Kushaan Shah teaches social media to help the needy find jobs

Social Rise wants to make the internet simpler.
Through the nonprofit, founder Kushaan Shah teaches social media to low-income folks, people experiencing homelessness and refugees. He believes it’s one way to empower those people and help them get jobs.
Shah, 22, teaches most of the classes himself in public libraries or at the venues of Social Rise’s partner organizations. The organization is backed by donations. Classes can average as high as 20 participants.
We met Shah, who lives in Ward 3, during a recent InnovatorsBox event about new media, where he was a panelist discussing what media means to Social Rise. He described the nonprofit as “very, very grassroots.”
The Washington Post wrote a story last year about how Social Rise helped newspaper vendors market their location and target city events using Twitter.
Shah himself is a business major turned technologist – a migration familiar in the #DCTech community where we’ve found many former law and politics majors. We talked to him on the phone about one of his favorite students, where he sees Social Rise going and the one reason he might need an intervention.

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This interview has been lightly edited.
So you’re from Boston. As a recent Boston transplant myself, I’m curious, what led you to move from “the Hub” to the Capitol?
I went to the University of Maryland. When I was applying for jobs after college most of them were just in the D.C. area. But what motivated me to stay after my first job was how there’s this neverending circle of innovation in the civic technology field.
Definitely. So what made you take the leap and actually start this nonprofit for tech education?
When I was in college, I was doing this program that required me to get an internship in the nonprofit space. So I decided to volunteer with Lift [a nonprofit that tackles poverty] in D.C. And I worked with a lot of people coming off the street, looking for jobs, housing, government benefits.
It was really sad because a lot of them spent all this time on resumes and then wouldn’t really get any response from companies. You had no idea if anyone even saw it. The fact that they didn’t really know how the internet worked made it all the more frustrating.
And so I thought, “How can I make the internet simpler?”
I realized I had used LinkedIn to apply for a few jobs in college. I learned things like how many conversations you had prior to the job is really important. It suddenly struck me why we teach social media. So why weren’t we teaching the same things among social services?
When did you start Social Rise?

It was around January last year I started thinking about it. I just decided to write down a curriculum of teaching LinkedIn, around February, March 2015.
I went to the National Conference on Ending Poverty that March where I talked with nonprofit professionals who worked with social services. I just asked them, “What are your biggest frustrations?” And what they said was, “The job search.”
But they were teaching MS Office and how to write resumes. None of them ever saw social media as a tool for the job search. So we started teaching LinkedIn in May 2015 and expanded later into Twitter.
Can you tell me more about how SocialRise works, and who it helps?
So we still give classes about Linkedin for people applying for work. And even if they don’t get the job, someone reading their resume and contacting them is a big morale boost.
But we’ve realized jobs weren’t the only things people needed. Social media can also be to market small businesses – so we’ve been teaching Facebook to refugees and immigrants, too.
It was really crazy to see people, especially women in their 50s, 60s, who immigrated here from all the over world. And all the sudden they’re using Facebook to advertise their culinary business or their fashion business.
One of these women became one of my favorite participants. She was this really famous writer in Ecuador. But when she came back to the U.S. she didn’t know how to find an audience. We taught her how to target audience and communities on Facebook.
And you do all this while still working as an IBM consultant, right?
Yes. In project management and user comfort. There’s a lot of alignment with that and Social Rise because not everything with social media is intuitive.
What I want to do is take communities’ challenges and needs with social media and bring that to UX developers. I want to focus on user literacy, making products more acceptable instead of pushing the users. How can we make LinkedIn and Facebook easier to use?
Do you ever see yourself transitioning into doing Social Rise-type work full time?
Initially, it started off as a side thing. Obviously, it’s grown from there. So I do take time limits, and breaks. Take a week off here or there. It’s easy to get burnt out.
We are right trying to put our workshops online, as open source, in case I’m not here.
Do you have any future plans for developing Social Rise?
Having a support system after the training is hard right now. It’s not necessarily in people’s best interest to have a guest lecturer come in for only a day. So we’re brainstorming ideas for that support system.
We’re also helping out a PhD research project out of North Carolina University. The student is researching on how tech impacts people’s perception of their social economic status. So we’re looking to give her all this data from our first year. I would also love to involve her in Social Rise workshops. It’s something we’re helping spearhead with her.
At the end, we always like to ask something to help get to know you better. Is there anything about yourself that no one knows?
I’m a huge theatre fan and recently got really into the musical Hamilton and can almost recite the entire musical by heart. I recently participated in Hamilton karaoke of every song in the musical. And also Rent, Spring Awakening — there’s a lot of musicals that if I start listening to them, I’ll listen to them for five days straight until I need an intervention.