NYU Students Offered $1,000 To Become ‘Changemakers’

By Robert Polner

NYU undergraduates will soon be eligible to receive up to $1,000 in seed capital to launch social ventures of their own under a new public service initiative dubbed “Be a Changemaker.”

The project, which begins next month, will challenge NYU students to come forward with “action plans” for addressing significant social issues. The goal of the initiative is to help students feel more empowered to address societal and even global problems that concern them, be they childhood diseases, community crime, or the ravages of natural disasters. The goals of those behind the initiative is to make the act of taking the reins, versus waiting for others to lead, more routine and even expected by students.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for any New York University undergraduates who want to pursue their vision for positive change,” says Gabriel Brodbar, director of the Catherine B. Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU, which is cosponsoring the “Be a Changemaker” initiative along with Youth Venture, a 10-year-old organization based in Arlington, VA. Both the NYU Reynolds Program, which is housed at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and Youth Venture share the goal of encouraging innovative and lasting efforts to tackle social issues sometimes deemed by others as insurmountable, says Brodbar. Youth Venture is the sister organization of Ashoka, a global association of social entrepreneurs. The NYU Reynolds Program, which awards fellowships and scholarships to competitively selected graduate and undergraduate students across the University, seeks as part of its mission to bring a wide variety of social entrepreneurial resources and opportunities to the entire NYU community.

Interested NYU undergraduate students can attend one of the Reynolds-Youth Venture “Be a Changemaker” workshops on Nov. 9 and 16 (see http://www.nyu.edu/reynolds/ for times and locations). At these sessions, they will learn about Youth Venture and how to prepare an action plan for a team project to address a significant social problem. Subsequently, interested students will be assisted in presenting their proposal to a panel consisting of their peers and other adults. When the panel determines that a plan is ready to go, it will be given seed funding of up to $1,000, along with ongoing advice, technical support, and the fellowship of other “changemakers.”

The “changemaker” teams will be asked to provide progress reports and complete impact surveys as their projects are ground-tested and evolve. They will be eligible to seek additional financing through a traditional business plan competition—funding aimed at nurturing social ventures that have had an impact and can be sustained.

Past Youth Venture projects designed by young people have included a volunteer-driven after-school program for at-risk kids, a disaster preparedness packet to provide young people with safety information, Hurricane Katrina and Tsunami relief, and the shipment of $2 million in donated supplies and medical services for children with diabetes in Ecuador and other parts of Latin America.

“Youth Venture is thrilled to partner with the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship to give undergraduate students the opportunity to learn hands-on what social entrepreneurship is all about through launching their own ventures,” says Gretchen Zucker, executive director of Youth Venture

In anticipation of the workshops, Bill Drayton, the founder of Youth Venture and the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Ashoka, who was recently named as one of “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S. News and World Report, discussed the NYU-Youth Venture “Be A Changemaker” project on Oct. 13 when he delivered the inaugural lecture in the “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century” speaker series sponsored by the Reynolds Program. The subsequent speaker in the series will be John Wood, founder and CEO of the organization Room to Read and the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. He will appear Oct. 30—RSVP for the event is required at http://www.nyu.edu/reynolds/news/ speakerseries.html.