Self-Solving Initiative
We believe that the starting point for any solution lies at the community level by:
- Educating people to identify and characterize specific problems in their daily experience
- Empowering them to develop their own solutions through further education, mentorship, and prototyping of ideas without overwhelming risk
- If necessary, providing financial assistance to create businesses that generate solutions to underlying problems together with LOCAL economic opportunities.
DESIGN BY THE COMMUNITY FOR THE COMMUNITY
To enable this approach, Future Scientist is developing a competition to empower high school students to positively impact their communities through innovative design and entrepreneurship. Working closely with the colegio in Portobelo, Panama, we saw that both the science and humanities students are essential for the success of projects. We are organizing a competition there to design solutions for problems the teams personally face. But there's a twist!
Unlike a traditional design competition or science fair, we require each team to develop a plan to deploy their solution in one or more communities. This mix of science and entrepreneurship will not only solve problems, it will bring students with diverse interests together to solve problems for those around them. Future Scientist is committed to providing mentorship and entrepreneurial support for teams during the contest and additional continued support for the winning teams. Together with the student teams and their communities, we can design for impact and make a change.
We are now extending this competition to adults of towns and villages by condensing the multi-week education and design effort into two days. Much like there are "hackathons" for computer programming where everyone has a shared specific challenge they are working to solve, we are testing the idea of an entrepeneurship hackathon for sustainable solutions. Design FOR the community BY the community!
Unlike a traditional design competition or science fair, we require each team to develop a plan to deploy their solution in one or more communities. This mix of science and entrepreneurship will not only solve problems, it will bring students with diverse interests together to solve problems for those around them. Future Scientist is committed to providing mentorship and entrepreneurial support for teams during the contest and additional continued support for the winning teams. Together with the student teams and their communities, we can design for impact and make a change.
We are now extending this competition to adults of towns and villages by condensing the multi-week education and design effort into two days. Much like there are "hackathons" for computer programming where everyone has a shared specific challenge they are working to solve, we are testing the idea of an entrepeneurship hackathon for sustainable solutions. Design FOR the community BY the community!
