Youth-led Social Change: Become a Part of a Solution to the Most Pressing Global Issues

How could young leaders use innovation and technology to tackle development challenges and aims at bridging a social distance in youths caused by the differences in race, gender, religion, and ethnicity?

The Gooddler social impact youth incubator inspires a new generation of youth to invest their entrepreneurial brainpower into solving the world’s acute humanitarian problems.

Inclusion Is Key to Real Systemic Change. ?Gooddler Social Impact Youth Incubator is an inclusive, participatory program for youths from different socio-economic backgrounds:

• to develop a value-driven character of a leader through discovering and building their leadership abilities
• to foster a development of social entrepreneurship, aimed at solving challenges facing local communities, through learning and mastering necessary entrepreneurial skills.

The Incubator focuses on how young leaders could use innovation and technology to tackle development challenges and aims at bridging a social distance in youths caused by the differences in race, gender, religion, and ethnicity. It culminates with presentations of proposed solutions to the audience of philanthropists, social impact investors, and global civic and corporate leaders at the Social Impact Youth Summit, an annual conference.

Goals:

• To provide youth with an awareness of and exposure to social entrepreneurship: How to see problems as opportunities
• To present a wide spectrum of social challenges, share effective strategies and innovative methods of solving them
• To connect the next generation of entrepreneurs, educators, activists, philanthropists, impact investors, and innovators

MODULE 1. INSPIRE TO LEAD:

Identify strengths and know how to use them. Strength-based Leadership Development.

MODULE 2. GENERATE IDEA:

Ideas Hackathon — explore the issues in local communities and find solutions.

During this Hackathon, Social Impact business model canvas will be introduced and customers segments will be identified. This is also the time when individual strengths are identified and teams are formed. The weeks following the Hackathon, our youth will focus on identifying the needs of local communities, researching solutions that are currently in place, talking to all stakeholders, etc. The goal is to come up with innovative ideas for further testing.

MODULE 3. DESIGN SOLUTION:

This module is all about the Human-centered design process and will include a deep market research, designing solutions, testing assumptions, iterating as needed, all done while being guided by the team of the experts. Weekly meetings will ensure the teams stick to their timelines, all gaps are addressed (technology, financial resources, etc), feedback is collected, iteration is done if needed.

Our youth will get an opportunity to mingle with prominent Bay Area entrepreneurs, VCs, corporate and civic leaders in formal and informal settings to further refine the sustainable business model of their solutions.

MODULE 4. GO TO MARKET:

Provide a blueprint for delivering a product or service to the end customer. Actually getting a product to the market growing the user base and getting traction. Learning from actual product usage and adapting pricing for profitability (or other key objectives).

Youth will get a chance to roll the sleeves and work in their own communities, testing their solutions with civic, nonprofit and corporate partners.

MODULE 5. PITCH IN FRONT OF INVESTORS:

Identify your investors, analyze their investment style. Prepare presentation. Pitch to investors.

We clearly see the growing interest of private investors in social innovation. In the past, actors like development banks, non-profits, and other organizations interested in economic development of a certain area dominated the field, and now for-profit investors start to play a significant role. Among these new players are family offices and individual investors who recognize the potential for actual for-profit return on investments in social innovation.

Here is a list of the Top Social Venture Capital Firms San Francisco Bay Area.

EVENTS:

• Silicon Valley Open Doors Conference — start the program at the Silicon Valley Open Doors technology investment conference in May. Mingle with startup founders, business people and investors to learn about entrepreneurship and to create life-changing connections.
• Demo Days. presentations of proposed solutions to the audience of philanthropists, social impact investors, and global civic and corporate leaders.
• Gooddler Social Impact Youth Summit, co-hosted with the United Nations. The annual Gooddler Social Impact Youth Summit is a vibrant forum for university and high-school student leaders advancing global development to learn, challenge, grow and connect with a global community of the changemakers.
• ECOSOC Youth Forum (United Nations, New York HQ). A selected group will be invited to attend UN HQ in New York to participate in the ECOSOC Youth Forum.