By Sanya | Creative Content Lead
Where this all began
We’ve been working in thousands of government schools in Bihar since 2012, teaching kids skills at school through stories, games and action-projects. Can you make something out of nothing to solve a problem? Can you re-design your bicycle to be all it can be?
Then, we had a friend visit our schools program and he asked us a very good question.
“You are teaching kids to become entrepreneurs once they finish school. Is there any way you could design entrepreneurial challenges for them now, that would give them a chance to become entrepreneurs at school?”
Good question.
To answer this, we designed a challenge for every school. The Kids' Sustainable School Challenge.
We asked kids one very important question.
“If you could change your school in any way, from the building to make it green, to what you’d like to learn, to solving a problem for everyone in school, what would you do?”
We asked this question through 300 super-duper Going to School team members visiting schools. We asked this question through a kid-powered radio show. We put flyers in newspapers, and posters on school walls.
If you called us last year and said you wanted to be a part of it, we sent you in return a School-Enterprise-Businessplan-Notebook, with a pre-paid business reply envelope.
Kids were asked to complete eight steps that followed design-thinking principles. Find the problem you want to solve. Ask people if they think it’s a problem too. Use your research to design a solution. Make a prototype. Test it with everyone. Refine it. Determine your marketing strategy. Get the word out. Complete your plan and post it to us in New Delhi, India.
We thought hey, we’ll receive a few hundred plans.
We received 10,000 completed school-enterprise plans from kids.
We had to ask volunteers to help us grade, log and assess kids plans (there were so many).
Kids’ school-change plans tell us kids want more space, clean water, teachers who are present every day, birds nests, tress, fresh air, places to play, girls to study, girls to play, sports pitches, stuff to play sports with, safe rides to school, innovative bicycles, lots of recycling, no trash.
101 kids and their plans have been shortlisted.
They have all been invited to a mega red carpet event. They are coming to Nalanda, Bihar with their parents and teachers, it promises to be an exciting day.
All day, 101 kids will present their ideas. They get 1 minute. And the judges are kids who have come from Mumbai, India. Kids get a chance to win mini-grants to action their school-change projects in their schools. The grants will go the schools to action kids plans.
To raise money for the kids' school-change plans, we asked you (and all our friends on GlobalGiving) to choose a plan and invest, we were thrilled to see the power of collective action.
The race to Nalanda continues. It’s all happening on Sunday, April 23rd, 2017 and you are invited. If you can’t make it in person, do follow our Livestream on Facebook.
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