May I get some light with my Coca Cola, please?

Check out how a soda bottle, water, a little chlorine, and simple tools can provide 55 watts of light to homes in the Philippines. Social entrepreneurship at its finest!

Video: Venture teaches Something Real

The Seattle Venture, Something Real Productions, inspires young people to connect with their passion and create a positive impact on the global community. By planning events like bboy contests and concerts, the Venture has gained valuable business skills, while motivating other young people to be changemakers.

Check out this great video by Something Real Productions!

When chocolate coins don't work

Hide and seek may have been an exhilarating game when you were younger, but it's not a pleasant activity when you're searching for funds to bring your ideas to life. Luckily, we have a couple places where you can start looking!

If your team needs to raise more money to make a bigger impact, we have resources to help you out! Youth Venture will help you determine your goals and the amount your team needs to raise in order to select the best fundraising option.

Option 1: Create your own branded product line. A product can be from key chains to reusable water bottles – Youth Venture will purchase them for your team as a loan and customize them to reflect your cause. If your goal is to bring clean water to impoverished villages, it's sensible to sell reusable water bottles. You’ll get to brand the bottles with your project’s name, logo, and cause. The money from its sale can help fund your venture!

Here is an example of how thousands of young students around the U.S. are helping thirsty students in Africa through socially responsible product sales:

When young students from the United States learned that many African schools don’t have running water and it was common for thirsty students to skip school so they can fetch water miles away, they decided to help out. They joined together to sell their own branded label of reusable water bottles to bring clean water to the students.

They were able to raise enough money to install PlayPumps in South African schools and communities where kids spinning the merry-go-around would actually pump up water from wells. Students focused on running their projects and selling their products without having to worry about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing, branding, and marketing of the bottles to make this project a reality. 

Option 2: Mobilize your network for “crowdfunding.” The beauty of crowdfunding lies in the collaboration with other supporters of the mission or cause to alleviate social problems. Your team can also meet and get inspired by other passionate, like-minded fellows committed to social change.

Unlike selling branded products to raise money, crowdfunding is done all online. The challenge, then, is finding ways to inspire your supporters to donate money towards your project. This approach is great for teams that have established and are looking to grow their operation and impact.

Asking for donations for a cause sounds a lot like some of the traditional charities you might hear about, but crowdfunding works more like a competition – there is a time limit to achieving the goal. First, set the amount you want to raise and you have until the deadline to reach your goal; otherwise, usually your project won’t be funded. Having the deadline helps build momentum and urgency for your project. So it is crucial to figure out ways to reach out to and galvanize your supporters and harness their collective power to get the project funded. 

To beat the time crunch successfully, your team needs an organized plan and Youth Venture will help you develop that. We will also help with the outreach for gathering supporters and donations! 

Every team has different needs and goals, so before you get started, Youth Venture can help you evaluate which methods of fundraising is best . Whether you are just getting started or are already making big, positive impact on the world, in the end, we are all connected by the common goal of creating a happier, healthier, and a more peaceful place to live.

If you want to start fundraising, don’t hesitate to let us know! Contact Rachel in the global office at yvdc@youthventure.org to get your efforts off the ground! 

"One of those days" by Venturer Scott Warren

This blog post was written by Youth Venturer Scott Warren for his organization, Generation Citizen on December 13, 2011. We love his perspective on failure and what it means to both live and work.

You can tell you’re going to have “one of those days” pretty early on. Before 9 AM, I had forgotten to bring shorts to the gym (so I worked out in pants), forgotten my cell phone charger (and my phone ran out of battery as soon as I got to work) and as I got ready to make my morning coffee, I spilled the grounds all over the kitchen (when that all happens before 9 AM, you should probably go home and start over).

The day got worse. Or at least I perceived it to. I felt completely off my game. I screwed up my personal life. I felt behind on our annual giving campaign. Three people canceled meetings on me. I unnecessarily got cross and annoyed with a team member. And before I knew it, it was 7 PM, and in addition to a still-full e-mail inbox, I had a Red bull, double espresso, and beer all sitting next to me on my desk.

Everybody has days like this. But for social entrepreneurs, they can be more pronounced. There’s a fairly simple logic behind this. When you’re starting something you believe in, work is life: it has to be. Therefore, if work sucks, so does life. And vice versa. So it seems. That’s what it felt like today. And then the spiral leads to thoughts of failure. Fear of me personally failing Generation Citizen. Fear of me failing personally.

So I went home, had a drink, and watched some really bad football. Then I read this: http://www.waldenu.edu/About-Us/38170.htm. A commencement speech by Cheryl Dorsey, Echoing Green’s President, on failure. It’s utterly brilliant. We spend our whole life afraid of failing and it completely hamstrings us. As Cheryl eloquently states, we shouldn’t be afraid of failing. Rather, “Failure is not a dirty word, a socially unacceptable outcome that has to be talked about in hushed tones. Reaching for something that seems so improbable, and maybe it is, but means everything to you is the very definition of opportunity and the lifeblood of all social change movements.”

Here’s the thing: at the end of a day like today, I’m okay.  I’m more than okay.  And even if GC fails, I will be okay.  And so will my team.  I believe in it, deeply.  But the opportunity to engage in this experiment, to see how far we can take this organization and this idea, is pretty powerful in its own right.  I can still fail.  But it’s a little different from failing a few years ago when I was a staff of one and affecting 80 kids a year.

But there’s another thing that all social entrepreneurs have a hard time recognizing: work is not life.  It’s a big part of it.  But it’s not all of it.  I think sometimes I have confused doing good work, which I believe GC is, with being a good person.  They are related, but they are not one in the same.  I have bulldozed family, friends, relationships because of an obsessive desire to work.  But it’s actually an obsessive desire to not fail.  I can take an hour to turn off my phone and be present in the now.  But I don’t.  I need to check my e-mail…to see what’s happening at work.  Why?

The dirty little secret is that I have no idea what I’m doing, work or personal.  I feel like most of us don’t.  I put up a front: in work, we’ve created a 5-year plan, systems, and a high-functioning team.  But in actuality, each day is a completely different challenge.  If creating an organization like this were easy, it would have been done.

And so I’ll wake up again tomorrow.  Hopefully I’ll remember shorts and my cell phone charger and not spill the coffee.  But it’s still going to be a complete challenge.  So instead of complaining about my day and fearing failure, I can only embrace it: this amazing and unique opportunity to create something out of nothing with a completely inspiring cast of supporters and teammates.  And the opportunity to carve a life full of love and adventure.  I have no idea what I’m doing.  But I’m damn well going to try harder to do good work, and try harder to be a good person.

-Scott

Photo credit

YV and Ashoka Fellows make an impact

For the very first time, Forbes has released a list of the world's top social entrepreneurs. Among this prestigious bunch are 10 Ashoka Fellows, one whom began as a Youth Venturer! Check out the full Top 30 list!

Congratulations to Ashoka Fellows: Rafael Alvarez, William Foote, Sam Goldman, Farell Hammond, Jordan Kassalow, Wendy Kopp, Josh Nesbit, Rebecca Onie, J.B. Schramm, and Jill Vialet.

About former Youth Venturer, current Ashoka Fellow - Josh Nesbit

Josh Nesbit spent the summer of his junior year of college researching access to malaria treatment in Malawi. For eight weeks, he lived and worked at St. Gabriel’s, a rural hospital first introduced to Josh by his mother, who is spearheading Malawi’s first physical therapy program at the region. It was there that he witnessed first hand the inefficiencies that limited the impact of community health care workers delivering care in remote regions.

He returned the next summer with 100 recycled cell phones, a donated computer, and a plan to coordinate communication between St. Gabriel and the expansive region under the hospital’s care using existing open-source text message software, FrontlineSMS. During that six month pilot project, which Josh dubbed Mobiles in Malawi, texting saved hospital staff 1,200 hours of follow up time, allowed the hospital to double the size of its tuberculosis program, brought home-based care to 130 patients who otherwise would not have received care, and saved antiretroviral therapy monitors 900 hours in travel time. The success of the project moved Josh to shelve his medical school plans in to devote his efforts full-time to transforming the community health worker system. With close collaborator Isaac Holeman, he soon founded, the organization that is today called Medic Mobile.


Now, Medic Mobile promotes decentralized medical care for the rural poor by maximizing the efficiency and efficacy of community based health care workers using mobile phone based communication systems. Instantaneous communication among community health workers and between community health workers and physicians and nurses at clinical hubs means that citizen health workers can provide care to their communities with much less dependence on a centralized medical facility. Because SMS is simple, affordable, and widespread, it represents a health care solution that can be championed at the most grassroots level. This factor was integral to Josh’s early idea, and continues to be a core foundation of Medic Mobile’s ongoing strategy.

Josh was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2011

A Family of Changemakers

Venturers Jonny and Daniella Cohen were recently featured on Goyoung, a website that recognizes social entrepreneurs under thirty. Jonny founded GreenShields, a project that works to improve the aerodynamics of school buses in order to reduce their carbon footprint. His sister Daniella took a different route and created G.I.V.E. (Go, Innovate, Volunteer, and Educate), which builds friendships between students in Illinois and those of the SDIE school for orphans in Bangalore, India.

Goyoung created a video to tell the story of these changemaking siblings. Check it out and be inspired!

TEDxYouthMonterey: Inspiring Tomorrow, Today

This post was written by Lennon Flowers and published on Ashoka's Empathy Blog on Thursday, December 1st. 

Earlier this month, we had the chance to take part in TEDxYouthMonterey, a day-long event co-hosted by the Monterey Institute for International Studies and Stevenson School, and a veritable army of volunteers and other community organizations. With the theme, “Inspire Tomorrow, Today,” the day drew a packed audience consisting almost exclusively of high school students from the local area,  education enthusiasts, and powerful thinkers and doers who refused to subsist on the status quo.

There was Kendall Ronzano, whose NerdGirlHomes is empowering high school students to lend their hands—literally—to fighting homelessness, by building homes from start to finish, and donating them to families in need. An inventor from the time she could walk, Kendall set herself a goal of building a home before graduating high school, and realized that the millions of high school students across the country represented a powerful untapped resource. There was Joe Kochevar, who invented a new means of coding words through images, and shared a glimpse of what Steve Jobs might have looked like at 17. And there was Shandra Benito, a 19-year-old Youth Venturer, who founded a summer camp program for low-income youth as a participant in one of our “Dream It. Do It.” challenges several years ago, and who shared her thinking on the ripple effect that accompanies every action.

In her earliest years, Shandra was like every other happy and healthy baby. But when she reached two and a half and still had only one made-up word in her vocabulary, her parents began to worry. They took her to a specialist, who discovered she had a "mild to moderately severe" hearing disability. From that point forward, she entered a new normal: her first language was sign language and her parents enrolled her in an all-deaf pre-school, with the result that all of her friends were likewise hard of hearing.

It was only as she entered a public kindergarten that she discovered she was different. Sitting on the rainbow-colored carpet tiles on her first day, she looked around to find that no one else wore hearing aids; no one else had an interpreter; and no one else signed. And so, just like that, her disability became something to hide. She would wave off her parents anytime they signed in public, she hated the word "deaf," and spent recess befriending the librarian. When her parents offered to pay her to play outside, she pocketed the money, and took her books to read outdoors while the other children played.

But at the age of 10, all of that changed. Michael, the 18-year-old son of a family friend, came by the house, and the two ended up talking on the couch all day long. Shandra shared her fears about entering middle school, her embarrassment over her hearing aids, and the feelings of isolation that had been with her since that first day of kindergarten. Having a cool 18-year-old tell her that she should be proud of who she was and that she had nothing to fear was all it took. And so, upon entering the sixth grade—a time in which many kids falter, and begin a years-long journey toward dropping out—Shandra bloomed.

No longer afraid of being different, she carefully explained why she read lips and what it meant to be hard of hearing, and found that her peers were no less likely to talk to her. Her hearing aids, and the radio device she carried, become a makeshift walkie-talkie she and her friends used to communicate in class. But she found her disability had given her something, too: she would instinctively sit next to the kid alone at the cafeteria table, because she knew what that feeling was like.

Now 19 and a sophomore at Seattle University, she is the founder and leader of Reach Out, an organization that runs summer camps for low-income and underserved kids each year, offering the same sort of mentorship, encouragement, and willingness to listen that made such a profound difference in her own trajectory.

We wrote earlier this week about the Bystander Effect: the tendency for individuals, when in groups, to stand by, hoping someone else will intervene to help a person in need. But thats's a tendency that can be countered.

Every child knows what it is to feel alone, and similarly what it is to make someone feel alone: the key, then, is giving students the confidence and self-determination required for applied empathy. 

If the speakers at TEDxYouthMonterey—and those who participated in the hundreds of TEDxYouth events around the world—were any indication, that message is coming in loud and clear. It’s a good thing, too: we could all stand to hear a little more good news in the world.

The Big Apple is in for some serious change

In partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim and NYU, Youth Venture has just kicked off a Dream It. Do It. High School Challenge in the greater New York region. This initiative will enable high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, and corporate employees to build critical 21st century changemaking skills through a regional campaign for high schoolers by which they develop ideas and innovations in creating healthy communities.

Over 85 high school students representing 25+ schools across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut convened at New York University's Stern School of Business on Sunday, November 13 for the first of a series of workshops that will continue through February 2012. The initiative will culminate with a community panel during which teams will present their ideas for Youth Venture seed funding and fellowship. Tremendous thanks goes out to Ashoka staff Cosmo Fujiyama who oversees the engagement along with a terrific team of NYU Ambassadors: Heidi Sloane, Bethany Halbreich, Clayton Lewis, Simone Johnson, Aileen Jiang, and Lily Astiz.

 New York Changemakers... Onward!