Our Story
Common Good Learning Tools (CGLT) began in 2019 when our founder, Pepper Williams, left his previous job after a corporate merger made his work life unfulfilling, and set out to try to create a company where he could fully control his own destiny and work on his passion project, a teaching and learning tool that he named Sparkl (after his son, an 8th grader at the time, advised him that by dropping the “e” the name would avoid ridicule by middle school boys).
His big break was a January 2020 meeting with Henry County Schools, who took a chance and hired him to create a one-stop platform for educators, families, and students. That collaboration led to HenryConnects (the first instance of the product we now call Cureum), which expanded statewide the next year through a partnership with the Georgia Department of Education. GaDOE also recruited him to build a new application for their CASE® publishing needs; that turned into Satchel (Georgia called their version of the app SuitCASE, but in CGLT’s home base of Portland the hipsters carry around satchels, not suitcases). Henry, Georgia, and our third Cureum partner, Arizona, soon started using Sparkl as well, and our current product suite was established.
Since those initial years, Pepper has gathered a diverse team of educators and engineers who share his goal of maximizing the amount of good we do in the world, not the amount of money we make. CGLT is proudly independent: no investors, no debt—we just have a mission to make a difference. Our tools are affordable, scalable, and are increasingly being offered for free to the public as we grow. We feel grateful to be able to enable states, districts, and even other ed-tech platforms to make standards-aligned and competency-based learning more equitable, accessible, and impactful, all for the common good.