We were lucky to catch up with Lloyd Hopkins recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Lloyd , thanks for joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?
Corporate America needs to understand that supporting teachers is essential to the future of their businesses and industries. The future of our workforce. Our future CEOs and leaders are in today’s classrooms. It is a corporate responsibility to ensure that the teachers being charged with cultivating their future talent have the resources and support they need to adequately fulfill their jobs of shaping our future!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I am an artist, author, philanthropist and social entrepreneur. I have worked in and around education for 18 years in different capacities. I have worked with youth offenders, dropout prevention and after-school recreation. But, the most meaningful time in my journey was the roughly 6 years I spent as a teaching assistant in the Alhambra Elementary School District.
That time was so impactful because it exposed me to the plight of teachers first hand. How they are often under paid, under valued and under resourced. I realized that the health of our teaching profession is a community issue. It is all of our responsibility to support teachers. We entrust teachers with our most precious possession, our children and we neglect the fact that, for 8 – 9 months out of the year, teachers are spending more time with our kids than we are. It’s important that are children are greeted by a happy, healthy and whole teacher because that teacher will also be able to make sure our children are happy, healthy and whole. It was this realization that led to the creation of Million Dollar Teacher Project (MDTP).
MDTP is a nonprofit focused on teacher retention and recruitment in Title I schools that serve marganilized communities. We partner with Title I Schools, to create community-centered programming aimed at helping them improve how their teachers are recognized, drive more support directly into their classrooms and create innovative ways to impact how their teachers are compensated. To achieve this we created programs like Take a Teacher to Lunch to involve the community in celebrating teachers. Classroom Support Teams to bring support directly into classrooms and T.A.P (Teacher Appreciation Package) to engage businesses in offering meaningful discounts to teachers.
I am most proud of the fact that we are growing this conversation of the need to support teachers and involving more and more people in the discussion everyday. Slowly, but surely, change is happening. The main thing we want people to do is think about how they can do just ONE meaningful thing for teachers a year. If we do that, we truly change the experience of what it means to be a teacher.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
I launched my organization with zero dollars in the bank and just a dream of improving education. I had no idea of how I would fund that dream or make it sustainable. Since I had no funding I had to figure out how I could go from “just a crazy guy telling people why would support teachers” to someone actually doing something about it. I needed to figure out how to get active and actually start showing people what it looks like to increase support for teachers. I needed to figure out a cost-effective way to start doing things in a way that I could control and didn’t need many resources or partners to execute.
The very first thing I did was attempt to launch a social media campaign called #Thankateacher. It was my attempt to try to create a viral moment like the Ice Bucket Challenge. I liked the idea because it didn’t cost any money to do, I figured I could bug at least 10 of my friends to thank you videos to their teachers and upload them to their social media accounts and I figured it was an easy enough ask, because we all should have a teacher story. Well…..I learned that it is much harder to create a viral campaign than you think, as #thankateacher still hasn’t taken off. But, creating that campaign helped me start engaging more people in the conversation and helped me begin to create a business model that has led to all the other programming we now do and it opened up the door for people to start donating to us to support that programming which has helped our organization grown significantly.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I think commitment to the mission and offering quality service helped me build my reputation in the market. Even before launching my organization, I began building my reputation when I was a teaching assistant on school campuses. My work ethic and passion for impacting kids helped me build amazing relationships that I still utilize today. As many of those teachers I worked with eventually became principal and administrators who remembered how hard I worked as an assistant and were willing to partner with my organization even before we were able to start proving proof of concept. Relationships are everything and never take them for granted.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.milliondollarteacherproject.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mdtproject/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mdtproject/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lloyd-hopkins-28b171a0
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mdtproject
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTo9uqD1M8l5efJr4AQqNg