The Mastery Mentors

Inspiration

Growing up competing in MathCounts, we realized that many of our peers who struggled didn’t lack the ability. Most of them just didn’t have access to free resources. Tutoring is extremely expensive for math; some tutoring services, like AlphaStar, charge up to $3,350 for 15 AMC 8 classes, which is almost $224 per class! Most free options didn’t teach well enough to cover most competitive math topics, so we decided to fix that. The Mastery Mentors started as a simple question: What if all students in my community had equal access to high-quality math tutoring?

What it does

The Mastery Mentors is a free, virtual, K-8 math tutoring initiative with four levels of classes, each with a different curriculum, ranging from lower elementary foundation classes to AMC 8 and MathCounts preparation. Students are placed in classes based on their current math level and their math competition experience. We try our best to focus on building mathematical intuition in all of our students. In just our first week, over 52 K-8 students from across NC attended and enjoyed our classes.

How we built it

We built everything ourselves with the guidance of teachers who also have a deep passion for competitive math. We built our curriculum with the help of a high school math teacher, and we expanded and partnered with the middle school with help from the chapter’s advisor. We recruited volunteers with an application process, carefully reviewing all our applicants (26 total!) to form our team of 11 volunteers. We built our website using GitHub and Vercel, tracked volunteer hours using Google Sheets, and started filing for NC State nonprofit status. Outreach happened through schools, community groups, and social media.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were managing all 11 volunteers, as we needed to ensure that all lesson plans were consistently high quality, and we also needed to train the tutors. We also had to figure out how to communicate with parents well, as most parents are not checking their emails we sent, so we created a big WhatsApp group with 150 interested and signed-up parents. Another difficult challenge we ran into included sorting our students into their respective classes. Originally, we made a placement test via Google Forms, but it ended up failing. We also attempted to ask parents about their child's understanding of math, but that also did not work. We also needed to onboard new students without creating a long process, so we made a Google Form for interested parents and students and added them to the respective sub-group chats for tutors to communicate with parents about classes, homework, and any additional questions. Balancing this initiative as student-athletes is a constant challenge, but we know that the impact we are making is worth the time spent. We also wanted to note that the reason some parts of the video are sped up is because of the time limit of 5 minutes!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our accomplishments so far, especially on the marketing and execution side of conducting a business. Right now, we have over 150 interested parents, over 50 current students, and over 11 trained volunteers. We are unimaginably astonished by how much traction we are gaining, as we only started this initiative a month ago. We have also grown tremendously on social media, with around ~23k Instagram views and 150+ Instagram followers (Instagram link). These numbers mean a lot to us, as they have been solely driven by our amazing team, which we are so proud to have.

What we learned

We have learned that running a non-profit is mainly about management and logistics. Tutoring and making lessons have been the easy part, while internal communication has been more challenging. We have also learned that demand for our service is much higher than we expected. This is especially common throughout families who can’t afford a private tutor, which has caused us to recruit more volunteers to adapt to this demand.

What's next for The Mastery Mentors

Our plan for The Mastery Mentor’s future is to start in-person summer workshops, build out student-led chapters across the state, and file a 501c3 (which we are in the process of doing). Long-term, we want to expand nationwide and potentially partner directly with national education boards. Our main objective is to make sure that every student has an equal opportunity to compete in math competitions, and we will not stop until this is achieved. We want to make sure that competition math is not just deemed a "luxury," but as a fundamental that every student should have the opportunity to partake in.