Make wiser choices

about school and technology

Guidance for parents, students, and the educators who serve them—grounded in research, equity, and design.

About

Hi!

I build things that help people make wiser choices about school, technology, and the lives they want to live. 

I’ve spent my career in two worlds that don’t always talk to each other: education and technology.

I’m nearing year 30 of teaching history, guiding teenagers through complex ideas from race to revolutions to how to write a sentence that actually says something. I also coach track and field because nothing teaches grit like trying to clear a bar or throw something heavy.

Outside the classroom, I’m the founder of Truth Bridge AI, a research and data company that helps students find colleges where they’ll thrive. I’ve built machine learning tools, counseling systems, and whole frameworks that untangle the college process, especially for families who have been ignored or underestimated.

Before that, I ran Bridge to College, and now Navega, where I work 1:1 with students and families, blending executive functioning, research, equity, and design thinking. I don’t believe in gatekeeping. If I learn something, I build a system so someone else can use it.

I’m currently pursuing doctoral work on organizational change, equity, and digital humanities at USC. My academic background includes time at the University of Chicago (MA), NYU (BS), and UCLA (MA) and professional work at Stanford where I specialize in race, technology, institutional design, and weird human behaviors that shape them.

Recently, I launched Taller Hoy, a workshop and creative space for community, learning, and design. It’s where my worlds meet: teaching, research, equity work, making, coaching, and the joy of building things with and for people. It’s the space where I test ideas before they turn into tools, companies, or algorithms.

I care deeply about making things clearer, kinder, and more just, whether it’s a lesson plan, a matching algorithm, or a system that helps a 15-year old finally understand their own strengths.

When I’m not teaching or building, you can usually find me running, listening to something with a strong beat, coaching kids through their footwork, rearranging my house for the 17th time, or laughing loudly with my son who is the center of everything.

This space is where I write about the questions that keep returning to me:

How do we make better decisions?

How do we use technology as a tool for liberation, not surveillance?

And how do we build systems that actually serve the people in them?

If you’re curious about any of that, you’re in the right place.

  • V

What I Do:

I help educational organizations design systems where more students—and the adults who serve them—can thrive.

  • Truth Bridge (formerly Bridge to College) is data company that matches students to colleges that are an academic, financial, and social fit. As Bridge to College, we raised venture funding from SoftBank and other investors, putting Vielka in rare company of Black and Afro-Latino founders who have raised nearly $1M.

  • I created this character Truth a long time ago when I used to make a comic strip. It’s been nice to merge this character in this way.

  • Navega is a 1:1 service company. In 15 years, we have placed 100% of students into college with funding. We have recently revised our strategy to focus on executive functioning with the aim of college graduation. It’s a more refined service that supports students beyond college.

  • “Navega” means to navigate in Spanish. Adelante!!

  • Taller Hoy is an organization that brings together communities and educators to advance equity in education..

  • “Taller” means workshop in Spanish, and “hoy” means today.

The above came together using what’s below.

From

Research

to Practice

The development of Bridge to College (now Truth Bridge) began with a fundamental question:

What predicts long-term student success?

Rather than relying on intuition alone, our team synthesized research from higher education, psychology, student development, and organizational learning to identify the characteristics most consistently associated with students who thrive in college and beyond. Those findings became the foundation for Bridge to College, Truth Bridge, and the organizational frameworks we continue to develop at Taller Hoy.

Although individual studies emphasized different outcomes, several developmental indicators appeared consistently across the literature. Together, these indicators form our research framework for understanding how students develop, persist, and flourish across educational settings and beyond.

  • An individual’s confidence in their ability to achieve academically and succeed in college.

  • An individual’s dedication to college and the value placed upon a college degree

  • An individual’s comfort in social situations and ability to communicate with others

  • The value an individual places on academics and attentiveness to school work

  • Individual has unusual and/or culturally-related ways of obtaining information and demonstrating knowledge

These indicators were selected because they appeared repeatedly across the literature and, more importantly, because they could be translated into observable behaviors, educational interventions, and measurable developmental outcomes.

From

Research tells us what predicts success. Implementation tells us how to cultivate it.

Understanding what predicts student success is only the first step. Equally important is understanding why students have unequal opportunities to develop these capacities. Our implementation work integrates research on systemic barriers with practical organizational strategies for supporting student growth.

  • Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (created by Margaret Beale Spencer) looks at how individuals make meaning of their environment and social factors such as race and gender

  • Individual is committed to fighting to improve existing system, not submissive to existing wrongs, nor hostile to society, nor a "cop-out,” able to handle racist system, asserts school or organization role to fight racism

  • Prefers long-term goals to short-term or immediate needs

  • Availability of someone to turn to in crises

  • Successful leadership experience in any area pertinent to their background

  • An individual’s desire to be involved in campus activities and their attachment to the college/university

  • An individual’s approach to challenging situations and stressful events

  • Strong self-feeling, strength of character, determination, independence

  • Individual recognizes and accepts any deficiencies and works hard at self-development, recognizes need to broaden their individuality

  • Individual is involved in their cultural community

*This developmental framework was created through collaborative work by Abbie Bates, PhD; Sandie Stringfellow, EdD; Taryn Glynn, MEd; and founder Vielka Hoy (EdD, in progress).

Research

to Implementation

  • Coined by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, stereotype threat is a pressure where people feel that their actions will affirm stereotypes of their group.

  • Critical race theory examines how race impacts outcomes in societal structures, law, and policy. 

Framework Notice
The developmental framework presented here represents original work by Taller Hoy. Individual concepts are grounded in established scholarship; however, the organization, synthesis, implementation model, and associated educational applications constitute proprietary intellectual property.

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