Next Steps

In May 2022, Crafting Heroes is submitting a pitch to begin a request for funding from America's Seed Fund through the National Science Foundation to create a sustainable framework for delivering high school internship opportunties in the Extended Reality space. Deidre LaCour, an alumnus of the program at William J. Palmer High School, is co-founding Crafting Heroes in this new direction, which will move the leadership of the organization to a person of color with a technical background.

For the 2022/2023 school year, Crafting Heroes is primed to expand HoloQuest: Space in partnership with the Space Foundation. In fact, the Space Foundation team has already begun the process to align the work to grant opportunities that will be submitted to turn the currently unpaid internships for students into internships that have the potential to be paid or to have scholarship/equipment incentives included. Ultimately, the goal is to partner with organziations like the Space Foundation and use the funding from America's Seed Fund to create paid internships for students. The Space Foundation is already putting together an application for the Unity for Humanity Grant to co-create curriculum for immersive space education. We will also be implementing a S.T.E.A.M. Factory in Palmer High School for on-demand fabrication.

We are excited to take next steps and adapt our approach based on feedback from our students, industry partners, partner schools, and community!

To read the Crafting Heroes Business Executive Summary, click here.

America's Seed Fund "focuses on transforming scientific and engineering discoveries into products and services with commercial and societal impact. The deep technologies we fund show promise but their success hasn’t yet been validated. And, each year, we award $200+ million in research and development (R&D) funding to about 400 startups across the United States. America’s Seed Fund is a program within the National Science Foundation and housed within the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships."

We are hoping to be one of those 400 startups funded in the 2022-2023 cycle to expand our work with kids and create sustainable intership pathways for students working with holographic computing.