We’re taking a timeout to thank BizzyB’s primary funder, The Larry & Helen Hoag Foundation of Irvine California for providing the resources to make BizzyB a reality. We also must thank Doug Freeman of First Foundation Bank for his vision in hooking us up.
About The Hoag Foundation
Larry and Helen Hoag were married for nearly 50 years. During their marriage, Larry achieved both financial success in real estate and great respect in his community for his service and generosity. In addition to his professional life, Larry was very engaged in civic affairs, serving as President of the Downey Chamber of Commerce and the Downey Hospital Authority. He also served as a Director of the Downey Rotary Club. Helen spent much of her professional life working alongside Larry, and devoted her personal time to helping disadvantaged and seriously ill children The Foundation was formed by Helen to honor Larry and to continue to protect and empower our children.
Software Produced by a Non-Profit
Software development is not easy to fund, particularly in the nonprofit space. Few nonprofits have technical capacity. And any software product is highly speculative. But Doug argued that since our sister for-profit has donated for years the use of a mature title we own (BizGym.com, an entrepreneur’s growth platform), that doing a student version was not a huge stretch.
The Rabbit Hole of Education
What did prove a huge stretch was going down the rabbit hole of learning about education. That ended up with deep dives into STEM, STEAM, Project-based Learning, Design-Thinking, Hackathons, Soft Skills, Social Emotional Learning, Play Space Learning, equity and access issues, common core alignments etc. We also joined several state and national committees in STEM, SEL, Workforce Development and technology to get a lay of the learning landscape. We also combined out print
Discoveries for Education
Fortunately, education has been trending over recent years toward our deep knowledge in creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship so we have something to bring to the PBL / Academies /Hackathon table. We’ve also produced over the years, common core aligned print curriculum for our innovation programs so we had at least some knowledge of education process. What’s come of these melding of these new and traditional perspectives is a new paradigm in education supported by the latest in digital technology.
Checkout BizzyB or ping us for a demo. We’re excited to gain your thoughts and continue to hone BizzyB into a truly useful application for all of education.