Voices

Armed with a patented algorithm to convert song lyrics into literacy tools, Gil Perkins (doing business as Sage Salvo) developed a digital platform to facilitate the mass collaboration between music artists and classrooms for literacy instruction. Salvo is the artist, scholar, and social entrepreneur founder of Words Liive. Sage is a 2020 Education Pioneers Fellow, 2018 AT&T Aspire Accelerator Entrepreneur, 2018 LeanLab Fellow, 2017 Clinton Global Initiative – Social Entrepreneur, 2017 4.0 Schools Fellow, and 2017 Camelback Ventures Fellow. He is also a 2017 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School where he earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) with a focus on Social Innovation. In 2019 and 2017, Sage was honored as a selection into the US Delegation of Entrepreneurs to represent the U.S. at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in The Hague and in Hyderabad, India; respectively.

Sage’s start-up, Words Liive, is a futuristic education technology start-up, organized around a ‘Literacy Moonshot’ goal for the year 2040 which is to get 2/3rds of the nation’s students to grade-level reading proficiency. He’s raised and earned over half a million dollars for the Words Liive app, called the Opus app, which is a new Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology that allows for on-demand and real-time lesson development, discovery, and sharing of unique literacy lessons that integrate popular song lyrics and other contemporary texts into existing reading and writing instruction.

Sage also participated in the mEducation Alliance’s event Going Global. 

For more information: Words Liive