Exploring social entrepreneurship with Beau Soleil students

​To celebrate the 110th Anniversary of College Alpine Beau Soleil in 2020, students from Year 7-9 worked on a social entrepreneurship project, coming up with a sustainable celebration product for the school community and Alumni, selling it to fundraise for good causes. To support them, I ran a Flow In Action Youth Entrepreneurship Workshop, connecting them to their creativity, mapping their ideas to the UN SDGs and into value propositions, ready to pitch. 

On a sunny Saturday in April, I ran the first workshop with the students on-site at their school. Working in teams, each group downloaded their idea, turning it into a value proposition that would be refined into their pitch.

Flow In Action Youth Entrepreneurship Workshops focus on taking incredible ideas and turning them into workable solutions; complementing the Flow In Action Innovation & Impact Workshops which focus on learning how to have those ideas.

By the end of the workshop, every team had their value proposition mapped out and had started to fully explore the ‘wicked problems’ of supply chain to source their materials from ethical and sustainable sources.

I returned to hear their pitches on a rainy afternoon in June. The students had taken on board all of the advice and insights I’d shared with them, and every 3-min pitch made reference to ethical supply chain, the UN SDGs being targeted, modelling social enterprises in their approach to covering costs and creating surplus.

Every team did an excellent job, bring together creativity, ideas and curiosity for taking action.

​When I work with students like this, whether online or face-to-face, I'm also embedding wellbeing and resilience tools - empowering them as the new generation of innovators taking action the planet. Thank you to their amazing teacher Aurelia Thompson-McNicol who commissioned me to work with them. 

From the very first interaction I had with Elaine, two things were clear: she knew what she was talking about and she had what it takes to help my students raise the game.

Elaine was easily reachable and extremely proactive, which meant that she already had a strong sense of what we were trying to achieve before she had even set the foot in our school.

Sharing the core values of our school as well as deeply connecting with her target audience, Elaine led our students to go beyond what I thought them capable of, embracing and making their own the notions of 'value proposition', 'value chain structure', 'profitability model' as well as 'social, ecological and leadership awareness'.
​
Suddenly the UN Sustainable Development Goals were no longer an element you needed to refer to at some point in your presentation but a clear call to action that resonated in all of the students' decisions...'
Aurelia Thompson-McNicol, College Alpin Beau Soleil 

Solution: Youth Entrepreneurship Workshop
Topic: UN SDGs, Entrepreneurship
​Commissioned by: College Alpine Beau Soleil, Villars, Vaud, Switzerland
​Date: April/June 2019

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