By LAUREN ROSENBERG and LUCY MAJSTOROVIC
Monash University students have shown Gen Y are ready to tackle society’s big problems as more than 200 aspiring social entrepreneurs gathered at Monash University’s Social Innovation Summit last weekend.
The summit marked the launch of Monash’s second annual Leave No One Behind program, which will see small groups of students race to develop pitches for their own profitable social businesses and compete to win $10,000 to bring their idea to life.
Program manager Dr Lara Werbeloff said the competition was tailored towards students in the HASS faculties (arts, law, business, education and art, design and architecture) so they could build business skills to address issues in their local communities.
“The skills of humanities students are really critical for solving those challenges … skills like critical and creative thinking and being able to look at really complex problems from multiple perspectives,” Dr Werbeloff said.
“[Young people] want to feel like they're contributing in a really positive way to the world around them,” she said.
The summit saw guest speakers share their triumphs and struggles launching their own startups.
Attendees were challenged to develop their own business ideas based on the UN’s sustainable development goals.
Monash graduate and previous Leave No One Behind winner Winnie Wong described how her mother’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease inspired her to launch her own social enterprise.
“My mum used to love fine arts, cooking and travelling… we offered to take her out, but she didn’t want to be a burden,” Ms Wong said in her speech.
She decided to create her own platform, Assisted Outing, to connect people with needs to assistants, who take them out on hikes, museum trips and other social outings.
“You have to find a problem that resonates with you,” Ms Wong said.
The top three social issues attendees said they wanted to fix when they registered for the summit were education, poverty and gender issues.
Founder of food rescue charity SecondBite and Monash alumnus Ian Carson offered students five tips: focus on solving one problem, research hard, just start your business, always persist and, finally, put together a great team.
“Just remember the Salvation Army started with one person, SecondBite started with one person … you can be that person,” he said.
Other speakers included Hands On Learning founder Russell Kerr, whose education enterprise takes disengaged students out of standard classrooms to work with them on building projects, and Grameen Australia CEO Katrina Dunn, who spoke about leaving her corporate job to advocate microfinance in Australia.
Education and Information Technology student Hayden Keep said at the beginning of the day he hadn’t considered entering the Leave No One Behind competition but the summit had changed his mind.
“Something that was really attractive about this program is that they're aligning it with things that are wider reaching than just 'hey let's get your idea off its feet’,” Mr Keep said.
“There’s only right now to go and get something done, and why not do it with this support … it’s the perfect time.”
Marketing student Natalya Banks said she found the focus on the sustainable development goals useful because they helped her identify real social issues she could solve.
“There’s all these resources available because there’s people all around the world working on solving it,” Ms Banks said.
Business student Sandesh Biyani said the best piece of advice from the summit was to narrow his focus.
“It has to come down to solving one problem at a time, one step at a time,” he said.
The Leave No One Behind program will start tomorrow, August 18,and will include a series of workshops, including prototyping and future business planning, before the final pitch event in October.