Learn about bilingual bridges

Back in 2017, Alaskan bilingual teacher, Kelly Minks, founded Bilingual Bridges with a mission: to make bilingual education accessible to multilingual learners everywhere. Faced with the harsh reality of inadequate resources, a shortage of bilingual materials, and insufficient training for instructors in her public school classroom, Kelly decided to make a change. She began challenging her colleagues and school administrators with two simple, yet profound, questions:

1. Firstly, with bilingual education programs dwindling across the U.S., where can the growing number of multilingual learners find academic support in their native languages and English?
2. Secondly, without access to bilingual tutors, family members, or friends, who will be able to help multilingual learners understand challenging homework assignments?

Unfortunately, people often responded to Kelly’s questions with shoulder shrugs, eye rolls, and shared frustration. Despite these reactions, Kelly remained determined to find a solution – even if it required her to learn how to innovate. Subsequently, she built Bilingual Bridges, an online tutoring platform that connected Multilingual Learners with certified, bilingual teachers through live, online lessons via Zoom—well before Zoom became a household name! (We’ve since upgraded to Lessonspace!)

To accomplish this, Kelly united a remarkable team of educators and other professionals who wholeheartedly embraced her vision of Bilingual Bridges. Together, they harnessed their collective expertise to scale Bilingual Bridges, providing students around the globe with the support they need to thrive in a fast-paced, multilingual, multicultural world. Today, Kelly is shattering barriers by leveraging community partnerships, evidence-based curriculum, and high-impact tutoring to ensure that all students have access to quality education in both their native languages and new languages