Ashoka Youth Venture and Best Buy Children’s Foundation have teamed up to create the @15 Community Impact Challenge. Ashoka is known around the world as the institution that coined the term social entrepreneurship and has been actively supporting social entrepreneurs for nearly 30 years. Ashoka’s Youth Venture works to encourage this spirit of innovation and social entrepreneurship in young people. With Ashoka’s Youth Venture’s support youngsters design and launch their own social ventures to target social issues and challenges.
The Best Buy Children’s Foundation hopes to empower teens at the most critical time of their lives – early adolescence. Its @15 programs provide teens with a platform to affect social change. @15 working together with Ashoka’s Youth Venture has created the Community Impact Challenge. Youth teams from around the nation applied to enter the competition. A set of 15 finalists was chosen based on an assessment of their potential for community impact and a vision of how they would create sustainable change.
The finalists are now listed on the @15 site and over the next 2 plus weeks, visitors can vote for the most deserving teams. The top five teams selected will get $5000 each and the next five will get $1500 in prize money.
The finalists consist of an exciting bunch of teenagers from all over the country with ideas that touch every part of the world. From ventures seeking to provide support to local school kids to ones that look to bring water to far off lands, these ideas show how young minds continue to come up with creative ways to deal with the toughest social issues. You can read about each of the winners on the Youth Ventures blog. You can help select one of the winning teams and it costs you nothing, just register and vote.
The Social Ecosystem 