Game Design Is an Economic Mobility Engine. We Have $71 Million in Proof.
Eight years ago, I made a decision that a lot of people in arts education thought was a mistake.
It was time for Urban Arts to grow up and decide where we would focus and where we could be really good. Urban Arts had spent years as a broad-based arts education organization, a little of everything, for as many kids as possible. In 2018, I decided to bet the whole institution on a single, almost contrarian idea: that the art and science of game design could be an engine for economic mobility. Not enrichment. Not exposure. A pathway to career-ready skills and to STEM and STEAM degrees for students who too often don’t imagine themselves within the industry.
That bet required conviction, a board willing to follow me into it, and a curriculum built from the ground up. And it required choosing the right platform to build on. Unity was the platform.
Why Unity?
We evaluated the available game engines against two requirements that usually pull in opposite directions: accessibility for a tenth grader writing their first lines of code, and rigor for a senior designing in 3D. We needed a platform that could meet a beginner where they are and still refuse to let an advanced student coast.
OpportUnity and CommUnity
Two years later, that choice stopped being a technical decision and became a transformative one. At the Unity for Humanity Summit, I met Jessica Lindl and Rachel Pohl. They cared about game design as a creative medium, but what made the partnership real was that they cared more about outcomes. They asked the questions I wish every funder asked: What are your students actually achieving? Where are they enrolling in college? What are they studying? What careers are they walking into?
That alignment — an obsession with student trajectory, not just student participation — became the foundation of everything that followed. We learned from Unity’s engineers and educators. We traded curriculum ideas. Philanthropic investment came too. But the capital was never the point. The shared belief was.