Heejae Lim, the founder and CEO of TalkingPoints, has dedicated her career to talking points against educational inequities and used her own experiences as inspiration. From being an 8-year-old immigrant in the UK who struggled with English to becoming a leader in education technology, Lim has developed a platform reaching millions of students, families, and educators.
TalkingPoints is a nonprofit founded in 2015 by Lim based on her MBA capstone project at Stanford University. It seeks to bridge the gaps between schools and families, especially for those who speak other languages besides English, using its two-way text messaging translation tool. Therefore, one would say that language, culture, time, and capacity, among other barriers, have often been obstacles to meaningful engagement with the immigrant families on the part of educators. Lim learned through personal experience that significant gains in a student’s success come from parents. Her mother, a non-English speaking immigrant, regularly met with teachers to discuss Lim’s education while Lim was still young. This taught Lim the importance of her profession.
What began as one school in the Bay Area in 2015 has rapidly grown into TalkingPoints, today supporting more than 8 million educators, students, and families across over 300 districts. TalkingPoints has had exponential growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped push demand for family engagement tools through the roof. The simple messaging tool started as TalkingPoints has now become a full-fledged family engagement solution. It has proved to enhance student outcomes in the areas of test scores, course proficiency, and attendance, particularly with the most under-resourced learners.
In the long term, Lim envisions TalkingPoints to be a technology-driven system of engaging families as an established practice in education. She believes that jointly with parents and teachers, their students stand a better chance of succeeding. With TalkingPoints, her aim is to ensure that every child gets support irrespective of their backgrounds for them to thrive academically. This is what Lim’s work exemplifies: how technology, applied in this way, helps bridge that gap in educational equity and creates stronger opportunities for all.
