Chip Linehan has always felt driven to make the world substantively better. He speculates that this drive was forged through challenging personal circumstances, from feeling like an outsider as a kid and, importantly, from his parents’ passion for civic involvement.

While building his career at New Enterprise Associates, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms where he became the youngest person to be named partner and co-managed the firm’s health care practice, Chip co-founded a nonprofit in San Francisco to help students overcome systemic barriers to achieving college degrees. When thinking back to the beginning of SMART—which remains a thriving, high-impact nonprofit—Chip says of his co-founders, “We were in our mid-twenties, and we were too naïve to realize that it might be difficult, so we just did it.”

Two decades later, Chip felt it was time to do more. He enrolled in Harvard’s Doctorate of Education Leadership Program. As part of his coursework, Chip reimagined what a public high school could look like. That assignment turned into the vision for Building 21, a nonprofit committed to designing school models that adapt to meet learners where they are, help them to pursue their interests and passions, and create pathways to college and career success.

Since its launch in 2014, Building 21 has opened two lab schools in Philadelphia and Allentown, Pennsylvania. With no admissions criteria other than district residency, the high schools are built on a three-pronged foundation: 1) relationships are paramount—young people learn best when they feel connected to and valued by others; 2) permeable infrastructure—students are pushed out into the surrounding community for “real world” experiences, and community leaders engage with students within the school walls; and 3) competency-based education—students track learning progress based on mastery of competencies that measure post-secondary readiness, rather than the time they have spent in a certain course or grade.