Young Social Entrepreneurs

The other night I was asked to be a judge at the Corporate and Community Social Responsibility (CCSR) conference for a youth social enterprise competition hosted by Child and Youth Friendly Ottawa. It was an interesting experience for me for two reasons: 1. the ideas pitched by young people and 2. the conversations I got to have with the judges.

Let's tackle the first part of this interesting experience: The Ideas Pitched By Youth

I have to say that overall the courage that these young people had to stand up there and talk about their ideas was quite wonderful. Some of these young presenters were as young as 12 years old. Imagine yourself at 12 years old standing in front of a room filled with adults as you talk about this amazing idea you have, heck think about yourself at whatever age you are now, could you stand up in front of a room filled with adults judging your ideas and your opinions?

Although these young competitors were wonderful I did have a few criticisms and a few concerns. The judging criteria that was handed to us were based on A) Societal Impact B) Innovation and C) Sustainability. Three great areas for judging a social enterprise contest. I didn't feel that almost any of the competitors ever once really addressed what their societal impact to a larger community would be, some skimmed over it but none stopped and really examined it and told us the whole story. Then there were the other two categories: Innovation and Sustainability.

Overall I thought the 2 youngest presenters were amazing just for getting on stage and in fact they may have done the best jobs in terms of showing their true feelings and exhibiting their passion for what they were talking about. That said I have to say I was particularly underwhelmed with the 13-18 and 19-24 age range. When I think of youth I think of wildly imaginative young people and to be honest what we saw on stage was simply a young version of smaller executives. Their minds had already been molded, they knew what was accepted as the norm for a competition and they executed that quite well. I guess my expectations were a bit too high perhaps. I was expecting someone to get up there and wow the crowd with their most innovative ideas about how we can be better serving the world and we just didn't get that. We had ideas that all had been done before with a small personal twist on them or for some projects just another version of an already played out idea in a different part of the city. Not only were most of the ideas not really innovative but I definitely found that many of the ideas had not really focused on the sustainability aspect. Most of the ideas were looking at just being grant based and if they hadn't thought about being grant based then they had not really thought about how they were going to sustain themselves for a longer period of time (this is a rant for a whole other post coming up next).

So I guess my question is this are we sucking the creativity and the imagination from youth all to soon? I believe that wildly imaginative ideas still exist in their heads and in their guts. Do we, as adults model behaviour that does not allow these youth to break the mold? I'm not sure what the answer was for this particular competition but I plead to youth do not ever model what you think a "business" person should be or how you think a "business" person should act. Instead think about who you are, where you come from, the energy and creativity you have, give us, the judges an the audience an experience. I guess that last part is what I was looking for, I wanted to experience passion and excitement and a sense of wonder from the presenters. Show me how passionate you are, forget that you are being judged, live your dream on stage.

Now if I can switch gears for a minute I just wanted to note that I also had some wonderful and insightful conversations with some other members of the judging panel that gave me a whole other flurry of thoughts. I was going to post those thoughts in this article but I think I will hold off and if you read the next blog post you will find my thoughts in there. The next post will be around Not-for-profits and For-profit business models, what are the differences and what did we discuss about each of these. So if you're interested look out for the next post as I dig a little deeper into the profit and non-profit world.