Girls' Education 

Workshop

Young Change Agents' social entrepreneurship programs help youth to see problems as opportunities. Teacher Maxine Welfare organised and participated in this program, with 83 students taking part at James Busby High School on Tuesday 13 June, 2023. Students worked in teams in this "hackathon-style" workshop to identify problems within their communities then ideate, validate, prototype and pitch. More than 10 social enterprise ideas were pitched at the end of the day. 

Community Problems Identified

Students discussed what community meant to them and worked to identify problems and create a vision for the future they want to create. Community problems identified by youth included:

• Migrant restaurant owners do not receive enough funding or support for their business to survive.
• Some parts of the school can be dirty and unpleasant.
• The gaming community has too many toxic members and lots of people rage when they lose.
• Smart phones like Apple are too expensive for young people to access.

Student Social Enterprise Ideas

All teams pitched their ideas to the group and their social enterprises are summarised below: 

• Helping Paws and Claws: An animal shelter that recovers cats and dogs from the wild, cares for them, and then sells them to good homes.
• Water Beads: A business that collects plastic waste found in public waterways like ponds, lakes, rivers, and the ocean. They then break it down into microplastics and create simple jewelry and accessories to sell.
• Cultural Food Location: An app that helps locals discover delicious restaurants that sell ethnic cultural cuisines in order to support migrant businesses in the area.
• Table Punching Bag: A miniature punching bag for your table so that gamers take out their anger on something durable instead of destroying their valuables or hurting themselves in the process.

Skills Developed

Throughout the program youth teams worked their way through a number of activities, developing skills in multiple core competencies whilst preparing for the final pitch. Identifying a problem, creating a social enterprise solution and developing an idea which solves a problem they care about and pitching for feedback.

#Critical thinking 

#Creativity 

#Collaboration

#Communication

#Problem solving

#Storytelling

#Decision making 

#Pitching

#Leadership

#Design thinking

#Budgeting

#Managing time

We thank the team from the Academy for Enterprising Girls for this worthwhile program. Our students had a great day and learned so many valuable skills.