‘Permission to believe’: A Q&A with Iris Hammel of biz education org RISE
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Iris Hammel believes students need to unlearn how they think about school and learning.
Her line of thinking is progressive, she said, and challenges the traditional education system. Instead, through a model focused on entrepreneurship students should be building skills through real-world experiences, exploring potential careers and visualizing how their education experiences translate into professional success.
Hammel is seeking to change how the education system thinks about workforce development through her Mishawaka-based not-for-profit, RISE, which stands for Regional Innovation and Startup Education. Founded in 2016, the organization has multiple training programs and classes for high school and college students, professionals and educators—all with the goal of inspiring business thinkers and equipping them with the tools needed to succeed.
With an extensive entrepreneurial education background with over 10 years of experience, Hammel serves on the Indiana State Board of Education. She’s also been the senior vice president of South Bend’s Garatoni-Smith Family Foundation.
She co-founded education software company Connected Classrooms and training tool TeachMe3D.org. She also previously led an innovative charter school in Wisconsin focused on entrepreneurism.
She spoke with Inside INdiana Business about RISE, the impact of business-focused training and statewide workforce development initiatives. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell me about Raising the Region and its mission.
RISE stands for Regional Innovation and Startup Education. I co-founded RISE about nine years ago with a gentleman, Larry Garatoni, and really at the time, our mission was to bring student-centered learning into the community where students are getting connected with community leaders and then starting companies, like real viable businesses. That’s how it got started nine years ago, and fast forward to today, now, we’re leading a statewide movement, ensuring there’s equitable access to entrepreneurship education, that it’s applied and real and not simulation-based, that students are really getting a true feeling of an actual experience of starting and running companies. It’s really exciting times. There’s just so much happening with it, but it all started here, nine years ago.
Why are organizations like RISE needed in your community?
I think that the traditional school systems or any school system—or traditional, non-traditional charter, private schools; we work with all of those schools—they have an important job to do that is mired down in a lot of regulation and bureaucracy, frankly, and they’re not able to innovate and move quickly in order to provide students with dynamic, impactful, community-centered learning. Even transportation is a barrier for students to be able to get out into the community and to meet with leaders and have that consistency. I think our region actually does this better than a lot of regions across the state. You’ve got community groups, like the Boys and Girls Club and RISE, partnering with all the schools, so we’re neutral entities. We’re here to serve all the school districts, all the higher ed institutions that we work with in the region.
Really for us, we think of our work as being like the front end of the talent pipeline when it comes to entrepreneurship and startups. And so, again, [it’s] really important to give them authentic experiences where they can start companies, but it’s also equally important to connect them with innovation projects or intrapreneurial projects where they can partner with a company that has a problem they need to be solved and they can then meet leaders of places they may want to work someday.
We have found it to be a tremendous talent retention opportunity as well for our community. A lot of students that are in our program end up building their first professional network, and when they think about where do I want to live, where do I want to do my work, they tap into that network first, which then allows them a really good chance at a really great job or opportunity. And then, they give back because that’s a big part of what we do as well: teaching them how to be servant leaders, where the connectivity of our program, it creates kind of that culture of rising tide lifts all ships, so we do better when we work together.
There has been a lot of legislation in the Statehouse and local pushes for more career development opportunities for students. How are you feeling about this recent movement?
I’m actually on the State Board of Education, and I’m a huge proponent of career and technical education. I think that our job as educators is to authentically expose students to the industries that are available to them. Entrepreneurship and startups have been proven: if you want to generate more jobs in a community, you need to start more businesses. In the first five years, startups generate more jobs than bringing in an Amazon or a big company, right? By helping students authentically connect with entrepreneurship and do the real work of building real companies, we’re helping them decide, ‘Is that for me or is it not for me?’ That’s our job in the K-12 space is to give students as many authentic, viable experiences as we can that are real hands-on, meaningful, walking right beside the leaders in the community that are doing it, so that they can choose them for themselves. We have lots of our alumni, and I’ll see on social media, they’re popping up their second and third businesses already, and it’s like, they’re not maybe doing the one they started with us when they were in high school, but they’re starting other companies. We’ve given them a process and a mindset that now they’re able to be scrappy and take those opportunities that they’re seeing at IU or wherever they’re at in college. That’s super important to me.
I do worry sometimes, in entrepreneurship, a lot of times economic development dollars go towards bright shiny objects, pitch competitions, things that are really actually time wasters in entrepreneurship. As a startup and a founder, that’s not where you go to get funding. You don’t. That’s a time waster. You’re working on going to market, building a product. We take it very seriously at RISE to give authentic learning. We’ve trained teachers that serve over 90 high schools across the state of Indiana, and we talk openly about that. It’s not popular to poopoo the pitch competition thing that everybody loves. But it’s like, we’re brainwashing kids that don’t do well in that space to say, ‘That’s not for me,’ when they’re actually the innovators and the engineers that can really build viable companies and solutions to major problems that we’re trying to solve. I just think it’s so important to take that responsibility seriously, so that students have that authentic opportunity and then you have to provide the funding and the access to go with it.
I think that’s a lot of the work that the state has done is we are working so hard at creating flexibility and opportunity and reimagining schools. These are major conversations happening right now at the state level. I honestly can’t believe we’re having such big discussions such as competency-based learning. I started a school in Wisconsin in 2009, and it was very progressive; competency-based entrepreneurship was the bedrock of everything we did, and it was very cutting-edge. I felt like I was on an island because, when you’re doing things progressively, you’re alone a lot. But here, there’s so much momentum, and there’s so many good things happening. In our region alone, we have two of the three schools in the state doing competency-based learning right in South Bend, and we’re another organization, so count us I guess is number four. We’re we’re trying to create models that other people can see, so that they have permission to believe it’s possible.
What has been the impact of programs like Startup Moxie St. Joseph County?
That’s our original program that we started everything with. I mean the impact is clear: the students that have graduated our very first year of Startup Moxie, they are now leaders in this community, and they’re joining boards, and they’re involved in leading good organizations. I just ran into a dad actually of one of our students from that first class, and he’s like, “Oh, he’s the branch manager at the credit union.” I ran into another alumni from last year, and she’s going to come and intern with us on some of the AI stuff we’re working on. So they really become a part of the fabric of our family and our network.
When you can connect young aspiring leaders or just young people that want to create a better future for themselves with good mentors and leaders in the community, that is not lost on them. They then become the next generation of leaders and connectors. Right in front of me is actually one of our second-year students. He owns a business in a building in downtown South Bend, and so, we always tour his business with our kids so that he can share his story from Moxie and how he started his company, and what he learned, what he did and he didn’t do, what he wished he would have done. He’s got a living business that they can be a part of. I think it’s pretty cool when young people can see other young people that are running viable businesses in our community, and they came from the same neighborhoods as them, and they grew up in the same places as them. I think that just building on that connective tissue is what leads to the success of year over year for all of our students.
Oftentimes, students don’t realize certain careers exist or what an occupation actually entails. Can you speak to that sentiment and how RISE programs work in that manner?
Think back to your traditional education, where we go to math class, we go to science class, we go to these classes in very siloed spaces, right? And we know about common jobs that we bump into as young people, but we don’t know what goes on behind the advanced manufacturing robotics center company on the west side of town. We don’t know what’s happening in Elkhart with some of the cool developments over there. Our program really gets students behind the scenes to see it to hear from the leaders, but also, those leaders are so generous in sharing the reality, the authentic life stories, the challenges, the failures. So often schools are not helping students learn from failure.
We all try to in traditional school, at least, you’re going for the A right? That’s the job; there’s one right answer. In programs like ours, we actually try for the first one or two months to train them not to play school. It’s helping them build those muscles of, ‘We’re not actually going to give you a rubric to tell you what will get you an A.’ You’re building a company, and there’s an infinite number of ways that companies can be built, but it’s largely based on who are you? What are your passions? What are your strengths? What makes you get up in the morning? What are you excited to do? And what do you want for your lifestyle? We’re not helping students learn about those things in school typically. Those are the things that I think every kid should start with and then design a life and a career on top of that — not the other way around.
I think our program gives students space to do that work, that very important inner mindset, inner work, that is necessary to be able to make confident decisions on what I think I’m really interested in that I want to go check it out. We also help build the confidence where they know how to network, they know how to ask great questions. We share with our students all the time: you have such an advantage as a young person, if you’re motivated and you’re professional, I do not think there’s one adult in this community that would not open the doors for you to learn. We really work with our students on helping them build those foundational skills so that even if they run into a career where they’re like, ‘Oh this is not for me,’ they know how to pivot and navigate out and not let it devastate them. Or, if they pick a major that’s not right—ideally, they’re not doing that, because we’ve done our job and help them really explore enough.
I would say, yes, our program helps students start businesses, but the things we don’t talk about that I think are so powerful is the networking that the students receive, and then just the behind-the-scenes look at all the different business and industry in our region from the owners, operators, the leaders, so that they really, truly have an understanding of, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that manufacturing could be so cool, and it’s not a dirty old factory. It’s actually robotics and you know, all these things.’ Giving them that that front seat look is really part of the magic as well.
What are teachers getting out of the training program and bringing back to their students?
Honestly, I think permission to believe is part of it. Educators get into education because they want to serve students, they have a heart for it. The education industry has such a culture of bureaucracy and rule-following, and entrepreneurship is a space that is new enough that it hasn’t been locked into that fully yet. It’s now becoming popular, and people are excited about it. Our higher ed institutions are working on figuring out what does that mean? what does that look like?
We’re working with high school teachers to help them be able to change how they teach. We actually call it facilitation. It’s student-centered; that is wildly different than standing at the front of the room and being the expert, right? So if you’re engaging and empowering students, you have to facilitate differently. You don’t follow heavy curriculum because you’re trying to actually get to know your students; and the art of knowing your students and building that trusting culture in your classroom is what guides the progress just as much as the experiences you create or the people that you bring in to speak to them.
For our more progressive partners, it’s a breath of fresh air because it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this playbook. I can run with it.’ For our more traditional teachers, it’s painful because they’re coming from traditional schools. They feel like, ‘Oh, we didn’t get to leave with a curriculum, and it tells us what to do every single day of the week.’ We oftentimes get lumped in with other organizations that are just doing the work of running a pitch competition or running a camp; we’re actually trying to create massive systemic change in the education industry by helping teach the strategies and tactics and building the tools that help teachers run student-centered classrooms that are tied directly to community and that can be beneficial in any content area, not just entrepreneurship. So any of the CTE, anything where students could get real hands-on meaningful work, do real projects, you have to embrace students as like, they are so exceptionally good if you trust them, and you create space for them to be themselves. I don’t think our traditional schools always allow for that, and so we do struggle with some of our teachers because they really want us to spoon-feed them what to do on day one, day two, and we push back and we say, ‘Where are your students at? Tell us about your students.’
When we do provide that one-on-one mentoring and guiding—we’re open, anytime —we’ll get teachers texting or calling, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this. What do you guys think?’ We’re really kind of like an R&D lab or a think tank for teachers to access at any time to brainstorm with, to help if they have a big goal, they want to build something new. We’re actually bringing teachers up from around the state for some AI training and how to do individualized learning using AI. We’re building AI teacher assistants that can help students get access to really good facilitation, even if their teacher isn’t good at that, so that they really are thinking critically for themselves through the different milestone and aspects of our model and process.
What has the impact been of your other program: the Applied Entrepreneurship Program?
Our goal is to get people into revenue as quickly as possible. I think even more so for the adult population where they’ve got families, they’ve got jobs, they’ve got a lot going on. So we don’t want to waste anybody’s time. Again, this is a luxury of our model is we work outside the confines of schools where they say seat time matters for mastery. We meet people where they’re at, so if you already know your go-to-market strategy and that’s actually what your career is in, and you know how to do that, but you need help over here; we’re going to actually help get you what you need. We do not keep all of our students at the same time at the same pace. That’s a big part of what makes our model viable and different is: we know where we’re headed, we have a process, we know the milestones.
We want to shore them up as quickly as we can; and understanding their mindset around money, understanding their technical skills, maybe they’re not that tech savvy — okay, then let’s spend more time on that.” When you get into this idea-to-revenue program, which we’re right now rebuilding the applied entrepreneurship program, adopting some of these really powerful growth tactics from Silicon Valley, we’re building those into our programs so that our students in applied entrepreneurship have access to those.
I hate to say students because we have community members. We have all those professionals. Last year, we had a cohort: I think our youngest student was 18, and our oldest was 64. What was so cool about that dynamic is the 64-year-old could really help the young students understand network and connectivity and could make introductions. The young students were helping the 64-year-old on technology and some other things. Honoring and respecting where everybody’s at and then building a community atmosphere is another piece of the magic of that applied entrepreneurship program.
What does the future look like for RISE?
We are unleashing right now RISE 2.0. We’re building out some really powerful AI chatbots that can help people along the process of entrepreneurship. We feel those tools will allow our style of education to scale much quicker and easier, so that the facilitators can really just focus on getting to know their students and connecting in their community. We’re building out a speaker series where we can record the best of the best from our community and Notre Dame, but then sharing those so that students in rural Indiana that don’t have access to Notre Dame can still have those talks and have content and have really in-depth discussions. We’re also popping up a lot more experiences training-wise during the school year. We’re doing a lot of the AI training — any teacher would get value out of that. It’s not just for entrepreneurship. We’re trying to share the tools that we’re building.
We’re breaking into the college space quite a bit more, as well as across the state meeting with several higher ed institutions around Indiana that are very interested in our model.
I would love it if I could raise enough money to be open source, so everything we have is just open to all. That’s a goal that we have. Continuing down that path as well, we’re a nonprofit that I think operates much more like a for-profit in terms of in terms of we do not want to take handouts. We want to earn our keep, but we want to make our work available to as many people as possible. So, how do we figure out how we can do that and still maintain kind of our lean operations?
The next step is helping. We have so many wonderful entrepreneurial support organizations in our state, but they too don’t have access to the technology the way that we have and so how could we help them use our tools so that they could help their community? We need more entrepreneurs. This state needs more entrepreneurs, and we think our tools could really help with that.