It all began with the letters.
“Unsolicited correspondence from parents and teachers that said stuff like, ‘Janie is at MIT studying robotics because of your toys. Johnny is at Northeastern studying architecture because of your toys,’ which is not what we set out to do,” explained Rokenbok Toys founder and San Diego Foundation (SDF) donor Paul Eichen.
“We just wanted to build a toy company, this really cool, technology-based toy company, that was all about construction and robotics.”
Those letters, though, led Paul and his company along an illuminating journey of discovery culminating in Kid Spark Education, an ambitious nonprofit that is disrupting the pattern of inequity plaguing STEM education in schools, particularly in schools with a high proportion of students of color and students from low-income households.
SDF and University of San Diego, Paul says, get the credit for making it all come to fruition.
“If it hadn’t been for San Diego Foundation and University of San Diego, we wouldn’t have known what to do with that correspondence when we got it,” Paul said. “It never would have generated this wonderful nonprofit doing great work in applied STEM education in all 50 states and in Latin America.”
The Premise
Paul is among those who are firm in their belief that the only way to close the STEM opportunity gap is to introduce all children to STEM as soon as they enter their first classroom and to keep them STEM-engaged throughout their time in school. The problem is most preschool and kindergarten classrooms offer no STEM education at all.
Thanks to Paul, his wife, Susan Flieder, SDF, and research alliances with University of San Diego, and Pittsburg (Kansas) State University, that’s all changing through Kid Spark Education and its successful efforts at incorporating the technology behind Rokenbok Toys into STEM learning at an early age.
The challenge: too many teachers can be intimidated just by words such as “engineering” or acronyms such as STEM.
But almost every adult is comfortable reading a story to young children. Why not, Kid Spark Education asks, encourage a story time that includes building things related to the story being read? Or why not incorporate lessons about spatial reasoning and creative problem solving when pre-K and first graders are playing with Rokenbok-inspired building blocks?
Turning a Vision into a Reality
Paul and Susan’s partnership with SDF began more than a quarter century ago after Paul’s entrepreneurial father, Myron, passed away and Paul’s mother asked her son and daughter-in-law to manage an SDF-housed, donor-advised fund – the Orca Fund – committed to protecting the environment.
“Susan, being the very deliberate, incredibly sensible, intelligent attorney that she is, said, ‘Yes, if we get an education in the nonprofit world.’ Susan discovered the Nonprofit Institute within the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES) at USD, and we went and got certificates in nonprofit management. I decided to continue my nonprofit education at USD and got a master’s degree in nonprofit leadership and management. And that was the beginning of our career in philanthropy.”
At an SDF function a few years later, Paul met with a UC San Diego Professor, Dr. Olga Vasquez, who had dedicated her career to serving underserved Latino youth.
“Olga identified that children need foundational STEM fluencies to have a STEM identity, to see themselves as someone who can deal with science and technology,” Paul said.
Not long after, Dr. Laura Deitrick, Executive Director at The Nonprofit Institute at USD, encouraged the team to launch a nonprofit based on the Rokenbok Toys to carry out the vision. The result: Rokenbok Education, which was later renamed Kid Spark Education.
A Growing Effort
Paul and Susan have remained actively involved with SDF and an array of nonprofits.
Susan serves on the board of directors at the San Diego Youth Symphony and the San Diego Diplomacy Council. Paul, a former SDF Board of Governors member, sits on the Kid Spark Education Board of Directors and remains active in developing new STEM products and programs.
Together, they embody the essence of SDF and its 50 years of serving the San Diego region.
“We get inspired when we can see real change in the community, where we see there is an opportunity to make change; that’s where we want to get involved,” said Paul, who added: “Change is really hard, but it only happens through collaboration. Nothing gets done on its own. It’s all a function of being part of a community where good things can emerge.”
Celebrate SDF’s 50th anniversary by joining Paul and Susan Eichen and other SDF donors to help make a transformational change for the issues you care about most – and the issues that mean the most to our community.
Learn more about SDF’s Fifty & Forward Campaign at SDFoundation.org/50.
