had 50 students approach me with questions after the flyer was created.3. I had 20 parents contact me with questions. 4. We received over 100 applications.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow us to offer the program to kids with full support including receiving donation checks written for the program.

YES said yes.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership, YES would make a decision within one week to allow students to count the trip as one of their required two high school summer internships.

YES said yes.
If we presented an overview of the program to YES leadership including the cost for the program, YES would pay all student fees to enable students to participate.

YES said no.
If we offered a program to YES high school students and accepted 10 students to participate HOLD: Later Stage MVP as a team traveling to one country, over the course of the year 100% of the 10 students would take language classes and achieve an intermediate level of proficiency in order to communicate over the summer.

Learn
In the "Learn" portion of the Lean Startup loop, we make a deliberate decision, based on the data, to persevere, pivot, or iterate with our product or service design 14 .A pivot is a wholesale change in the model, while an iteration is a minor change to the model 23 .Every critical hypothesis we defined proved successful except for receiving all student fees from the school.YES would not pay any student fees.So we iterated and asked for YES fundraising staff to direct some of their fundraising work to the trip for the students.We were told no.We iterated again and asked for funding from YES angel investors, outside community members who financially invested in the school and mentored students.YES refused to give us access to talk with the investors.At this point we pivoted to a student fundraising model.The trip was still free as long as the students were willing to put in "sweat equity" 26 and raise funds throughout the school year.
Finally it was time to create an actual MVP of the trip.We decided to go and visit the Peace Corps volunteer who invited us to El Salvador because Central America was a closer, cheaper, and more minimal trip than other regions; we estimated the trip cost to be $10,000 for the entire team of two teachers and 10 students.Canada may have been possible, but a trip in which students had to learn another language like French wasn't minimal.In order for it to be minimal, we decided a Spanish-speaking country was best given that our population was 90% Latin American, majority of the students spoke some Spanish, and Spanish was the most popular foreign language course taken by students.Instead of designing the trip and including language learning preparation meetings, we would just give application preference to students who already knew Spanish.
A Spanish-speaking country would also be easiest for parents to accept.Even though parents initially signed the permission slip, they could remove their students from the trip at any time.Many parents already had told us they did not want their children going to Africa.We were going to have to assuage fears in future parent information sessions.
Lastly our MVP trip and program covered just the last quarter of the school year, from spring break to the end of the school year and the beginning of summer.This meant that we had to find students who were available to fundraise most of the remaining weekends (since we did not have the full year).
After the first trip to El Salvador, the first year, we were able to grow, pivot, and iterate going to further places like Asia and Africa, using the entire year to prepare with students, working with the students to learn a foreign language that was not Spanish, and managing larger budgets (the India team in 2007 had a budget of $50,000).The next section will summarize the pivots and iterations for the program.praise to that person, and giving a wish or a hope for that person whose feet we are washing 6. Application a. MVP -The application consisted of demographic information, some short answer, a recommendation, and an essay.We asked about Spanish proficiency, exercise routine, and grades.We looked for people who were available every weekend or the vast majority of weekends before the trip.b.Pivot -We no longer asked about language proficiency since we believed students should have an opportunity to learn the language.We no longer needed students to be available each weekend since we moved to a model with fewer fundraisers.

Fundraising & Marketing
a. Original Idea -The students raised as much money as they could.If any student surpassed her goal, she could select a student to receive her surplus.Each teacher fundraised for the trip the teacher was leading, both as an individual and for the entire trip, which benefits all students on the trip equally.Most of the money for the trips would come, not from sweat equity of the students, but from private fundraising the teachers do before, during, and after school with business groups, Chambers of Commerce, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Kiwi Clubs, etc.The teachers advertised the program as an international development, social entrepreneurship, service learning trip.The teachers also solicited in-kind donations from groups like airlines, van transportation companies in the country we would visit, etc. i. Iteration -The author became head of the program and fundraised for his own trip as well as all trips, in general.b.Pivot -The main author advertised the program as local development more focused on the students, rather than the work they would do abroad.This was in response to business people who asked why wouldn't they simply give the money directly to the community abroad.This description as a local community youth development project focused on the YES students was a more accurate description and connected more with audiences.8. Sustainability a. Original Idea -The project work the students complete is community suggested and community-owned.The community will carry on the work after the students leave.Each family that benefits from the work is required to work alongside the students in setting it up or building the main project (whether a library or dualcomposting latrines).The community applies for a grant from the students to complete the work before the students arrive.This teaches the community grant proposal writing skills and they can use it to apply for other funds.b.Persevere -We never changed this model as it worked well.
FIGURE I Lean Startup 3-step Loop

24
FIGURE IIIValue Proposition Canvas24 FIGURE IV Value Proposition Canvas for High School Student Customer