NEW YORK, March 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The national nonprofit Basta is proud to announce that it has received a generous grant from the Schultz Family Foundation. This grant will allow Basta to further invest in new tech tools to tackle systemic underemployment, while also increasing lifelong social mobility for early career job seekers.

New AI solutions are poised to change just about everything about how we do business, but few institutions are using new technology to change who does business. Every year, one million college students in the United States are underemployed upon graduation. Research from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation indicates that early career underemployment causes lifelong wage depression, suppressing both wealth accumulation and social mobility. Ensuring that young college graduates find great first jobs is an important first step to closing this gap.

"Despite massive improvements in search and customization, it's still surprisingly hard for first-job seekers to find a job that's the right 'fit,'" says Basta Founder and CEO Sheila Sarem. "Our Seekr tool helps people do that, and through this partnership with Schultz, we are solving this problem at scale. We've begun amplifying our reach by democratizing access to Seekr LITE, providing everyone an opportunity to experience the unique impact of Basta's approach."

By combining Basta's proven track record as a national leader in supporting social mobility for underrepresented young people with the Schultz Family Foundation's dedication to establishing and supporting sustainable career pathways for young adults, the two are finding innovative solutions to career navigation tools, backed by the power of AI. Drawing inspiration from the Schultz Family Foundation's American Opportunity Index (AOI), Basta will be integrating a new "job match" score into Seekr, its AI-enabled career navigation tool. Eventually, job seekers will be able to upload a resume and job posting link to a large language model, and receive an immediate "match" score, paving the way for additional personalization and customization that demystifies early career employment. The "match" tool automatically processes available job postings to filter out irrelevant or misaligned positions, allowing for opportunities that align with the user's profile to be highlighted. The enhancement of this tool will allow for hundreds of thousands of college students and early career job seekers to access real-time personalized career navigation.

"We believe that with the right tools and career navigation resources, young adults can fully tap into their potential and achieve career success," said Marie Groark, managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation. "We are thrilled to be partnering with Basta in their efforts to use innovative tools to empower young adults in their job exploration toward meaningful careers."

"Young people come to us, and they have very little sense of how people actually get jobs," says Basta CEO Sarem. "Who can blame them? We don't make this easy, as a society, and our job as an organization is to chip away at this and other barriers to the American dream."

About Basta
Basta is closing the employment gap for first-generation students, enabling them to secure great jobs, launch careers, and change the face of leadership in the workforce. First-gen job seekers have what it takes to succeed but often face systemic barriers in professional knowledge, networks, and opportunities.

Since 2016, we have built innovative, data-driven solutions ensuring students convert their hard-earned degrees into a great first job. Through personalized career preparation and partnerships with top employers, we are accelerating the professional journey of thousands of first-gen students at 300 campuses…and counting! Basta participants are now thriving in first jobs at Bloomberg, Snap Inc., Citi, DonorsChoose, and over 100 other companies. Let's jumpstart first-gen success together. Learn more at: projectbasta.com.

About the Schultz Family Foundation
The Schultz Family Foundation's mission is to create greater opportunity, accessible to all. Our work is deeply rooted in the lives and values of our co-founders, Sheri and Howard Schultz, who believe talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. We seek to apply the lessons they have learned over the decades to seed innovations and scale solutions to help young people successfully navigate the transition to adulthood and positively impact the trajectory of their lives. We are investors in unleashing potential and unlocking opportunity, working in partnership with employers, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and governments that share our aspiration of enabling everyone to access the full promise of America. Learn more at: www.schultzfamilyfoundation.org

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SOURCE Basta