Back in 1998, Clay Cooper took an immersion Spanish class in Antigua, Guatemala.  He was impressed with the effectiveness of the method.

But he told me he was stunned to discover that his tutor, a university-educated man, lived in poverty. He told me that the tutors were paid low wages and had few students in the off-season.

Cooper told the Miami Herald: “I felt that the only thing preventing him from earning more money was just not enough [year-round] demand for his services.”

Cooper and his wife Cindy, of Portland, Ore., decided to set up an Internet-based business that would link tutors with students year-round and that would pay them a fair wage. Their company is called Speak Shop.

He said that Skype proved to be an effective method to deliver lessons on video or audio. He said even tutors in Guatemala and Nicaragua who had not previously used computers found Skype to be easy.

Students go to the Speak Shop website to pick a tutor and schedule a class. They pay tutors $7 to $10 per hour–about twice the going rate locally. Plus, students pay Speak Shop a monthly stipend based on how many lessons are taken per month.

Over the years, I’ve taken Spanish, but feel stuck. I’ll see if my tutor, Osberto, can move me along with a little help from Skype. I’ll let you know it goes, amigos.

Twice a week, Margo Griffin, who lives in Denver, Colorado, has a one-on-one Spanish lesson with her teacher, Mayra Juárez, who lives miles and miles away, in Antigua, Guatemala. Both attend from the comfort of their homes via the Internet, a webcam and an innovative socially responsible business called Speak Shop.

Mayra Juárez earns extra money by offering Spanish classes over the internet.

Antigua draws thousands of international students each summer to its Spanish schools. But in the off season, many teachers are out of work. Clay Cooper, founder of Speak Shop, noticed this when he took classes here in 1998, and thought the Internet could connect teachers and students year-round. From those roots, Speak Shop was born. Griffin schedules classes on Speak Shop’s Web page, pays online and “meets” Juárez at a specified time, either using the Internet communications tool Skype or Speak Shop’s Web-based software. Mostly, they talk and review exercises Juárez sent by email. But they can also check a word’s spelling via chat and its meaning with Speak Shop’s translator. “This is the ultimate program,” Griffin says.

Thanks to Speak Shop, Juárez, who also teaches at a Spanish school in Antigua, gets year-round business and makes twice as much an hour as she does at the school. She says Speak Shop has been a lifesaver during a time when tighter travel budgets and the country’s high crime rate are keeping visitors away. “Speak Shop has supported me since August,” says Juárez. “I didn’t have any students at the school, because there weren’t any.” Speak Shop charges $10 a class, plus a monthly membership fee of $9.99 to $39.99, depending on how many classes you plan to take. The class fee goes to the teacher.

BY JOSEFINA LOZA

Once a week Steve Milhollin meets his Spanish tutor, even though they’re thousands of miles apart.

He lives in Carter Lake, Iowa. The tutor, Claritza Morales, is in Antigua, Guatemala.

They connect online through Speak Shop, a California-based [sic, Oregon-based] firm that offers tutoring to students worldwide and employs teachers in impoverished countries.

Milhollin liked the idea of connecting with a native speaker online. But little did he know that his Spanish lessons would blossom into something more – a friendship.

Milhollin signed up with the language site last summer. There, he schedules class times, pays for lessons and virtually “meets” his tutor, Morales.

They talk through headsets and review Spanish exercises she e-mails to him. They also use online translators to look up new words.

Morales, a chatty woman in her mid-40s, doesn’t speak much English. So the translator comes in handy.

She’s married with five kids. Milhollin has met them all – online, of course. He’s a 62-year-old retired computer programmer who wears wire-rim glasses and has a 1970s Burt Reynolds mustache.

“We’ve become really great friends,” he said.

He speaks Spanish quite well. He reads at a fourth-grade level, mostly “Judy Moody” children’s books in Spanish.

Morales has helped him with the language. And with a lot more.

When Milhollin fell gravely ill, Morales was there. He lost hair and weight and he got weak. Morales stayed with him online.

As he got better, their lessons progressed. They met more frequently.

“I get a real buzz from Spanish,” Milhollin said. “It’s like classical music. I get chills down my spine whenever I hear it.”

The tutor’s support touched Milhollin. So he started digging a little more into her personal life.

He learned Antigua is home to dozens of Spanish schools that offer immersion language programs. Competition is stiff among tutors, like Morales, who offer cheap private lessons at the schools in the summer to students from the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea.

But in the offseason, many tutors have no work.

So companies such as Speak Shop have sprung up in recent years, offering online language classes through videoconferencing.

Tutors set their own price, between $7 and $10 per hour. Speak Shop founder Clay Cooper said the company doesn’t take any of their earnings, instead charging students an initial fee. However, tutors who use the local Spanish school’s computers to give online classes pay a small fee for the space.

Morales didn’t have a home computer. She would drive – or sometimes walk – an hour or so to a nearby school to log online to conduct her lessons.

“I felt bad,” Milhollin said. “Instead of spending time with her family, she was tutoring me. I wanted to help.”

So he bought her a computer.

“It was a wonderful gesture,” Cooper said. “I was really impressed with his generosity. He wanted to make sure Claritza could tutor more students but also have time with her children.”

Indeed she does. Morales works from her home and makes twice as much tutoring.

As things turned out, Milhollin was her lifesaver.

• Contact the writer: 444-1075, j.loza@owh.com

Twice a week Margo Griffin, who lives in Denver, Colo., has a one-on-one Spanish class with her tutor, Mayra Juárez, who lives in Antigua. Both attend the class from the comfort of their own homes via Internet, webcam and an innovative business called Speak Shop.

Offering quality tutoring to students around the globe, the small U.S.firm employs struggling teachers in Guatemala.

’’I love the fact that our money is going to support that kind of program,’’ Griffin said.

Griffin schedules her classes on Speak Shop’s Web page, pays online and ’’meets’’ Juárez at the specified class time, either using Skype or Speak Shop’s own Web-based software.

They two women talk through headsets and review exercises Juárez has sent by e-mail.

They also use ’’chat’’ to work on spelling and use Speak Shop’s online translator to look up new words.

’’I think this is the ultimate program,’’ said Griffin, who tried Speak Shop when she grew tired of driving to group Spanish classes after work and never learning as much as she had hoped.

’’For less money, I can be in the comfort of my own home with a cup of coffee or whatever, enjoying the class,’’ she said.

SEASONAL WORK

The picturesque town of Antigua is home to dozens of Spanish schools where tutors like Juárez offer cheap, private lessons to foreign students of all ages from the United States, Europe and more recently from countries like Japan and Korea.

In the summer, the schools have enough students to employ hundreds of Spanish tutors. But in the off-season, many have no work.

Several companies have sprung up in recent years offering language classes – from Spanish to Potawatomi, spoken by the Native American tribe of the same name – via video conferencing. Since there are dozens of schools that operate in Guatemala, there is plenty of work for local tutors.

Online education, like that offered by Speak Shop, could solve some of the problems of traditional classrooms, said Michael Horn, executive education director of the nonprofit think tank Innosight Institute, which strives to use technology to solve social problems.

’’There are some really neat ways to customize your learning online that you can’t do in the traditional way,’’ he said.

Online learning programs also offer flexibility of time and place not possible in a normal classroom setting, Horn added.

Horn said he thought programs like Speak Shop were likely to expand to in the future. ’’There are a lot of people who want to crack this space,’’ he said.

However, economic conditions in many Spanish speaking countries prohibit teachers from buying the computers that could provide them with steady work. ’’It makes it difficult for tutors to earn a consistent living,’’ said Clay Cooper, who founded Speak Shop in 2004 with his wife, Cindy.

Cooper saw this firsthand while taking Spanish classes in Antigua in 1998. He visited the home of his tutor and was shocked to discover that the university-educated man lived in poverty. ’’I felt that the only thing preventing him from earning more money was just not enough [year-round] demand for his services,’’ Cooper said.

He thought the Internet could be a way to help connect tutors and students even in the months when most students had to be at home attending classes and most professionals had to be working. Six years later Speak Shop was born.

Speak Shop currently employs 11 tutors – nine in Guatemala and two in Nicaragua. Before they begin teaching for Speak Shop, the tutors learn how to use webcams and videoconference. They also learn to solve basic technical problems.

CONFIDENCE GROWS

’’At first it was difficult,’’ said Juárez, who didn’t have much experience with computers before she started working with Speak Shop. “But I began to lose my fear as I realized it wasn’t as complicated as I first thought it was.’‘

Now she has mastered talking with her far-away student through her headset, simultaneously typing clarifications into a chat box and clicking to another folder to look for the day’s homework.

Tutors set their own price for their work, which now varies between $7 and $10 per hour. Speak Shop takes none of these earnings. However, tutors who use the local Spanish school’s facilities to give online classes pay a small fee for the space.

Four of the tutors in Guatemala now work from home using their own equipment.

’’The fact that they can have a computer and Internet at home is really concrete evidence of the economic change,’’ Cindy Cooper said. Tutors use Speak Shop’s software and online scheduling system for free, while the company makes money from a monthly membership fee charged directly to students—from $9.99 to $39.99 depending on how many classes the students take. Still, lessons turn out to be cheaper than most language classes available in the United States.

Although still small, Speak Shop is growing rapidly. A total of 6,000 hours of lessons were offered in 2008 compared to just 3,700 the year before.

JOB-SPECIFIC CLASSES

Speak Shop also offers specialized programs for various professional fields and is accredited by the California Board of Registered Nursing to offer continuing education credits for nurses wanting to learn Spanish. No nurses have yet tried out the program.

Speak Shop has won recognition for focus on social responsibility. In 2005, the program won a prize for the ’’Best Social Return on Investment’’ from the SET Inventors Challenge: Social and Environmental Technology for the Developing World, a business plan competition for companies that generate social or environmental benefits in developing countries. It also was a finalist in PBS’s Project Enterprise Contest in 2007. The contest recognizes creative, social entrepreneurship around the globe.

The Coopers admit that trying to run a socially responsible business has been challenging.

’’We could do this the easy way and just bring on tutors who are in the United States, or in developed countries who speak English, have access to the Internet and so forth,’’ said Cindy Cooper. “But we’re doing it the way that will have the most social impact.’‘

Juárez now works from home, has a job year-round and makes about twice as much money per hour as she does at the Spanish school in Antigua where she still teaches during tourist season. She said Speak Shop has been a lifesaver at a time when tighter travel budgets and the country’s high crime rate are keeping visitors away.

Her student, Griffin, said she’s sold on the price, flexibility and individually tailored lessons, plus the chance to learn about another culture and have a personal relationship with her tutor. ’’While you’re expanding your vocabulary, you’re also creating an incredible bond with someone in Guatemala,’’ Griffin said.

Published: Saturday, February 21, 2009

Hablas espanol? I can’t count the number of times of I’ve gone to Mexico and vow the next time I return, I’ll be able to converse with a cabbie or utter more than “Cerveza, por favor.”

Night classes or Spanish for Dummies DVDs can be helpful but it doesn’t compare to learning one on one with a tutor.

Clay Cooper, CEO and founder of speakshop.com discovered this in 1998 when he went to Antigua, Guatemala, and took private Spanish lessons from a tutor. “I never thought I’d learn a language, but I got pretty fluent.” It was then that he formulated an idea that was not quite technologically ready for prime time. But by 2005, the technology was in place for him to create speakshop.com, a website that uses video-conferencing software enabling people to learn Spanish from the comfort of their home from live tutors in Guatemala or Nicaragua. What makes Cooper’s service more remarkable, however, is its philanthropic edge. Students can choose from 15 to 20 tutors based out of two well-known language schools, which Cooper has partnered with: Probigua in Gautemala and Ave Nicaraguita in Nicaragua. Typically, these tutors might make $1 to $2 an hour, and their meagre incomes are susceptible to the ups and downs of the tourism trade. Teaching for Cooper’s service has given them the chance to become tutor-entrepreneurs, where they can set their own rates and schedules, a fair trade arrangement that works for everyone and allows them to participate in the global economy.

The first time Calgary radio personality Robyn Adair met with her teacher online, she was given a webcam tour of the school where the tutor works and learned a bit more about the impoverished city where the literacy rate hovers around 50 per cent.

Adair, of Calgary’s Country 105′s Odd Squad morning show, is just one of Speakshop’s online students. Several weeks ago she signed up for five hour-long sessions, which cost around $20. “I did a trial lesson, and I liked it,” says the DJ who couldn’t find the time to take a Spanish class because she’s in bed by 7 p. m. so she can be on air for the 5:30 a. m. show on Country 105.

“This is way more flexible. She’s there and she’s live and you get one-on-one attention,” says Adair, who took some Spanish in university, but now wants to brush up on her skills for an upcoming trip to Nicaragua. Each week, Adair can request what she’d like to work on, whether it’s past tenses or casual conversations. “She’s been very flexible. It’s a really cool idea.”

Adair chose her instructor based on biographical information and her interests. Each tutor has a posted bio, like single mom Arlen from Granada, Nicaragua who took a two-year course to learn how to teach Spanish to foreigners. With the money she makes from tutoring, she hopes to one day become a lawyer.

Cooper says he’s looking at introducing Portuguese classes and maybe a few more in the future.

To learn more go to speakshop.com, where there are also opportunities to help the communities where the tutors live.

The sound of Spanish vocabulary and laughter echo around Kerri Piette’s kitchen table.

Each week Piette takes Spanish lessons from Leonor Chivichón. However, Piette lives in Carlisle and Chivichón in Guatemala.

The two women connect through Speak Shop, a business that offers Spanish lessons from native speakers via the Web.

“We laugh a lot and compare notes about culture and current events,” said Piette, who uses a Web cam to talk face to face with Chivichón.

Next week, Piette will put her Spanish-speaking skills to the test, when she returns to Honduras to volunteer to Montaña de Luz, an orphanage.  The first person she hopes to impress is Celestina, an orphan, whom Piette considers a daughter.  “She (Celestina) teases me relentlessly,” Piette said.  “I promised if she studied her English in school, I would practice my Spanish so I could talk to her without using a dictionary.

While Piette’s Spanish has improved with Chivichón, she is also pleased to support fair-trade practices.

Speak Shop, a Portland, Ore., based business employs tutors from Guatemala and Nicaragua, allowing them to keep all of their hourly wages, which range from $7 to $10 an hour.  The company charges customers a subscription fee, ranging from $9.99 to $39.99 a month.

Students in Burlington High School’s alternative program also use Speak Shop to learn Spanish.  In this program, students take classes at night and enjoy the flexibility of having a Web tutor, said Burlington Superintendent of schools Eric Conte.

The School Department is also exploring the idea of adding Speak Shop as a supplement to the classroom.

“It’s not just a way of providing Spanish, but a way to add depth to a program,” Conte said.

Speak Shop tutors, who also teach at Spanish language immersion schools, say the business allows them a better quality of life and more time to spend with family.

“I think it’s (Speak Shop) not only going to change their (the tutors’) lives, but change the lives of their children and that to me is extremely rewarding,” said Clay Cooper, owner of Speak Shop.

Cooper began the business in 1998, after completing a Spanish-immersion program in Guatemala.  He was struck by the country’s impoverished conditions, and wanted to help tutors earn extra income in the off season, when tourists weren’t seeking lessons.

Piette said her enhanced Spanish language skills are critical to connect with children at the orphanage, many of whom are infected with HIV and AIDS.  “It (the orphanage) was going to be a hospice for children to die, but what happened was they started receiving antiretroviral drugs and living – and now it’s their home,” Piette said.

For the past three years, Piette and her son Jarrett, 18, have visited the orphanage.  “They’re always in our minds,” Piette said.  “There’s pictures of them on the mantel – we miss them.”

THIRD WORLD POVERTY IS AN OVERWHELMING THING.

Those who have seen it with their own eyes return home chastened by the experience but can think of no earthly way to make a dent in the misery.

After all, what can one person, one family, one couple do by themselves against such a monstrous enemy?

BrainstormNW, April 2008

The obvious answer is to write a check. Maybe it’s not a Bill Gates-sized check, but giving something – anything at all – seems right.

Even so, while gifts of money salve our conscience, they seem to disappear, without having the substantive impact envisioned.

Folks grow weary of feeling ineffectual, reasoning that a check, even many checks, will never replace what is truly lacking: a viable economic system that allows people to advance themselves. A marketplace.

In time, many givers shrug it off and get on with their lives.

Cindy and Clay Cooper are non-shruggers.

Not content to take the checkbook route, Cindy Cooper and her husband have decided to give the real thing: the gift of capitalism.

Yes, it’s the fish story again – the gift of a fish versus the gift of a fishing lesson that results in a lifetime of support – but with a 2008 twist: Give someone a fish and they eat for a day, give someone access to a virtual global marketplace of fish buyers and they eat for a lifetime.

The Coopers’ Speak shop, a nearly 2-year-old venture based in Portland, is a picture of perfect timing, marrying the growing need in a global marketplace to speak other languages with Internet technology that allows a virtual immersion experience.

Speak Shop’s one-on-one Spanish lessons are taught from Guatemala via live videoconference to Americans who have found their professions – especially in legal and medical circles – increasingly international.

The coopers provide the technology platform and act as the bridge between a growing crowd of students and their Guatemalan tutors. For this serviced, the Coopers receive a $9.95 membership fee from each student and then pass on full lesson fees to the tutors themselves, who for the first time, have clients year-round and businesses they can run and manage themselves.

Fascinating Oregonians - Cindy Cooper

It all began when Clay Cooper, a web tech guru who never traveled went on a trip to Guatemala to follow his career goal to “do something international.” He met up with a college-educated Spanish tutor living a surprisingly impoverished life.

It occurred to him that a man with such a bilingual skills lacked only one thing: a market in which to offer his commodity. The wheels began turning.

Cindy completed the vision, supplying her international experience growing up in Brazil and her unwavering belief in capitalism as a tool to bring about social good.

The result: A marriage, a business and a third-world venture incubator all in one.

Cindy, who says her time in corporate marketing for Nike gave her practical ideas for businesses to aid in developing countries, believes the power of business for social good “is still largely untapped.”

To date, Speak Shop has taught some 5,000 lessons online and seeks soon to recruit tutors in other countries and offer other languages.

The effect on tutor families has been nearly instantaneous, she says. Instead of struggling for necessities, Speak Shop tutors are able to stow away cash for their children’s education and to complete their own.

Even more, Cindy says, the tutors have become entrepreneurs rather than just survivors. “They’ve started developing marketing and business skills. Over time, something has shifted in how they think of their role,” she says. “Now that they’re out of survival mode, they think, ‘What else can I dream about?’”

Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2007 - Fair Trade Spanish

Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2007
By Laila Weir

How Speak Shop uses the Web to help teachers earn more and students pay less.

When Michael Parker sits down to his private Spanish tutoring sessions, he pays his teacher $8 per hour, which is much less than the $25 per hour he was previously paying to his teacher in Iowa.  But his new teacher, Yesenia Mateu Grave lives in Guatemala, where wages are a fraction of those paid in Iowa.

Thanks to Web conferencing, Mateu Grave teaches students around the world via a site called Speak Shop, combining audio, video, and online chat for a classroom-like experience.  During her classes she converses with her students entirely in Spanish, reviews their grammar, and helps students with their writing.

The possibility for teachers like Mateu Grave to export their services directly to students in wealthier countries is as new as the high-speed Internet.  Win-win pricing is one advantage: Students pay less than they would in their home towns, and teachers earn more.  Online classes also ensure that teachers work even when tourists – their usual in0person students – are scarce.  “We have the opportunity to earn a bit more money,” says Mateu Grave.  “It’s more constant than tourism.”

Giving teachers in developing countries access to the much wider, and richer, global market is the driving idea behind Speak Shop, an award-winning company whose mission is to create a Fair Trade marketplace in language lessons. Co-founder Clay Cooper conceived of the idea for Speak Shop after studying Spanish at Probigua (Proyecto Bibliotecas Guatemala), the nonprofit language school where Mateu Grave works.

“In Guatemala, I saw some of the worst poverty I had ever seen, and I realized that even skilled, hardworking people, like Spanish tutors, struggled to earn a decent living,” he writes on the company’s Web site. “Students were seasonal and when hurricanes hit, visitors stayed away.”

So in January 2005, Cooper and his wife, Cindy, launched Speak Shop as a “Web-based marketplace where tutors became entrepreneurs.” The company went online with a small group of teachers from Probigua, which

SSIR, Summer 2007 - Fair Trade Spanish

provides the computers and Internet connection for the teachers in return for a fee paid by their students. Through relatively low-cost search engine ads, the Coopers say Speak Shop has attracted hundreds of students, enough to provide significant additional income to the school and to the teachers.

In December 2006, tourists were rare enough that at one point the brick-and-mortar Probigua school had just a single student. But that month, the seven Speak Shop teachers worked a combined 229 hours online. That averages out to about an extra week of work per person, paid at twice the in-person rate. “Speak Shop gives us the opportunity to improve our lives or, during difficult times, to survive,” comments teacher Milvia Vásquez.

Speak Shop’s appeal to students is apparent: Some 90 percent of those who take a free trial lesson offered on the site go on to sign up for paid classes, according to Cindy Cooper. Now Speak Shop is expanding into Nicaragua and launching a new Web site, with more features and the capacity for handling a higher volume of students and classes. Its plan is to continue moving into other countries and, eventually, to offer additional languages.

In the meantime, Speak Shop is picking up plenty of prizes. In 2005, the company won the Best Social Return on Investment Analysis Award in the Social and Environmental Technology (SET) Inventors Challenge. Last year, it snagged an InnoTech Innovation Award at the Oregon InnoTech Conference. Most recently, readers of Fast Company voted Clay Cooper one of the magazine’s “Fast 50” – the top 50 “leaders, innovators, and technology pioneers.”

Certifiably Fair

The Coopers based their company on the same ideas of worker empowerment and trade equity that underpin Fair Trade product companies. To this end, they created what is in effect a Fair Trade service company that allows teachers to set their own rates and their own hours. Speak Shop simply provides the technical framework – the Web conferencing, the online scheduling interface, and IT support – along with marketing. “The tutors are not our employees,” emphasizes Cindy Cooper. “They work for the students.”

To reflect the teachers’ independence and to keep the system transparent for customers, the Coopers set up a dual-fee system. Students pay a monthly membership fee to Speak Shop that is separate from the hourly fee they pay the tutors. This is in stark contrast to traditional language schools, where students have no idea how much, or little, of their fees filters down to the teacher. The Coopers say they’ll continue monitoring the effectiveness of this arrangement, because transparency is the key to their Fair Trade-inspired goals.

“You know what the worker is getting and the worker knows what a fair wage is,” says Charlotte Opal, vice chair of the standards committee at Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, the umbrella organization for numerous Fair Trade labeling initiatives worldwide. “That information is empowering to them. That information could spill over into other teachers’ wages and the wages they get for non-Internet classes.”

Fair Trade services represent “a new frontier” of the Fair Trade movement, according to Opal. Similar ventures, such as forays into Fair Trade tourism and Fair Trade software development, exist, she says, but are “very rare.”

Speak Shop is currently seeking official Fair Trade certification from IFAT, another international Fair Trade association. Certification is important because Fair Trade, written with capital letters, is not a vague concept of economic justice but a very specific set of guidelines to which products must conform. Standards for Fair Trade services aren’t yet defined, and some Fair Trade traditionalists might resist expanding the term. But Opal says Speak Shop’s model complies with some fundamental tenets of the movement. “This is directly linking the producer to the consumer,” Opal says. The teachers “are empowered in the marketplace. That’s exactly what Fair Trade is supposed to be about.”

Convenient and Competitive

Normally, consumers expect to pay a premium for Fair Trade products, but so far Speak Shop’s main selling points are its low prices and convenience, though students are also enthusiastic about getting to know someone overseas. (Parker eventually traveled from Iowa to study in person with his teacher.) “You have no commute time to your classes,” points out Kathy Longo of Minneapolis, who found Speak Shop via Google. “There’s more flexibility” to schedule classes at night or odd hours, and “it’s really affordable.”

Longo says she and her husband paid $30 each for hourly lessons with a tutor before finding Speak Shop. In comparison, Speak Shop’s going hourly rate is a bargain-basement $8, of which the teachers take home about $4, after paying Pay-Pal and Probigua. Speak Shop’s membership fee ranges from about $10 to $40 per month, depending on how many lessons the student takes. These rates are similar to those of the company’s few online competitors, most of which are individual teachers using Skype, the Internet-based long-distance service.

But what happens if – or when – a company with no social focus swoops in and undercuts the company? In Speak Shop’s model, teachers are free to lower their prices to stay competitive. But at that point, the company’s Fair Trade principles could provide the edge for them to hold out for more – especially if the company receives Fair Trade certification.

Still, staying competitive and continuing to refine the pricing system promise to be among the company’s main challenges. The technology itself also poses problems, because many teachers in developing areas lack the hardware necessary to teach online – an issue the company will have to confront as it expands. The more Speak Shop can help teachers access the technology – in addition to the Web forum – the more it will be able to bring its global reach into those corners of the world that need it most.

The seed was planted in the winter of 1998, when Clay Cooper ’00 traveled to Antigua, a beautiful, historic city in Guatemala, to soak up some culture and learn Spanish at an immersion school. the experience opened his eyes and touched his heart.

“The tutors were living in poverty,” says Cooper, who graduated with his wife, Cindy. “They were very bright and well-educated, but there was little demand for their services. There just weren’t enough people going there to study year-round.”

Six years later, the Coopers would try to change the bleak existence of those tutors. Armed with a business plan developed at Thunderbird, the couple quit their jobs and in June 2004 started Speak Shop, which links tutors in Guatemala with students everywhere via videoconferencing and the Internet to learn Spanish in a one-on-one, face-to-face settings.

“We always wanted to start a business from scratch. This was a great opportunity to do that and help some people,” says Cooper.

Prospective students click onto the Web site, register, find a tutor and make a reservation. Students log on at the appointed time and are able to see, hear and exchange text with the tutor. Cost is $5 per hour, with a $9.99 monthly charge. Tutors, who work at a Guatemalan school, receive about $4 per hour, a far cry from the $1.50 an hour they received before Speak Shop was created.

For the Coopers, the business satisfies both their entrepreneurial appetites and social consciousness. The company recently won top honors in the Social and Environmental Technology Inventors Challenge, which estimated it will bring in a $57 million social return to the teachers in 10 years.

“I enjoy being able to have an impact in people’s lives on a daily basis,” says Cindy Cooper. “This really doesn’t feel like work — it’s engaging and inspiring all at the same time.”

Future plans call for the Spanish-language business to expand by finding tutors in other developing nations, including Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico.

March/April 2006

Here’s a chance to learn Spanish by speaking one-on-one with tutors in Guatemala – without even leaving your living room.  Speak Shop enables students around the world to take personalized Spanish lessons on their computer via videoconferencing, allowing for instant audio and visual

Adoptive Families Magazine, March/April 2006

 feedback.  At $5 to $6 per session, Speak Shop is cheaper than standard private lessons, and your participation helps fight poverty in Latin America: Speak Shop pays its online instructors higher wages than schoolteachers earn in Guatemala.  Plans for offering other languages are in the works.  Sign up for lessons at www.speakshop.com.