International school service learning
is broken. We rebuilt it.
Gateway matches students with vetted community organizations for eight-week, co-designed projects, beginning in Ho Chi Minh City. Real outcomes for organizations. Real growth for students. Documented results for schools and parents.
Service requirements don't teach.
Real projects do.
Every IB and most international schools require service learning. The intent is real — service learning is meant to build empathy, leadership, and the kind of agency and future ready skills that classrooms can't teach on their own.
The execution isn't. Matching is informal. Scaffolding is missing. Outcomes go undocumented. Schools spend tens of thousands on coordinator time. Parents pay tuition that covers it. Students fill obligations and “check the box” instead of growing from them.
Eight weeks. One project.
Measurable Outcomes.
Discover
Students complete a structured assessment that maps interests, skills, and growth goals to the deeper learning competencies — mastery, identity, and creativity — drawn from Mehta and Fine’s Harvard research.
Match
We pair each student with vetted HCMC community partners whose actual operational needs align with what the student wants to develop. Founding cohort matching is hand-curated by the founder — turning every placement into structured training data for our matching model.
Co-design
Student and partner sit down together and scope a real eight-week project. Our co-design tool surfaces the tensions between what the student wants to learn and what the organization actually needs — turning that conversation into a structured project brief.
Document
Weekly reflections, competency tracking, partner feedback, and a final narrative report — turning service learning work into evidence that schools, parents, and college admissions committees can actually use.
Service learning usually ends with a placement.
Gateway begins there.
Our co-design tool keeps going, guiding the student and the organization through the project they'll actually do together, the outcomes they'll both work toward, and the brief that anchors the partnership. Both sides end with something measurable.
Walk through it →Summer 2026.
Ten to fifteen students.
The founding cohort runs in person in Ho Chi Minh City from July through August 2026. Each student is matched with a vetted community partner and works through a structured eight-week placement — with weekly mentorship from the founder, scaffolded reflection, competency tracking, and a final narrative report.
Founding families also receive priority placement in subsequent cohorts and sibling enrollment privileges.
- —Eight-week structured placement with a vetted community partner
- —Weekly 1:1 mentorship with the founder
- —AI-scaffolded co-design and reflection tools
- —Competency tracking across three growth dimensions
- —Final narrative report for schools and college applications
- —Founding family privileges (priority 2027 placement, sibling rates)
A $150 reservation fee secures your founding cohort spot, fully refundable until your student is matched with a confirmed partner in mid-June 2026. Full tuition is collected before the cohort begins.
Built with the organizations
actually doing the work.
Community partners join Gateway free of charge. Each is vetted for safeguarding standards, project-readiness, and bilateral fit. Our founding lab partner is the VinaCapital Foundation.
“We can be, and we will be your lab. We will be your learning lab. Whatever information we have is yours.”
Rad Kivette · CEO, VinaCapital Foundation
Built from lived experience.
Designed for real outcomes.
I'm a Saigon South International School graduate. Junior year, I spent Saturdays teaching English at orphanages in District 4. I had no curriculum, no continuity, no way to measure whether any of it stuck. By the end of the year, I knew the answer: it hadn't.
Senior year, I tried something else. A few classmates and I started a club called Bliss 4 Youth that worked with the children of our school's local staff. We met weekly, built a real curriculum, and tracked progress over the year. Every student left with improved English.
That's the difference Gateway is built to scale. The platform is grounded in deeper learning research from my studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education with Jal Mehta — the framework that defines what mastery, identity, and creativity actually look like in young people.
Ho Chi Minh City is where it starts. LinkedIn · long_trinh@gse.harvard.edu