About Social Capital Builders
Social Capital Builders partners with organizations to strengthen access to opportunity by helping youth and adults understand, navigate, and actively engage the connections that drive economic mobility, hiring, retention, and long‑term outcomes.
WHY WE EXIST
Across workforce, youth development, justice, education, and employer systems, programs work hard to build skills, offer opportunities, and track outcomes. Yet access to opportunity often remains uneven, unpredictable, and difficult to sustain.
We saw a consistent gap: while programs measure what participants know, they rarely have structured ways to understand or strengthen who participants are connected to, or how those connections influence real outcomes.
Social Capital Builders exists to help close that gap by making connections a deliberate, measurable part of every opportunity strategy.
Meet the Team of Professionals
Edward DeJesus
Ed serves as Project Lead at Social Capital Builders, guiding the design and implementation of the Opportunity Navigation System across partner programs. He works closely with organizations to align strategy, practice, and capacity-building efforts that strengthen access to opportunity for youth and adults.
Project Lead
Cera Doering
Dr. Doering serves as Instructional Specialist at Social Capital Builders, working with programs to support students through community-connected learning models. She also advises on instructional design and program policies to ensure alignment with educational standards, learner needs, and implementation goals..
Instructional Specialist
Charles Dotson
Charles serves as Justice Program Coordinator at Social Capital Builders, bringing deep experience training mentors and supporting justice-involved populations. He is a certified MST therapist and holds a master’s degree in public health, grounding his work in evidence-based practice and systems-level understanding.
Justice Program Coordinator
Anvay Kumar
Anvay serves as the Technology Lead at Social Capital Builders, overseeing the design, integration, and maintenance of the technical systems that support opportunity navigation and data-informed practice. He ensures our tools are secure, scalable, and aligned with real-world program needs, translating complex frameworks into reliable, usable technology.
Tech Lead
OUR APPROACH
Our work focuses on strengthening connection access as a measurable, learnable, and supportable part of workforce and youth development practice.
Rather than replacing existing programs or systems, we partner with organizations to add structure, shared language, and guided practice around how opportunity actually moves through people, organizations, and institutions.
Our approach is human-guided, practice-based, and designed to fit real program environments—supporting both staff capacity and participant action without relying on proprietary platforms or extractive data practices.