Raise is a social network dedicated to equality of chances. On Raise, tutors and professionals exchange information on educational and career opportunities. Tutors can provide better information to high school students while professionals get the opportunity to civically engage.
In France, higher education choices are still highly determined by one’s social background. Thus, according to a 2014 report of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP), high school students of modest origins are 20% more likely to prefer not to enter higher education and 37% less likely to prefer 3-year or more programs than other students . Similarly, France still has one of the most unequal educational system among the OECD countries. A number of other studies have pointed out discrepancies or asymmetries of information as one of the most important causes of these inequalities of choices.
The State, associations and corporations have recently mobilized to tackle this issue developing tutoring networks to better accompany students in their educational and career choices. A whole ecosystem of initiatives now exists and we estimate that they are currently approximately 15,000 active tutors in France.
However, even with this network being constituted, inequalities of choices persist. To explain this paradox, our assumption is that tutors themselves lack adequate information to successfully advise high school students and therefore fulfill their mission.
We therefore targeted 11 associations and interviewed them to understand their difficulties and needs. Here is an excerpt of the interviews we conducted.
As Ambition Campus and Attrape ton Avenir, other associations expressed the same difficulties. 10 associations out of 11 state that they are interested in a platform helping them to connect with other tutors and gather information. Here are some of the answers regarding the tools that could help them better fulfill their missions:
Over the 2010-2016, civic engagement has progressed in France, to reach 25% of the population in 2016. People are more and more on the lookout for engagement opportunities for causes they find important. To help people getting to know engagement opportunities, platforms such as Charity and jemengage.paris.fr have been developed. They help people find missions they are interested in and that match their competences. Moreover, they permit people to engage in more flexible ways : on a temporary basis, working from their home …
The rise of civic engagement has partly been permitted by companies’ endeavors to incentivise their employees to engage. Some corporations have in effect recently furthered their societal engagement and included their employees in this effort. Skills sponsorship arrangements between corporations and associations have also greatly developed in the past few years in companies such as Orange, Vinci or Carrefour … They now even hire interns working one day a week for an association thanks to the startup Vendredi.
Equality of chances has traditionally been a cause companies have promoted through their foundations’ financial sponsorship. In the field of equality of chances, companies such as SNCF, Total and Manpower gathered in an alliance (Alliance pour l’Education) to provide homework support to middle school students in priority education areas, often mobilizing some of its employees. In France, they have recently gone further and started to include it in their HR policies having recourse to agencies such as Mozaik RH to promote diversity in their staff and hire candidates that would not make it to the last round in traditional hiring processes.
Raise aims therefore at satisfying two identified needs:
A digital platforms economy is emerging. In every field of the economy, platforms putting into relation actors having reciprocal roles emerge. Some matches sellers (of a product or a service) and buyers while others permit nonmonetary exchanges. Thus, while Blablacar matches drivers and people who want to be drived, Wikipedia matches people who use knowledge and people who produce knowledge. This platform are more and more becoming multi-sided meaning that they try to satisfy the needs of several types of customers and users. Raise has therefore been built following this format. Yet, its aim is not to materialize a monetary relation but is rather to emulate a commons-based peer production in the same way as Wikipedia has done for the past 17 years. In this sense, it goes back to internet as it was conceived and conceptualized by its pioneers: a tool to empower people, that encourage self-organization and commons notably thanks to collaboration. “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (The Wisdom of Growth, James Surowiecki).