Swiirl teams up with former Raptors star Jerome Williams for 40-city student tour

A Canadian startup is going on tour with NBA legend Jerome Williams, the former Toronto Raptors player commonly known as Junk Yard Dog (JYD).

“You’ll be amazed at what can be created when a kid’s being dead honest.”
Jerome Williams

Toronto- and San Francisco-based community engagement platform Swiirl will be powering a 40-city, North American tour for William’s non-profit educational program Shooting for Peace. The tour kicks off at York University in Toronto on Nov. 1. Through it, Shooting for Peace aims to bring financial literacy, mental health, and wellness education to more than 500,000 students in the Greater Toronto Area.

Williams’ foundation, the JYD Project, is making a multi-million-dollar, in-kind donation of his new book, R.O.L.E Player, to students in participating school districts on the tour. It will also offer access to Shooting for Peace’s digital, financial, and mental wellness curricula. Shooting for Peace will use Swiirl’s new agentic artificial intelligence (AI), Pulse, to listen in on Williams’ sessions and learn what topics matter most to students and educators. This will help curate programming.

“You’ll be amazed at what can be created when a kid’s being dead honest,” Williams told BetaKit in an interview, adding they may not know about compounding interest or checks and balances. “You assume that parents are at home teaching kids. Well, that might not be the case,” he added.

The tour builds on an existing partnership Shooting for Peace and Swiirl struck earlier this year. Brands normally use Swiirl to commission students and youth to create content, from artwork to social media videos, to engage communities at the local level. Swiirl’s new offering is meant to turn that content creation into insights, gathering a community’s unfiltered thoughts on a brand while compensating users.

“Instead of having to ship it out to one school in particular, we can go district-wide with the press of a button,” Williams said. “When you plug and play with Swiirl’s AI system, it’s game over, because now the students are not only engaged with the educational piece, they’re also getting some monetization out of it.”

The Shooting for Peace tour has 34 cities booked across North America, including Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, with at least six more planned stops. Williams looks forward to kicking off the tour in the city he once played in, and said there will be time for students to have lunch and play basketball while learning about financial literacy and other life skills.

“I might have some surprises in the bag. I don’t want to let anything out, but I can tell you this: JYD will be in the house with his shoes laced up,” Williams said.

With files from Douglas Soltys. Feature image courtesy Swiirl.