More than 85% of social enterprises shut down within the first three years of operation. A major reason for this is limited access to specialized technical expertise and talent, which is essential in the initial, crucial stages of developing a solution. Emerging and early stage social enterprises either lack the required resources or direct them to other pressing needs to stay afloat. These services are costly largely due to the need for highly skilled and technically trained people. This results in institutional and operational hurdles, and limited growth for these impact organizations. Simultaneously, there is a rapidly growing pool of students and industry professionals looking for social sector learning opportunities. The Impact Collective harnesses this opportunity and embodies the value of building a network and ecosystem for collective action – the collective mobilizes and matches students and industry professionals with social enterprises who have technical needs. It brings together industry professionals, domain experts, and students from various disciplines and technical areas to form interdisciplinary technical consulting teams to serve impact organizations for social change.
In the US, there are 70 million baby boomers who own 2.34 million Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the country, employing more than 25 million people. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy and have generated 64% of new jobs annually. Unfortunately, up to 70% of current owners will not be able to sell their businesses when they are ready. The large number of retiring owners, coupled with the uncertainty of successful exits, poses a threat to millions of jobs and jeopardizes the owners’ safety net for a comfortable retirement. 2ndWind aims to create a more efficient platform to facilitate SMBs’ transitions, helping retiring owners achieve their retirement’s goals, whilst continuing the creation of job opportunities and prevent layoffs associated with SMB closures.
Black Girls Dreaming is a multimodal sensory art installation that epitomizes the value of art for social change. The installation brings to life the multiple and often contradictory experiences of Black girls. It is a place for Black girls to hear, see, smell, taste, and witness their own lived experiences. As suicide rates among Black girls continue to rise we are compelled to create this space as a communal healing space for Black girls and allies to join us in our efforts to make the world a more livable and safe place for all Black girls. Further, this silent art exhibit features interactive art rooms exploring topics related to the multiple experiences of Black girlhood. Each room in the exhibit is a carefully created space that features the art work of Black girls across the African Diaspora.
Every year, millions of people suffer brain injuries, yet diagnosis and treatment guidance is limited by traditional healthcare options. Confidence aims to improve the experience of brain injury patients and healthcare professionals by using a patient’s smartphone data to provide optimized and personalized care. After a suspected or known brain injury, healthcare professionals will direct patients to download the Confidence application to their smartphones, which will allow the application to locally access and analyze the patient’s data to analyze for changes correlated to brain injury, such as cognition, mobility, emotional stability, and general activity. A summary of this information will be provided to the healthcare team so it can be used to assist in diagnosis and guide treatment options. Ultimately, Confidence will give each patient customized rehabilitation that increases their recovery and opportunities to continue thriving in their community.
The NFT Inclusion Project pitches at the Spring 2022 Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day, May 4, 2022.
NFTs use blockchain to prove the originality of any online content, and thus have the potential to revolutionize how we make and invest money online. Yet, women and minority groups are once again excluded, with a 95% male creator market who receive 77% of all NFT revenue, and males accounting for 3x the ownership of non-males. The NFT Inclusion project aims to create an NFT marketplace that focuses on principles of access, education and community building for a previously excluded voice in both the technological and financial ecosystems. The goal is not to encourage women and minority groups to break into a world that isn’t designed for them, nor are we looking to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it is to take a model that we’re familiar with (ie. online shopping for big fashion retailers like ASOS) and apply it to invite a wider audience into the world of buying and minting NFTs.
Over the past 20 years, vaccinations have prevented over 2 million deaths. This triumph, however, has not been a panacea. Today, 1 million children in low- and middle-income countries continue to die from vaccine-preventable diseases each year. This inequality is largely fueled by technical challenges surrounding the administration of vaccines using hypodermic needles. The MEDiRoller, consists of a novel, handle applicator, containing a spring-loaded delivery system and one of our two types of single-use polymeric microneedle cartridges. The two types of cartridges include a novel cartridge containing a hexagonal solid microneedle roller, that can raster across skin to treat larger surface areas, as well as a MNP cartridge containing a sterile biomedical sponge for sterile vaccine or drug containment and loading, followed by delivery through hollow microneedles. This Big Idea, if successfully developed, will revolutionize vaccine and drug delivery in low-resource communities.
We need to set a robust way to price carbon dioxide to allow markets to price in the cost of climate change. The most accepted method to price carbon employs complex models that are owned and run by scientists and policymakers in silos. Organizations, citizens and stakeholders don’t have access to them, and these models static data. Carbon pricing DAO’s plans to solve this issue by enabling open access to these models by cloud-hosting them, and providing APIs for web2 and web3 access. Additionally, Carbon Pricing DAOs will also build realtime climate oracles, that will assess the earth state, verify them and cryptographically sign this crucial data to these models, so that they’re up-to-date. Futhermore, it will develop a DAO creation tool that allows any organization to setup their own model, and achieve consensus on price-setting through this DAO. In conclusion, by allowing organizations to accurately set carbon Pricing for themselves, we will enable CO2 to be treated as a precious asset in the climate crisis.
Imagine graduating from college and having to wait three to five years before getting a stable job — this is the story of many young Nigerian college graduates. Madojo seeks to connect college students, employers, and entrepreneurial opportunities in Nigeria by hosting and micro-credentialing professional case challenge experiences. The name Madojo is coined from the words for community in the three major languages in Nigeria (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba). As a community of learners and opportunity seekers, the web-platform combined with in-person networks across major private and public universities in Nigeria will prepare students through real-world business cases to bridge the experience gap between the skills that students have and what employers in Nigeria seek in ideal candidates. The goal is to be a community of the future where professional trust is built on shared experiences and expectations that are publicly verified on a blockchain through micro-credentialing.
Sotira is a SaaS platform for sellers and resellers who sell products through Instagram or on ecommerce platforms like Etsy, Poshmark, Depop, Shopify, StockX and GOAT. This platform allows users to add all their income streams on one dashboard, so they can analyze and compare growth for each of them. Some features include ecommerce income stream management, financial tracking, expense tracking, sales logging, profit optimization and profit forecasting. Aditionally, it also helps sellers to easily create and mint NFTs to promote their small businesses and online stores and provides tools to help sellers analyze payments in different cryptocurrencies. Ultimately, Sotira plans on partnering with exchange platforms to enable sellers to invest profits from their ecommerce businesses into cryptocurrencies. By doing this, Sotira aims to help sellers and resellers, many of which are women, have a clear view into how much profit they are actually earning so they can optimize their income streams and price products more optimally.
