About

AMBASSADORS

Complete Mission Statement

Underground Academy empowers students to explore their passions by making interactive classes available to high school students regardless of their socio-economic background or abilities. Underground Academy was born after I interned with Global Nomads in early 2021. Global Nomads is an education non-profit that reaches thousands of teenagers across the world each year and offers a space for them to share their stories and opinions on major global issues. In working with Global Nomads, I learned about the importance of universal design and how to make education accessible to people regardless of their resources. Specifically, I learned how to design classes that catered to people with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, developmental disabilities like autism, and physical disabilities such as vision impairment. At the end of my internship, I got the opportunity to speak at Skoll World Forum and propose my idea for Underground Academy. With the feedback and support of the men and women I met there, I launched the Academy. 

Underground Academy strives to create opportunities for Miami students to uncover their interests, in an environment that is both led by youth and catered to the youth. While high schoolers have access to a wide variety of online learning, most of it is targeted toward school subjects, requires a fee, and most of it is not interactive. These main obstacles prevent students from exploring their interests or exposing themselves to new topics. Our goal at Underground Academy is to ensure that all high schoolers can discover their passions in safe, educational spaces that are interactive. Our classes cover subjects ranging from artificial intelligence, ethics, existential risk, leadership and resilience, cybersecurity, space travel, Web 3.0, equality in the workforce, and more. Our classes also promote interactions between the audience and the speakers through real-time Q&A, creating a far more personal and engaging learning environment. Our classes are Zoom-based discussions with interactive chat and live question capabilities. We decided to use this method after experimenting with many approaches. We spent 6 months experimenting with various metaverse-based platforms and learned that current metaverse technologies made access more difficult. The platforms were unreliable and hard to download, it was difficult to establish accounts, there were limits on the number of participants, and bandwidth requirements created lags and delays. 

So far, Underground Academy has had the pleasure of conversing with interesting people from many walks of life, including Daniel Diermeier, President of Vanderbilt University; Shane Battier, 2-Time NBA Champion with the Miami Heat, Founder of the Battier Take Charge Foundation; Lilia Infante, former DOJ Special Agent for Cybercrime and Founder of Cryptocurrency company Cat Labs; Loretta Hall, co-author of NASA astronaut Wally Funk’s memoir; Janette Nunez, Lieutenant Governor of Florida; and Vicki Lopez, Florida State House of Representatives District 113. Our classes have reached over 500 students from the Miami and New York area, and the number is rapidly growing. We plan to reach over 5000 students by the end of the 2022-2023 school year. Our team and listeners are comprised of high school students from public, charter, and private schools in Miami Dade County and New York City ((e.g., Booker T Washington High School, Coral Gables High School, Miami Central, MAST Academy, Brearley School, Ransom Everglades, Palmetto Senior High).

Overall, Underground Academy aims to increase educational opportunities in the lives of Miami youth, so they can learn about the world and themselves, and begin to contribute to, and engage in, important topics in the process.