Stand Together

We're one quarter into 2026. Across the country, thousands of organizations are working to solve problems most big institutions haven't been able to figure out. Progress is coming from the bottom up. Here's proof. 🧵

The debate around AI in music is loud right now: copyright lawsuits, fears about livelihoods, and concerns that generated music will crowd out human creativity. Historian and musician John Hardin has heard all of it before. "The moral, creative, and economic fears surrounding AI in music aren't new. They've been with us for generations." As a senior fellow at the @abundanceinst, Hardin has spent his career studying how societies respond to technological disruption, and music is one of his sharpest examples. From the player piano to hip-hop to Auto-Tune, every technology that threatened music ended up expanding it. The artists who embraced those tools reshaped music. The ones who fought them didn't. Hardin argues the pattern is repeating, and he thinks the question was never whether AI would change music. The question is who gets to participate. Stand Together supports the people working to make sure the next generation of musicians has the tools to find out. Read the full article: bit.ly/4sLlBwD

Ken Ruggiero is the son of Italian immigrants who worked his way through college at his family's ice cream shop. There were no mentors, no internet, just a lot of figuring it out. Decades later, he built @ascent_funding around the students still doing the same. The problem Ruggiero identified isn't just access. It's what lenders use to decide who deserves it. Traditional models rely on credit scores and cosigner requirements that systematically exclude first-generation students and career-switchers. Ascent's model looks at a student's school, major, geography, and likelihood to graduate instead. The results are concrete. Since 2022, Ascent has issued over $30 million in 0%-interest career loans, with an 80% graduation rate and a 40% average income increase among recipients. Borrowers pay nothing until they land a job above a certain income threshold. After 60 months, any remaining balance is forgiven entirely. Financial Literacy Month is a reminder that access to opportunity isn't just about what you know. It's about who the system decides to believe in. For students like Liam B., who completed a coding bootcamp and became a software engineer, the difference was a lender willing to bet on where he was going rather than where he'd been. "We're not betting on credit scores," Ruggiero said. "We're betting on effort, trajectory, and potential." Read the full story here: bit.ly/4vynhvN

In the United States, 70% of people who leave prison return within five years. At Mt. Tamalpais College, which operates entirely inside San Quentin State Prison, that number drops to 5%. The difference is a college education built around the individual, not the system. Jody Lewen came to @MtTamCollege as a volunteer 25 years ago when the program had no staff, no budget, and a handful of instructors. Faculty now come from Berkeley, Stanford, and other Bay Area universities. "In many colleges, there are many talents that are not recognized," said Berkeley professor Rita Lucarelli. "What I see here is that whatever is the talent of one student, it will come out." The model is deliberately the opposite of cookie-cutter. Students arrive with different educational backgrounds, different needs, and different goals. The college meets each one where they are. Craig arrived unable to write a full essay in under five days. With a dedicated tutor, he now completes one in a day and earns A's and B's. Second Chance Month is a reminder that public safety and human dignity aren't competing values. The outcomes at Mt. Tamalpais make that case more plainly than any policy argument could. "What the success of Mt. Tamalpais illustrates is that when individuals develop and discover their own unique gifts, they become almost forces of nature in terms of their drive and commitment to repairing the world," Lewen said. Read the full story here: bit.ly/3Q6wQSB

In Second Chance Month, Stand Together partners work to understand what keeps people stuck in cycles and build targeted solutions for long-term success. Alyssa Tamboura's story shows what becomes possible when someone finally gets the support they deserve: standtogether.org/stories/strong… #SecondChanceMonth

Her father had been learning to code through @TLM, earning a degree, presenting a capstone project to Mark Zuckerberg. Watching him rebuild gave her permission to do the same. She earned her GED, then a degree from UC Santa Cruz, then graduated from Yale Law School.

When Alyssa Tamboura was a kid, she told people her father had died in a car accident. It was easier than telling the truth. He was in prison, and she had no one to help her carry that. 🧵

.@GreatSchools reaches more parents than any school search platform in the country. Its CEO @jondeane says it was still missing something important.

Scott Strode started The Phoenix, @RiseRecoverLive, in 2006 with a single gym in Boulder after finding his way out of addiction through exercise. What began as one location has grown into a national community that has directly impacted more than 1 million people. 4 in 5 active members remain sober.

What makes a great school great? CEO @jondeane of @GreatSchools , the tool you see when browsing homes, has a surprising answer.

For decades, ZIP codes determined school options, and test scores defined school quality. But parents are asking an entirely different question now: What makes a great school for my child, specifically? @JonDeane is the CEO of @GreatSchools, the school search tool used by 50 million parents, and he’s on a mission to help them answer it:

When Alyssa Tamboura was 11, her father was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She never got to say goodbye. For the next decade, she told people he died in a car accident. It was easier than explaining the shame. By 17, she had dropped out of high school and was raising a son alone. Her father spent those same years writing her letters, sending birthday cards, and calling whenever he could. She never opened the letters. When she finally visited him as an adult, he hugged her before she could say a word and apologized for everything. She went home and read every letter in the box. Her father found The Last Mile, @TLM, while incarcerated, a program that teaches coding and software engineering to people preparing for reentry. He learned to code, worked as a web developer from inside prison, and presented a capstone project to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Watching him rebuild made her believe she could too. Alyssa earned her GED, enrolled in community college, transferred to UC Santa Cruz, and eventually graduated from Yale Law School, where her father attended her college graduation. Second Chance Month is a reminder that cycles of trauma rarely break on their own. They break when people are seen, supported, and given something real to work toward. "My fate is not predetermined," Tamboura said. "I get to decide what my life is and what my life looks like, not the criminal justice system. I took back that power." Read the full story here: bit.ly/4mhuKvg

SC is #LetGrow's first "Lighthouse State," spreading our FREE independence-building programs thru its schools. Traditional "SEL" has kids breathe, meditate, self-soothe. Let Grow gets kids OUT & ABOUT. They play, run errands, cook, THRIVE! @StandTogether: standtogether.org/stories/educat…

It's Financial Literacy Month. For 150 million Americans with poor or no credit, the problem was never financial discipline. It was a system that couldn't see the full picture. Here's how StellarFi is changing that: standtogether.org/stories/the-ec… #FinancialLiteracyMonth

"The best path forward is through technology and innovation," Zarrad said, not more regulation. He would know. Before founding StellarFi, he spent years as a bank regulator watching the system from the inside.

150 million Americans have poor or no credit. That's not a personal finance failure. That's a system built on incomplete data making life-altering decisions about two thirds of the adult population. 🧵