Not long ago, the experts who take it upon themselves to frame our shared experience as a nation decided that the U.S. system had transitioned from the “information economy” to the “attention economy.” Of course, any attempt to put a label on anything as massive and diverse as a national economy must be based on oversimplifications, but there’s something to this. The fastest-growing parts of the economy have to do with producing technologies designed to command our attention and thus drive our purchasing, social, and political decisions.
What this enormous investment in attention-grabbing is not producing, however, is better-informed citizens. Quite the opposite—as Impact Fund members know well, our fellow Americans are more vulnerable, not less, to manipulation in the economic and political spheres. Indeed, many of the organizations we support have won our partnership precisely because of their ability to disrupt the more alarming social trends. Two Bradley Impact Fund grant recipients that are rising above the war for our attention and cultivating informed citizens are Milwaukee’s Kingdom Prep Lutheran School and Kite & Key Media.
Kingdom Prep Lutheran High School opened in 2018 with sixty boys in its first freshman class. Today, with support from The Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund donor community, Kingdom Prep has a total enrollment of approximately 240 students in all four high school grades. Before founding KP, Kevin Festerling toured the most dynamic, disruptive schools for boys that he could find before arriving at a key principle: high expectations—“the cheapest, most innovative way to transform a whole school.”
As founder and principal, Kevin envisioned Kingdom Prep as a school where young men develop their God-given gifts to lead in the home and in the Church, engaging in meaningful work that will transform their communities. With the help of his cofounders, Kingdom Prep is filling a demand for an innovative high school able to prepare young men for twenty-first century leadership based on the principles of faith, service, experience, and excellence. The diverse staff of teachers are passionate about shaping their students into leaders in their personal lives and their community.
Recognizing that informed citizens capable of building and contributing to the nation aren’t formed through rote memorization, KP focuses on students’ hearts as well as minds, training them to see, identify, and solve problems through a biblical framework and worldview. This means helping young men who often emerge from very difficult neighborhoods to form brotherhoods that motivate them to be better leaders, servants, and men. In these “packs,” young men find affirmation, accountability, and challenge in a healthy environment, better situating them for lives of success and impact.
Kite & Key Media creates content that counters the deluge of false and misleading information masquerading as the truth. Launched by Manhattan Institute policy wonks Vanessa Mendoza and Troy Senik, Kite & Key catalyzes public dialogue on critical issues facing America and the world, wholly through social media videos. Surveying research from universities, think tanks, field experts, and investigative journalists, the studio provides often-ignored context in the venues that now dominate national discourse.
With more than 200 million views of its work across various platforms, Kite & Key has a loyal support group among Impact Fund members. The key, so to speak, is translating the best research into widely-shared videos, such as The Clean Energy Paradox, The Day Money Gets Outlawed, and Why Everyone’s Wrong About Homelessness—and Everyone’s Right. Doing so well means that the studio creates a bridge between public policy and the everyday lives of millions of Americans. As Ms. Mendoza said at an Impact Fund event some years ago:
The vast majority of Americans care about the direction of this country, but they’re going to work in the morning, they’re raising their kids, they’re thinking about an elderly parent, they’re not thinking about public policy in the ways that we do.
What these two stellar organizations have in common is a passion for excellence and breaking through the noise and low expectations that risk making American exceptionalism a thing of the past. They join other Impact Fund grant recipients who are creating informed citizens who are more capable of exceptional accomplishment, and more apt to pursue it.