BOOM Challenge 2021 is a social innovation educational program for vulnerable and rural high school young students, to teach them how to identify any social/environmental issue in their community and transform it into a business opportunity in less than 3 months.
We know that with COVID-19 the education system has suffered a great impact in terms of reaching the students with the knowledge, even more in places that are away from urban centres. That’s why we wanted to create something that could complement the educational establishments, put into practice the knowledge the students have, and combine that with the development of social purpose and leadership skills.
We wanted to see how we could motivate and make the opinion of the young one’s a relevant factor in a territory’s sustainable development. It has been an amazing journey in terms of the internal challenges we had to go through, but in terms of the results we are having right now, we are really motivated to keep going and put this program in more territories around the globe.
We had to make everything in a virtual mode because of COVID, but I believe that was a really nice opportunity because it gave us the chance to have a really close experience with international mentors, amazing brilliant national and international entrepreneurs as speakers at the events of the program, and those details were some of the highlights that students did not believe at first.
So this educational program is an amazing creation that combines social innovation tools, STEAM methodology, Chilean national curriculum knowledge for high school students, entrepreneurship and project design tools. Everything is mixed in a really fun and gamified experience that also puts giant experts(national and international) 1 on 1 with the students.
In the first version we had more than 40 students from a really vulnerable territory in Chile and right now the best 3 project teams are presenting their projects to the public interest technology- university network(PIT-UN) with scientists, entrepreneurs, faculty members from the University of Michigan to improve their technology, their methods and their actions. This part I believe is something really powerful. We have been able to connect social/environmental big problems in territories of Chile, led by young people, with experts in the areas from the US to promote those solutions and make them feasible. We had to make English intensive sessions with the teams and mentoring for them so they could explain the best way possible for their initiatives and it has been an amazing journey with them.
We hope that this can contribute to more territories and can bring more amazing young people to raise their voices and promote solutions for their communities so we can help them canalize those solutions. I’m willing to continue working on this, we have the power and the opportunity to push the change to make it happen with help of young students, and it is one of the best ways to build better cities, better countries, and a more sustainable globe. To learn more please leave us a message via mail at: gaf.saez@gmail.com
