by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Co-Founder & CEO of Encantos, PBC
Today begins the next chapter of Encantos.
Years in the making, we have launched the first curated creator platform that is built for kids and designed for learning 21st-century skills.
So why a curated creator platform?
When we started Encantos in 2016, we knew we wanted to build a purpose-driven company from the ground up that was 100% focused on kids.
We were two Latinx families that came together with a shared mission to democratize, diversify, and personalize learning for kids. With kids of our own, we were facing the same challenge that every parent faces: how do I best prepare my child for success in school and in life?
We first set up Encantos as a public benefit corporation (PBC) so we could be true to our mission, similar to other PBCs we admired like Patagonia, Etsy, and Kickstarter. We then started to identify how best we would make our “dent in the universe”.
We believed in reimagining education using the best of entertainment and technology.
We believed that kids learned best through play and through storytelling (and there’s research to prove it by pioneering academics like Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek).
We believed that teaching isn’t just for teachers, and that people around the world wanted to help kids learn.
And we believed that kids needed to learn 21st-century skills.
We were inspired by the groundbreaking World Economic Forum (WEF) report New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology. The WEF’s research found that in addition to language arts, math, and science, today’s fast-changing world required kids to possess and be adept at 21st-century learning, literacy, and life skills.
● Learning skills like creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration that prepare kids to work through challenges with people and complex situations.
● Literacy skills are much more than just reading. They include civics, environmental literacy, financial literacy, information and media literacy, culture and multilingualism, and STEM.
● Life skills like adaptability, curiosity, empathy, leadership, perseverance, and social-emotional awareness to help kids build character and confidence.
These are the skills kids needed to learn.
These are the skills that aren’t being taught in school.
These are the skills that are now the “new fundamentals” for a fundamentally changed world.
So, we had an idea.
What if we could bring the best creators from around the world to help kids learn?
We decided to test our hypothesis with our first creator, Encantos co-founder Susie Jaramillo.
Susie definitely had something that she wanted to help kids learn: how to become kindergarten ready in two languages, English and Spanish. She wanted to fuse culturally-authentic stories and characters with research-driven learning in a fun, engaging way for both kids and parents. Knowing that kids learn through play, she wanted to use all of the tools that made sense — audio, video, books, games, and more. This was a storyworld for kids to explore and learn in. This was the storyworld of Canticos.
Canticos became a huge hit and is now the #1 bilingual preschool brand. It received an Emmy nomination, won two consecutive Kidscreen awards, and was honored by Common Sense Media. Most importanly, Canticos is loved by kids and parents around the world.
This became our “MLP” — our minimal lovable product. We learned a lot with Canticos.
- Storyteaching works. Grounded in child development research[1] that shows kids learn best through stories, we worked with academics, researchers, and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines to develop a new methodology combining play and learning into what we call “Storyteaching”. These are the stories that need to be told, the skills that need to be taught, in the ways that kids learn best.
- A parent is always a child’s first teacher. Even after they go off to elementary school and beyond, kids are always learning at home. When the pandemic hit it, parents everywhere began to question “what exactly are my kids learning?” and many started to take matters into their own hands, looking for trusted brands that could offer supplemental learning and enrichment at home. Parents want their kids to learn the new fundamentals, and it mattered not just what they were learning, but how and from whom.
- Everyone wants to help kids learn. We have creators from around the world reaching out to us wanting to find a way to replicate what we did with Susie. Creators who want to help kids learn are educators with superpowers. We call these creators “storyteachers”. They can be teachers, of course. They can also be artists, writers, performers, business executives, subject-matter experts, athletes, celebrities, and so on. Especially when it comes to helping kids learn 21st-century learning, literacy, and life skills, there are so many storyteachers that can and want to help.
- Representation matters. More than 50% of kids in the United States are multicultural, yet children’s entertainment and education still does not reflect today’s diverse world. Families expect greater representation in what their kids are seeing and learning.
- Curation is the key. Parenting is hard enough as it is. Having to police what kids are watching on a screen just makes it that much harder. No parent want to just let their kids roam freely on a social network. On the other end of the spectrum, parents don’t want to have their kids watching cartoons and movies all day long on TV or their streaming platform of choice.
So where can parents go to help kids learn at home that is entertaining and educational while also specically designed for and safe for kids?
Welcome to the world of Encantos.
We’ve taken all of these learnings and created a revolutionary new storyteaching platform that empowers creators to help kids learn through stories.
The Encantos app features curated, age-based storyteaching experiences representing a diverse range of subjects and perspectives for kids ages 8 and under. The app is organized around content types — audio, books, games, and videos — and creator channels, called “storyworlds.” The app launches with a range of storyworlds including the #1 bilingual preschool brand Canticos along with new creator storyworlds such as La Petite Petra, Tyrus’ Kids, and Wally the Worried Walrus.
Just like an app store, storyteachers can submit their content to create a storyworld on our platform. The north star is the content must teach a 21st-century skill! Once approved, the creators’ storyworld will be on our platform. Encantos will curated and moderate all content to ensure it meets our guidelines and our focus on fun and engaging learning.
We view this as a supplement to traditional education, as the stories on our platform aim to teach key learning, literacy, and life skills helping prepare kids to thrive in a fundamentally changed world.
We are proud that Encantos is bringing culturally authentic voices together on a platform that provides the broadest range of perspectives that have been missing for kids and families.
Now more than ever, we are committed to Encantos making a purposeful and meaningful impact on what and how kids learn by democratizing, diversifying and personalizing learning.
[1] Psychologist Jerome Bruner’s research suggests that facts are more than 20 times more likely to be remembered if they’re part of a story. Source: Harvard Business Publishing
