I believe that every child deserves a good education! So I funding and actively working with and mentoring various education initiatives to improve our society. We need to change how we teach various subjects, so students to understand the bigger picture of theory and real-life experiences. Schools should empower young people to become ethical citizens to cope in modern society by understanding our challenges from climate crises and mental health to financial literacy, fake news and healthy eating habits. Growing up with reasonable values saves a ton for later cost of societies.

My school years

I studied in 2 different primary schools, followed by Kuressaare Gymnasium and Estonian Business School (EBS). As some of the lessons felt boring, because the teacher was not able to explain the subject related to real life, I often found additional activities besides official curriculum.

I was an active member of student council, organized disco parties and even published my private newspaper to compete school's official newspaper. As Internet technologies were emerging in mid 90's then I learned about coding and created 1st website for my school.

In high-school Martin had lectures of organizational behavior by our school director, which was truly inspirational. I learned about good values like trust, independence and taking responsibility, team work and solving conflicts - important life skills.

Challenges of Estonian Education

Estonia's education system is the best in Europe by recent PISA test results from 2022. So we have pretty good foundations, but also multiple challenges:
  • Estonian teachers are among the oldest within OECD countries
  • Quality of school leadership (recruitment, goals, culture, community engagement etc)
  • High drop-out rates of youth after the mandatory primary school (9th grade); not graduating the next education level due to lack of motivation and getting bored from traditional lessons
  • The low levels of practical STEAM skills acquired from school.

Good Deed Education Fund

To solve the education challenges mentioned above myself and Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise) started venture philanthropy fund in 2018 with a budget of 3 million euros. Good Deed Education Fund is supported and funded by 40 Estonian tech founders and companies. We have received few hundred ideas and funded 20+ different projects, that have reached ca 80% of Estonian students and majority of schools. We run our fund as a startup, we learn and improve every day. In some critical areas where we don't receive enough project proposals, we started several projects ourselves, eg:

KOOD/Jõhvi - Coding School

Based on different survey's, Estonia is lacking 5000-8000 software developers. To solve this gap, I co-founded kood/Jõhvi in 2021, a platform based coding school based small Eastern-Estonian city Jõhvi. Initially 2-year learning program is now transformed to 1-year base program plus specialization modules and aimed to young people (18-40 years), who want to learn practical skills for software development and build their careers in Estonian booming startup community. By early 2024 we have over 100 graduates and 400+ students in study programs.

We have over 40 founders and companies, who have contributed their funds to open and operate the school. Renovating an old building and opening the school takes over 7 million Euros of investments, of which Estonian government supported with 1,8 million Euros. We are looking for co-minded founders and companies to fund the school to expand and make it even better!


MOTIVATIONAL TALKS IN SCHOOLS

Every month I try to host students at Bolt office or visit 3-5 schools myself to meet students, teachers and school management teams in order to share my entrepreneurial story, ideas and motivation for building better schools. I encourage:
  • teachers to make lessons more practical and empower their students to find their inner strengths and passions to develop their careers.
  • students to dream big, try various activities during school years and then focus on the subjects that could become their career - either in business or social sphere.
  • school leadership to build an open and community based organizational culture, team based leadership structure and more practical interdisciplinary study methods combined with opportunities from AI and other EdTech solutions.
For booking my talk or visit to Bolt office, please e-mail me.