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 sch
