Dan Gonzalez: Scaling a Reimagined Approach to Internships

Dan Gonzalez, Co-founder and CEO of District C, discusses how his nonprofit is democratizing access to authentic workplace learning through Teamship, a reimagined internship model where teams of high school students solve real business problems. Drawing from his background as a physics teacher and education entrepreneur, Gonzalez explains how District C emerged from early conversations about AI's impact on work and the need to develop uniquely human, durable skills. He details the program's innovative design—breaking abstract concepts like "teamwork" into observable behaviors and coaching protocols—and shares how they've made the model accessible to over 7,000 students by embedding it in Career and Technical Education courses. Gonzalez describes their low-lift, high-impact approach to employer engagement that requires just five hours of business partner time across four to five weeks, enabling 700 employers to participate without the complications of traditional internships. The conversation explores their test-and-learn philosophy from startup through scaling, the dramatic student improvement across multiple cycles, and practical strategies for both educators seeking to implement experiential learning and employers wanting to support youth development while addressing real business challenges.

Transcript

Julian Alssid Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces Podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. 

Welcome to today's show. It feels like every day we're both reading and hearing about the importance of experiential learning opportunities for students while enrolled in college, and more and more so in K through 12 education, while the importance of these opportunities has been recognized for many years, efforts to develop authentic applied learning in real world contexts at scale have become front and center. 

Julian Alssid: It's so true, Kaitlin, we're seeing a significant alignment around this. More employers are actively seeking practical, applied skills earlier in the talent pipeline, and educators and learners alike are seeing the value of academic learning applied in real world work environments. Authentic projects are becoming an integral and essential part of the learning experience.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly, and with all that being said, we're really looking forward to our discussion today with Dan Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of District C, a national nonprofit that prepares the next generation of diverse talent for modern work. District C offers a unique program called Teamship, which is a reimagined internship where teams of students solve real problems for real businesses.

Julian Alssid: To provide a bit of background. Dan studied engineering at Dartmouth College before becoming a high school physics teacher. After teaching, Dan joined Manhattan Prep, a global leader in test preparation, and became president of the company in 2011 shortly after it was acquired by Kaplan. In 2017, Dan co-founded District C and has been working on its build out since. We're thrilled to have you on the podcast, Dan, and thanks so much for joining us. 

Dan Gonzalez: My gosh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: We're really excited to have the chance to speak with you today, Dan. So as we get started today, we'd love to learn a little bit more about your background and what led you to founding District C. Tell us the story. 

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, so one, one interesting, what I think is an interesting kind of founding story about the founding is my wife and I started District C together as co-founders. We started our research back in 2016 and we both quit our jobs at the same time to invest full time in District C. And I think what we were seeing at the time was, you know, obviously people have been talking about artificial intelligence for many, many decades, but around 2016, 2017 the conversation started to come into the national forefront as it relates to work and preparing for work. And we were kind of trying to look ahead and imagine what do we need to be preparing students for if we are kind of confronting this reality of an AI dominated workplace, and so, you know, at the time, this was a couple of years after the code.org put out that video, and there was kind of this national movement around preparing students to be coders and software developers. And the thing that we are trying to imagine is, all right, if, if we are thinking about how to prepare young people for any job in the future with the skills and competencies they need to cut across any industry, how would we design a learning model that would do that? Now you can call them professional skills, durable skills, soft skills, 3Cs, 5cs, 10, Cs whatever you want to call them, but these like uniquely human skills, and that's what we were after, and that's what we set out to try to figure out. 

Julian Alssid: So you were you? You were talking AI practically before it was born.

Dan Gonzalez: Maybe, maybe not, not so, so early. But I would say, Yeah, we were thinking about it back then. And I think, like, obviously looking back now, we feel like it was the right place to be focused. And I would say one challenge we had early on as we were thinking about building a program like the one we built, is a lot of conversation was centered on, as I said, coding, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education. And so it was hard to cut through some of that conversation. And even though there was a lot of discussion around portraits of a graduate, how do we help students develop durable skills, soft skills, the default in education, as you all know, is to kind of generally come back to the content and focus on the content. And so things like coding, entrepreneurship, etc., stem where content tends to be at the front and center, those are the things that tend to carry the day in education conversations. So we had a little trouble initially, kind of cutting through some of that and really trying to focus on all right, if we're serious about durable skills, how do we really get down past the abstractions into learning models that really help students develop these things. And so it took, you know, a couple of years of trial and error and experimentation with the model that we built before we started to kind of feel like the conversation was changing. 

Julian Alssid: Okay, so, how? So, how are you teaching durable skills? What is the program model? Yeah, yeah. This is the question everyone wants to know.

Dan Gonzalez: So the program model is called Teamship. You can think of Teamship as a reimagined team-based internship, where teams of students solve real problems for real businesses in the community, and all the while, they're getting coached by an educator who's been trained and certified by District C and so students are getting proactive support as they're going through this generally 25 to 35 hour experience. The thing that we learned early on was putting students in teams and asking them to solve a real problem actually ended up being the easy part of the model. Of course, it takes work to go out and find businesses, engage them, prep them, Tee them up for the experience, etc. And that's a whole system of work that requires attention and care. But I think what we learned was the most difficult part was helping students actually get better at the work. So it's not enough just to create the experience and create the context for the experience to help students actually develop these skills, you actually have to coach them proactively and consistently, and as I mentioned before, kind of break away from the abstractions and get down to observable behavior. So just as an example, if I were to say Julian and Kaitlin and I'm watching you do your Teamwork, you're solving a problem for a business. Just keep in mind, be team players. Respect your teammates. Those are abstractions, right? Students don't really know what to do with that, that kind of coaching. So what we try to do is break those abstractions down into ways of working, tools, protocols, et cetera, that we can coach students on and actually observe those in their work. Instead of, Hey, be great team players. I might say, hey, Julian and Kaitlin, which set of your tools do you think you can pull out to make sure that you're getting better equity of voice in your team conversations, and they should know like, Oh, if I take tool X, I and Z and snap them together, it will create more balance of voice in our team conversation, and our work is going to be better. Our thinking is going to be better, our ideas are going to be better. Trying to break away from the abstractions and get down to the observable behavior. I think that was an insight we had early on that we really tried to build off of in subsequent years. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I feel like that response has...now I have so many other questions about the program model, but I mean, I guess one area I'm curious to hear a little bit more about is so you partner with employers and with schools to offer this program. And what is, what does the program the 25 to 35 hour model, what does that look like in schools? Is it held after school? Is it during the school day? Is it held in collaboration with a classroom instructor? Is there a range? 

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, great question. So most of the Teamship experiences that students get are through their schools. And so you're exactly right. We generally partner with Career and Technical Education departments, so at the school district level, at the K 12 level, and then we work with them to identify schools that are going to adopt the Teamship model, to identify teachers that are going to go through our training and certification process. And then we support these teachers in implementing teamship In generally one of two ways. The first way is as a 25 to 30 hour experience embedded in one of their existing courses. The second way is building an entirely new course that is Teamship exclusive. So imagine a semester-long course where students do two or three Teamship cycles over the span of a semester, and each cycle, they're with a different team of students, and they're working on a new problem for a new business. So that's generally that's the predominant model, and the reason for that is, I know from, you know, back when I was young, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I got an engineering internship because my dad knew someone, right? So I asked my dad, hey, could you help me get an internship within a week? I had it. I think we know that students with family connections and social capital, they generally don't struggle to get these kinds of experiences. But what about everyone else? So one of the keys to the Teamship design was building it so that it could be delivered and provide access to many more students than typically get these kinds of powerful workplace learning experiences. And that meant designing it so that it could be implemented at school during the school day. So that was a key kind of design constraint that we went into many years ago when we built this.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I would imagine too to have the opportunity to engage in multiple of these experiences over a learner's journey through their high school experience would be really powerful to, as you said, build upon and continue to practice and learn some of these human or durable skills that you know take time to learn and hone, right? I mean, it's not like this isn't just because you've engaged in one of these experiences doesn't mean you couldn't engage in another, I assume.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, and you all, of course, are bringing a ton of your own experience to this conversation. That is exactly the right insight. I think it was two years after we started. We piloted our first semester long course. We got 16 students from four different schools in the Raleigh, Durham area of North Carolina, and we essentially taught a course for those 16 students. They did three cycles over a semester, three Teamship cycles. And we were, I think we were taken aback at that the step wise improvement from cycle one to cycle two was kind of astounding. Like, once they get the first one under their belts, they can look back and reflect and say, that's what this is about. This is such a different experience for them, right? It's so different from traditional school. And so once they have one under their belts, they're able to, just like adapt very quickly, set new goals for themselves for the second cycle, and the level of their work just improves pretty dramatically. And so I think we realized in that moment, the most ideal implementation mode is one where students get multiple touches on the ball for exactly the reasons that you mentioned. 

Julian Alssid: Okay, so, so staying on the path of specifics, this is great. It's really, really fascinating. And so much of what we try to do is unpack and understand, like, the school side I get, how about the employers? I mean, you know you mentioned earlier, like, yeah, sure. You know, most people are getting it's mostly word of mouth. For most people, that's how they found an internship. How are you engaging employers at scale? How do you find and support them? 

Dan Gonzalez: So we have a team of people that is dedicated just to this work of engaging employers. To date, we've had, I think we're at about 700 employers who have engaged in this work. Some of them engage once. Some of them engage twice, three times. I think we've had some engage as many as nine or 10 times. The number one key is creating an opportunity for employers that is low lift, high impact. So we want to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes, and before they understand the details of the experience and what their role would be. They often come in with the assumption that their role is going to be kind of like it would be for a traditional internship, which is, all right, I'm going to have to manage a group of students over multiple weeks and multiple hours per week, right? And a lot of times, companies are hesitant to do traditional internships or offer traditional internships for high school students. Number one, because there's a whole bunch of like legal considerations when you're working with minors. Number two, they're often skeptical of high school students' ability to add real value to their businesses, right? So what we try to do is counter both of those potential skepticisms, right? So the first thing we say is, look, this is going to be a five hour experience for you over the course of four to five weeks, the first hour or so is going to be working with us to scope the problem. We're going to actually write the problem statement. We're just going to kind of interview you business partner to understand what's keeping you up at night, and then we're going to craft a business problem statement that will be accessible to high school students. And then the rest of those five hours, you're going to meet with the student teams three times, and the first time, students are going to come in and they're going to interview you, they're going to run the meeting. So all you have to do is show up and represent your business and your problem. The second time is a midpoint check in. They're going to come with some initial ideas, maybe ask you a few more questions, and then the third time, they're going to propose their solutions to you in kind of a boardroom style meeting. And so for the business partner, the reaction typically is, so I don't really have to, I don't have to mentor the students full time during this experience, and the answer to that is no, the teacher who's been trained will do that part. And so it's an easy ask that they can say yes to, given that the students are owning those three meetings and facilitating those three meetings, it's easy for the business partner to plug in. And so the first time, we make it easy for them, and they generally want to participate because they want to do good in their community. And then I think they realize that we have evidence to suggest, they realize the power of the opportunity and how much value and benefit they get out of it, and so that's when they're out for a second and third time. So that's kind of the strategy that we try to employ, that we've kind of refined over the years. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: So Dan, it's really interesting to hear you talk about, as Julian said, both the employer side of this and the school side, as you reflect on, I mean, you said this was you started in 2017 so you've been building this for the better part of eight years at this point. I mean, tell us about your growth trajectory. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you've encountered as you've built District C, because I would imagine that, you know, you've addressed a lot of challenges that maybe others are, you know, wrestling with day to day, and how to make this type of really authentic work, and these types of authentic projects happen in schools and communities. 

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that question. When my wife and I started this, we were both first time entrepreneurs, and so we were simultaneously wrestling with like, okay, what's what's like, the education part of this, and then what's the entrepreneurship part of this? Like, we're two new entrepreneurs trying to start something that matters and trying to make an impact. And so I think, like, one of the big challenges for me, just like a personal challenge for me early on, is I went from a job where I would wake up every morning and I'd have eight hours of meetings blocked on my calendar, and it was just back to back to back, right? And then starting District C, I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be nothing on the calendar. All proactive, right? It was all like, go out and make it happen. And that was a really difficult transition point for me. And I think one, I had a lot of impatience early on, and like wanting to see results and outcomes. And I think one learning and reflection is this kind of stuff, like when you're building something new from scratch, it takes, it just takes time. You all know this, I see the head nodding. You know this experience, it takes a lot of time to build traction. I think one of the things that, in retrospect, a good decision we made early on was we didn't, we didn't hold ourselves to getting it exactly right the first time. Instead, we took kind of a test and learn mindset, and so the first thing we did is we got 10 or 11 students around, around the community, and we just tried the first version of the program that we had dreamed up. And we learned so much from that, that first pilot, from that first trial, and we just kept building on it. And honestly, we didn't worry about the business model, we didn't worry about the scale model until we felt like we had enough reps on kind of coaching students through Teamship, where we felt like, oh yeah, this is, this is what we want to kind of put out to market. And so I would say the first phase was proving demand. Do students want to do this? Will business partners engage? And once we felt like we had a check mark in that box, then we thought about the business model. So as a nonprofit, how are we going to fund this? And what we decided was we're going to do it in a fee for service approach, so we're going to partner with school districts and they're going to pay us to deliver this service. And that is ultimately going to be the thing that will indicate for us whether this is working or not, is our districts, will they? Will they pay us for this? And so that was, that was kind of the second phase, was building the business model. And then the third phase, which we're in now, is scale. So how do we prove that we can scale this nationally with high fidelity and continue to kind of see the results that we're seeing? So yeah, those are, those are the phases we went through. 

Julian Alssid: So as you're now in this scaling phase, how are you continuing to monitor your success and you kind of, you know, what sort of data you collect. How are you using that for scale and continuous improvement? 

Dan Gonzalez: I would say the primary answer is, we try to stay really close to the work, observing students doing the work, you know, staying in close contact with teachers and coaches who are coaching students so that we're getting constant feedback from them on what's working and what they're struggling with. We also do some formal surveying of students and teachers and business partners to get a sense for like, hey, you know, at the most basic level, would you recommend this experience to someone else? And so we monitor that kind of data. We asked students to self report on their growth along two dimensions, one, their confidence in working in teams and their confidence with solving complex problems. So there's some self report data there. So I think piece number one is trying to, just like stay close to the end stakeholders and users and understand what their experience is. The second thing, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, is, is like through market signals? So when we're having conversations with prospective district partners, are they, are we, is this concept resonating with them, and is it resonating to the point where they're willing to spend some of their budget to put this in front of students? Right? And so I think that has been an important, just like market indicator of how valuable this, what is the perceived value of this kind of work in the market? The thing that I think we need to get our ducks in a row on is, how do we measure the long term impact on this? And so I think the dream state for us would be, you know, understanding from our student base, from our alumni at age 25 or 30, say, versus students who have not done Teamship, what is what is your level of well being? What are your employment outcomes? What is your annual salary? And comparing that against students who haven't been through the experience just to see, like, are we getting kind of the scalable impact that we want? And that, of course, as you can imagine, just takes a ton of work to think about how to design that, that system that would give us that kind of input. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you mentioned, Dan, you know, kind of monitoring, like staying close to the work. It makes me wonder too. As you've talked about the growth of this program over time, where are, where are the programs located at this point? In which states do you operate? 

 

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, we've had students participate from. I think it's 16 states at this point. And that's a little misleading, because in some states that might be one or two students who opted into a virtual program that had students from multiple states. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Oh, neat. Yeah.

Dan Gonzalez: The vast majority of our work is in North Carolina. It's where we live and where we got started. But increasingly, we have programs running in Virginia, Wisconsin, a new, new partner in Texas. And so, you know, honestly, to this point, we haven't really had a state, state strategy as much as we've just like followed the energy. So where we get interest will partner, and where we have the right mission alignment with partners, that's where we invest our time. And so it's kind of just by happenstance where, kind of these pockets of activities are happening? 

Julian Alssid: Do the relationships with the districts look similar around the country? Is there? Is there? Is this evolving? Is this building out? Yeah, I would say, generally speaking, they do. So usually the first conversation is with the Career and Technical Education Director at the district level, and the implementations tend to be in CTE courses, oftentimes in entrepreneurship or business principles or marketing courses, what have you. And so we're definitely seeing some patterns in terms of how CTE directors are valuing this work, where they're trying to plug it in, why it matters to them, but certainly on the edges, you see variations and kind of custom implementations depending on specific geographies and program needs. And I would say most of the time a school district is wanting us to help them engage businesses in their backyards. Sometimes they want to expose their students to businesses that exist in other parts of the country, but usually they're trying to create a community around this work in their region. And they're often bringing really deep relationships with business partners that they want to deepen even further. And they see teamship as a way to engage them on a different level. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: So with your response to that question, I feel like we're kind of naturally going in this direction, but we always like to tie the podcast conversation a bit to the title of the podcast, which is  Work Forces. So thinking about everything we've talked about today, and I think you've given us a lot to think about here, Dan, but what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in supporting secondary school learners to obtain applied learning experiences. 

Dan Gonzalez: I think teamship is a great way to connect the education community, the educator with the business community. And so I would say, if you are running a program for young people, whether it's a workforce development program, program that exists in a community college, or a higher ed setting, or in a K 12 setting, a Teamship is a great way to get students involved with businesses in the community. If you are a professional that works for a business and you're interested in doing what you can to help young people prepare for their futures. Obviously, we're always looking for business partners to engage in this work, and would love to have a conversation. I think, though generally, just beyond Teamship as we're thinking about preparing, preparing people for their futures, I think kind of embracing a shift from hey to prepare for a job or a career in your future, you need to develop skills around this very specific type of job or career, right? And it's, it's generally skill based, you know, relative to a career pathway or a career sector, whatever it might be. And I think that's really important, especially as jobs are changing and the types of jobs that are emerging these days we hadn't even imagined 10 years ago. So certainly, there are skills and competencies that young people need, but I think we need just as much weight on the transferable skills that students can take across any career path or any career journey that they might embark on. We talk a lot about the importance of durable skills, but I think we need to get really serious about how we help students develop those. And I think there's employers have a responsibility to help educators think about that and to engage in that kind of work. 

Julian Alssid: Yeah. I mean, I think, and especially with fluidity in the job market, and it's more and more about, you know, what are the bucket of skills you've accumulated, and how can you now apply them in new realms and new places, both to figure out what you like and where you want to go and where's the fit, but also because everything is in flux. So I think you know this, this idea of having a series of experiences where you're building these skills, and there's a lot of overlap, and the durability develops in that build. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and I do think too, I mean, for high school learners, I think often, course work is subdivided right into these, into particular subject areas. And it's like actually, though, in most settings, we're not working in a one subject area, right? We're working in a cross-disciplinary way, and to make that more transparent for people and to like have these types of team based experiences, project based experiences that integrate those skills, I think, helps to proactively and intentionally share exactly what you're saying, Dan, right? That like we don't like as much as you, of course, need to focus on building out specific knowledge and skill domains. There's a lot of integration, and it's actually in the integration of those skills where a lot of the magic happens.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, well said.

Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed. Well So Dan, as we wind now, in our conversation, this has been really fascinating, so you know again. So appreciate your time, and wonderful to hear how you, your just your own process, your own thought process here and how this has all unfolded. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work? 

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, so district c dot co is our website. We have a page on there called the latest where we have updates, and there's a contact form there, and so that's how most people will find us and reach out. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I'd love to, love to hear from you. Would love to continue this conversation. And yeah, that's a spot you can get in touch with me directly. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Dan, it was thanks so much for having me. Kaitlin and Julian. I really appreciate it. Thanks for doing this work. It's important. 

Julian Alssid: Yes, thank you, Dan. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info forward slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends, and if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.