WHAT WE DO

Translating the Opportunity

Currently 4 Million jobs in STEM and the Arts are unfilled. That’s a huge opportunity for our people to step into! We utilize music, video, performance, and motivational speaking to make STEAM careers relatable and within reach. Through our App, engaging video content, school assembly shows, and workshops, we reach young people where they’re at.

Building a Bridge to Careers

If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, so we make it our mission to provide information, exposure, and inspiration. We produce and curate content that features stories of BIPOC folks in STEAM careers, and informative programming that decreases the space between underserved youth and in-demand careers. We help them see themselves in these careers.

our mission

To inform, inspire, and activate underserved youth to pursue in-demand career paths.

our vision

Our vision is that the opportunity gap will be closed! That over a million young people are on pathways to success; meaning they are able to support themselves and their family, live a fulfilling and empowering life and help mentor and raise up the next generation of changemakers. 

OUR IMPACT

Through in-school programming, production and distribution of impactful, relevant content and the building of cross-sector partnerships, STEAM the Streets has become a force in the ecosystem to create a more inclusive STEAM career pipeline.

The Opportunity Gap Challenge

An estimated 9.5 Million STEM/STEAM jobs will exist in the United States in 2018.

Currently, less than 20% of college attendees are enrolled in STEM majors.

More than 1.5 Million of those STEM jobs will remain unfilled due to lack of qualified applicants at this rate.

Many suburban districts are addressing this crisis by providing programs, but inner cities are still far behind the curve. Only 25% of U.S. middle/high schools have high quality computer science programs.

Only 5% of employees at top tech companies are Black or Hispanic. If this continues, there will be a vast underrepresentation of talent of color in our nation’s brightest occupations.

Our Impact

  • Since 2016, STEAM the Streets has directly served over 2,500 youth, in addition to more than 3 million impressions via online media campaigns.
  • A music video we produced about Black Inventors, “Black Made That,” involving over 300 students from Richmond, CA & New Bedford, MA, has garnered 1.5 million cumulative views and 33 thousand shares. Educators across the country are using it to engage students around Black History and STEAM.
  • Since 2017, we have released nine episodes of “STEAM Powered,” a video series profiling STEAM professionals of color. We utilize the videos for school assemblies, online distribution, and as resources to help close the opportunity gaps. You can find these videos in the Discover tab in the STEAM the Streets App.
  • Through a long-term partnership from 2016-2020 with Carney Academy in New Bedford, MA, our programming helped double the number of 5th grade students who scored proficient on the Massachusetts Science assessment from 30% to 60%.
  • In 2018, Keith Middle School reached only 7% of their target on the Massachusetts state assessment, and that number jumped to 66% in 2020 after partnering with STEAM the Streets.
“I am the Science teacher for grade 5 here at Dighton Middle School. I wanted to express my appreciation for your presentation this morning. It is so vital for students to hear from someone other than me that STEAM is so important. Often times we cannot see the importance of education and are just getting through the day. I was impressed with your show and I said to kids I wished you could see them working hard each day in Science for me.”
Andrea CabralTeacher, Grade 5 Science
“It’s about equity, it’s about access. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know about these opportunities if you don’t have role models. STEAM the Streets should be doing this at every school.”
Justine MedinaPrincipal, Carlos Pacheco Middle Schoo
The STEAM initiative at Keith Middle School was about changing mindsets and exposing students to opportunities. No matter where you come from greatness is at your finger tips and it may not always be down the path you think. Through our partnership students heard this message from the launch assembly and local guest speakers and went on to experience it through partnerships between teachers and field experts during after-school programming.
Josh AlmeidaFormer Principal, Keith Middle School

OUR STORY

Founded in 2016, STEAM the Streets originally began as National Youth Awareness Campaign to Bridge the Diversity Gap in Technology initiated by Ben Gilbarg, Founder & Creative Catalyst, and Angel Diaz (aka DJ Anghelli), Youth Engagement Specialist of Big Picture Anthems. The mission of Big Picture Anthems was to to make a national impact on underrepresented youth through audio/visual campaigns and communication movements, so equipped with a Board of Advisors that’s exactly what it did. Fortunately, STEAM the Streets grew from a campaign into its own initiative, and into a series of viable programs ranging from STEAM career awareness assemblies, to guest speakers to after school workshops and cumulative design challenges. Now we’re moving into organizational era of STEAM the Streets where we expand and solidify the process in schools, but begin to carry it beyond the classrooms, hallways and auditoriums into the broader community to further spread the awareness and opportunities to increase diversity and more equitable outcomes to those who often get underestimated.

Meet the Team

Meet the advisory board