Opportunities & Events: June and Beyond

Can you believe we are almost at the half-way point of 2013? If you haven't had time this year to focus on leadership development opportunities, or attend conferences that energize your passion, perhaps the best is yet to come for you this year. It's not too late to apply for the following awards or register for these upcoming events. The sky is the limit--you just have to reach. Good luck!

Opportunities 

2013 Drucker Challenge

Deadline July 1, 2013
The 2013 Drucker Challenge Contest will provide an opportunity for students, managers and entrepreneurs under age 35 to win prizes and gain free access to the annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. The Essay Contest encourages applicants to reach beyond the traditional realm of business to the Arts and Sciences, just as Peter Drucker did. New this year is the Video Challenge. Learn more!

reSET Social Enterprise Awards
Deadline July 31, 2013
The reSET Social Enterprise Awards recognize aspiring individuals with a viable, sustainable, and socially responsible business plan for a social enterprise that will improve the community, create jobs, and demonstrate the possibilities that are created when profit and purpose are pursued at the same time. Applicants will compete for up to $5,000 and public recognition at the fall 2013 reSET Social Enterprise Awards. Apply today!  

Omprakash Volunteer Abroad Grant Program,
Rolling Application, No Deadline
The Omprakash Volunteer Abroad Grant Program offers entrepreneurial students the opportunity to intern with one of 148 vetted partner organizations in 41 countries at little or no cost.  Students can search Omprakash's free database for more information. Omprakash also introduces EdGE, a network of grassroots social projects. Learn more here.

Events

oikos Young Scholars Entrepreneurship Academy
August 25-30, 2013
Zurich, Switzerland The fourth oikos Young Scholars Entrepreneurship Academy provides a unique platform to develop scholars in the early stages of their careers. The academy aims at advancing academic research, building networks and practicing theories. The event includes paper development workshops, professional development roundtables, research talks and outdoor activities in the picturesque Swiss Alps. Participants will also have the opportunity to apply their insights and skills in a HUB Challenge Lab in collaboration with The Hub Zurich and Ashoka Switzerland. 

Summer Academy on Peacebuilding & Intercultural Dialogue
September 1-11, 2013
Vienna, Austria
The Institute for Peace and Dialogue (IPD) has announced this year’s International Summer Academy on Peacebuilding & Intercultural Dialogue which will take place in Vienna, Austria. The 11 day training offers people of all ages and backgrounds a place to discuss and learn about peace and conflict studies from experts with years of experience. The goal of the summer academy is to support institutional academic peace education and strengthen the peacebuilding skills and intercultural dialogue of international society. Learn more.  

Chicago Ideas Week
October 14-20, 2013
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Chicago Ideas Week (CIW) brings together hundreds of the world’s brightest thought leaders to inspire, connect and activate the city of Chicago and the world. With over 25,000 attendees in 2012, CIW is a global hub for new ideas, an ecosystem for innovation and a playground of intellectual recreation. Learn more. 

Enterprise Elevator Pitch Event

November 29, 2013

Cape Town, South Africa   

Enterprise Elevator supports South African entrepreneurs in the start-up or early stage of their development to prepare for and secure an investment partner. Enterprise Elevator functions as a partnership-based platform to support these entrepreneurs and the investors who share their vision. Apply today to be one of the entrepreneurs chosen to pitch their model or business idea to a panel of expert judges. The final 12 pitch applicants will also get access to the investors lounge on the evening of the event, and the opportunity to be fast-tracked into the Unreasonable Institute's 2013 incubation program in Colorado, USA.

Be sure to "like" YouthActionNet on Facebook to hear about the latest opportunities, events, and upcoming deadlines you don't want to miss! 

Bold or Insane? Rafael's Quest to Re-think Recycling

"Less than 1% of materials are recycled in Brazil--In the next five years, it is my hope that S.O.S. will be responsible for increasing this industry to at least 1%." 

The percentages may sound small, but the feat is not--Rafael is determined to double the recycling rate in São Paulo, Brazil--a dense metropolitan area home to nearly 20 million people.

As a Laureate Global Fellow at the 2012 retreat, Rafael confessed to the group "Doing this work, people are either going to call you bold or insane. I think I am a little of both." 

Rafael Henrique Siqueira Rodrigues launched Organized Systems for Sustainability to address challenges in the recycling production chain and create jobs with fair incomes for waste workers. An engineer by trade, Rafael sees social impact work a little differently--he does not call his activities "projects." Instead, he identifies each activity he has developed as a "tool" in his "toolbox" of solutions. He considers himself a problem solver, and approaches each challenge with the tool that is right for the job. 

As an engineer, complex systems are also important to Rafael's work. Rather than focusing on one stage of the recycling process, he works to re-design recycling in Brazil from the time materials are discarded to the time they are re-purposed and used again. 

For example, S.O.S. creates community-friendly recycling receptacles--a large city wall with drop boxes for various materials and beautiful murals illustrating where to drop each material. Next, students volunteer their time to manage the materials on the other side of the wall, and encourage their families to bring their recyclables to school. S.O.S. then organizes waste workers with fair wages to pick up the materials and bring them to the recycling facility. Finally, S.O.S. makes their own products out of some materials, such as paper, notebooks, and other office supplies. Funds from selling the products contribute to S.O.S. operations, and the cycle continues.

See S.O.S. in action in the video below. 

Meet two other environmentally-focused fellows or read Rafael's Top 4 Reasons to be a Fellow.

By Lisa Jones

Making Qualitative Data Count

By Lisa Jones

Qualitative data. Many organizations have it, but don’t know what to do with it. From one line quotes to multi-page surveys, qualitative data can speak volumes about an organization’s impact. The question is, how can organizations synthesize those volumes into substantiated statements that offer a depth of insight into their impact that numbers alone cannot match?

Chris Raine, founder of HSM

Chris Raine, a Young Social Pioneer, YouthActionNet’s partner in Australia, and founder of Hello Sunday Morning, has done just that. Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) is a blogging website that encourages people to undertake a period of sobriety (typically 3, 6, or 12 months) and use this time to actively reflect on the role that alcohol plays in their life. The HSM participants voluntarily participate, blogging about their journey as they experience the highs and lows of a substantial lifestyle adjustment. At its core, HSM is a movement towards a better drinking culture—a platform for individuals to create meaningful change in their lives while being part of a larger community of others taking up the same challenge. 

Soon after founding HSM in 2009, Chris sought out solutions for program evaluation. Since the program leaves it to the individual to decide what amount of alcohol consumption works in their lives, he needed to find a way to measure the overall affect HSM had on a person’s well-being—not just the number of drinks they did or did not consume.  Chris knew he had a treasure-trove of valuable insights—stories of transformation, and stories of slip-ups, documenting the experience with deep personal reflection and honesty. In 2011, HSM had 2,190 blog posts from 1,768 individuals—a total of 846,676 words. The daunting task was determining how to use them. 

To synthesize the content of the posts, HSM enlisted the help of a team of students and professors from University of Queensland. The team used software called Leximancer to identify common concepts occurring throughout all of HSM’s blog posts. The process to determine common concepts began with an analysis of words that appear frequently, either together or apart. Next, the software mapped how concepts were related to one another within the text. The final result?  A map of blog content grouped according to the larger themes of culture, life experiences, and both personal and collective change.

Once the content of the posts was mapped, Chris was able to use categorical data associated with each post (such as number of days the HSM blogger had undertaken the challenge) to draw conclusions. By running a search for posts at particular stages of the challenge against the themes that had been mapped, the team learned that HSM bloggers’ posts change thematically over the course of their HSM experience:

 “In the earlier parts of an HSM experience, an HSMer is more likely to describe their drinking practices, be conscious of peers’ reactions, be focused on individual goals, and seek advice from fellow HSMers. As their HSM experience progresses the thematic content of their blog shifts, first documenting efforts to make personal change and reflecting on their own drinking practices, to then reflecting on drinking culture and in turn offering their own advice and strategies for change to other HSMers.”¹

Through the blog post analysis, the research team was able to prove that the blog facilitates peer-to-peer collaboration—participants use it to document personal reflections, and discuss shared experiences collaboratively. Also, the qualitative data revealed that the HSM bloggers create “an imagined community characterized by particular narratives, norms, and values.”² 

In the effort to substantiate bold claims such as these, Chris and his team used multiple strategies—not just the blog analysis. They administered surveys to randomly-selected participants at the beginning and end of their experience, organized small group discussions, and sent out email questionnaires. However, they encountered difficulties with these other methods such as low response rate, incomplete responses, or variances in when surveys were completed by different participants. In the end they discovered an important lesson: Data was easier to collect when it was ‘naturally-occurring’ or ‘built in’ to the HSM process. Using this learning, HSM built the qualitative questionnaire into the sign up process. 

Throughout their evaluation endeavor, HSM learned the value of qualitative data, but also learned the limitations of data that is collected for evaluation alone, rather than as part of the larger journey. The data in the blog was not written with evaluation in mind—posts are heartfelt, vulnerable, and capture how the participant is feeling at pivotal moments throughout their HSM experience. 

You can’t rate a participant’s sober 21^st birthday story from 1-5, or calculate the importance of her finding time to volunteer on the weekends, but you can begin to understand the commonalities in a shared experience—the struggles, motivations, and turning points. You can take that information and use it to increase program efficiency and empathy, attract more people to participate, and continue to synthesize their collective voices into data that informs a larger discussion on drinking culture. With 10,000 new posts each month and counting, Hello Sunday Morning is well on its way to revolutionizing people’s relationship with alcohol, and Sunday mornings, in Australia and beyond.

Source (1,2):

Hamley, Ben and Dr. Nicoholas Carah. One Sunday at a Time: Evaluating Hello Sunday Morning. Queensland, 2012.

Photo of Chris by triple j