How Strong Start Works
Strong Start is a mission-driven nonprofit created to help communities intentionally build life, learning, and career readiness from the earliest years.
We focus on the years when habits are forming, identities are flexible, and trajectories can still be shaped. By strengthening foundations early, we help children develop the internal skills they need to stay focused, adapt to change, and navigate challenges as expectations grow.
Strong Start works behind the scenes with schools, families, foundations, and community partners to design early learning conditions that support long-term growth, not short-term fixes.
Our Role as a Nonprofit
Strong Start exists to advance a clear charitable mission: to help communities stop leaving readiness to chance.
We do not operate as a traditional program provider, and we do not promote a single product or curriculum. Instead, Strong Start focuses on how early learning systems are designed so children practice critical skills intentionally and repeatedly, until those skills become internal muscle memory.
As a nonprofit, Strong Start:
Raises philanthropic and community funding to support early readiness efforts
Partners with public and private school districts, educators, and community organizations
Supports classroom implementation in ways that are sustainable and aligned with long-term student outcomes
All decisions are guided by student well-being, community context, and the belief that early investment reduces the need for later remediation.
Our role as a Nonprofit
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Our role as a Nonprofit 〰️
How Early Readiness Is Implemented in Classrooms
To carry out its mission, Strong Start licenses and deploys UNYTUS, a K–5 Character and Career Readiness program developed by educators and owned by Stratf LLC.
UNYTUS is a tool, not the mission.
Strong Start licenses UNYTUS at fair market value and uses it as one implementation pathway to help schools build early readiness foundations in a proactive and intentional way.
This structure allows:
Strong Start to remain mission-first and funder-accountable
Schools to access a high-quality, classroom-ready solution
Continuous innovation and improvement of the tool’s educators rely on
Strong Start maintains full programmatic oversight and ensures that the use of licensed tools directly advances its charitable purpose.
How School and Communities benefit
Through this model, schools and districts receive:
This approach allows districts to act early, when impact is greatest, rather than relying on reactive interventions later in a student’s journey.
Why This Model Matters
A story of skills, systems, and what we leave to chance.
Many of the challenges schools face in middle and high school have roots in the earliest grades, long before they show up as academic gaps, disengagement, or mental health concerns.
Long before “graduate portraits” became policy language, Dr. Michael Trimberger lived what they are meant to represent.
As a young athlete, Mike learned what discipline, focus, resilience, and judgment feel like through daily practice. Every decision mattered. Every setback required adaptation. Progress was earned, not guaranteed.
Those same durable human skills later carried him into technology, leadership, and public education. The environments changed. The expectations changed. But the skills that mattered most did not.
Along the way, he noticed something unsettling.
Too much of success was left to chance.
Some students benefited from systems that recognized and nurtured these skills early. Others had to stumble into opportunity, or never encounter it at all. When systems failed to intentionally support early development, potential quietly went unrealized.
Strong Start exists because readiness should not depend on luck.
Habits, mindsets, and skills form early, when learning is still joyful and trajectories can still be shaped. That is why Strong Start focuses on:
Investing when habits are still forming
Supporting educators with developmentally appropriate, classroom-ready tools
Aligning early foundations with long-term life and career readiness
By separating mission stewardship from product ownership, Strong Start ensures integrity, flexibility, and long-term impact, allowing communities to focus on what matters most: helping every child build a strong start..
Partnering With Strong Start
Strong Start partners with:
Foundations and philanthropic organizations
School districts and educational leaders
Community stakeholders committed to long-term student success
Together, we expand access to early readiness foundations and help communities invest in the years that matter most.
For partnership inquiries, please contact:
Executive Director, Jit Sihra
[jsihra@unytus.com]