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What if redesigning education at the margins could improve schools everywhere?
Across America, students in rural and Indigenous communities are often left behind by education reform efforts. But Jonathan Santos Silva, founder of The Liber Institute, is challenging that status quo with a model built on equity, empathy, and local leadership. In this episode of Pitch Playground, we explore how Liber is redesigning rural education from the ground up.
Students on Native reservations like Pine Ridge, South Dakota—where Jonathan once taught—face some of the lowest academic outcomes in the nation. From condemned school buildings to teacher shortages, these communities often endure crumbling infrastructure and insufficient support.
“If you aggregated Bureau of Indian Education schools as a 51st state, they'd be 51st in outcomes.” —Jonathan Santos Silva
The root causes? Centuries of broken treaties, structural racism, and an education system designed without Indigenous voices at the center.
The Liber Institute empowers local educators, students, and families to transform their own school systems. Its three core components are:
Liber uses a unique POWER framework to guide school transformation, taking partners from problem definition to solution implementation through a lens of equity and innovation.
Liber has already supported transformational change in Native communities:
Students are seeing the difference:
"I don't know what you all did, but the new teachers connect with us better than the old ones."
These changes lead to improved student engagement, staff retention, and community trust.
Jonathan believes that designing for rural and Indigenous education equity benefits all schools.
“If we go to Native students and ask, 'How do we do this better?' the things we learn there should work throughout rural America and eventually urban America as well.”
By solving for those historically left out, we surface insights that can transform the entire system.
While Liber currently operates in-person intensives, Jonathan and his team plan to scale impact through:
The $50,000 prize from Pitch Playground would fund development of a group coaching program that expands Liber’s reach beyond the communities they can visit physically.
Despite Liber’s success, fundraising has been challenging. Jonathan, a Black leader serving Indigenous communities, finds himself at the margins of traditional DEI funding norms.
“Even though we talk a lot about working across lines of difference, almost nobody funds it.”
This makes the case even more urgent for funders to prioritize cross-cultural coalitions and rural equity.
Improving rural and Indigenous education isn't just the right thing to do—it's a strategic investment in systemic change. With the Liber Institute, Jonathan Santos Silva is proving that community-led school transformation, rooted in empathy, equity, and culture, can create lasting impact.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of Pitch Playground to hear how Liber is reshaping what's possible in rural and Indigenous education.