By Ryan MacLean | Project Manager
TakingITGlobal’s head office has been busily bringing new opportunities and resources to young people to help them act on issues that are important to them. With your support, TakingITGlobal connects young social innovators to Sprout Ideas [www.sproutideas.org] and delivers the Sprout e-Course to new groups of young people. We are continually improving the program with more emphasis on new video content, mentors, guest experts, and internal curriculum reviews.
The Equinox Fellowship, in partnership with Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI), recently completed the e-course – a cohort that saw 36 students registered. Participants are from North America, Africa, and the Middle East. Those completing the course are given the opportunity to apply to further opportunities in the Fellowship, such as mentorship and seed funding for their projects. These participants are all pursuing innovative projects in the field of education.
A large cohort of young people is starting Sprout presently, once again sponsored by Microsoft YouthSpark and donors to this page on Global Giving. Of these 47 young people, 27 are from the TakingITGlobal online community as well as the Microsoft Innovate for Good community. The remaining 20 people are from 4 winning teams of Imagine Cup, a global student technology competition by Microsoft.
These 4 teams are the 2013 Imagine Cup Grants winners, whose projects are generally in the areas of health, and leveraging technology to improve life for other people. Teams are from Slovenia, Taiwan, Australia, and Ireland. We’re honored to be working with these teams. We’re currently matching these Imagine Cup teams with experienced employee mentors, who can give general professional, project-related or technical advice based on their careers in the technology sector. This value-add of matching young people to mentors builds off our previous experience running a program to match about 70 young people to mentors. We think this kind of support will be very valuable in helping the winning teams of Imagine Cup succeed with their projects.
Sprout now has a presence on TakingITGlobal’s homepage, which links to a new domain for Sprout Ideas [www.sproutideas.org]. This new site exhibits this program more fully: There’s a video describing the course and including some testimonial from past graduates, and information on the Sprout e-Course, Sprout Self, and customized cohorts of the Sprout e-Course. We’ve also recently partnered with a professional video studio in Toronto to help us create high quality video content for participants in our programs as well as anyone who finds the TakingITGlobal! We’ve recently interviewed Justin Hanna (Manager at Kids Help Phone, and advisor to DoSomething), and Frances Edmonds (Dir. Environment Programs, HP Canada), and look forward to doing many more of these interviews in the months ahead.
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