EducateDeviate on the Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition

Check out EducateDeviate on Staples

The Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition, hosted by Ashoka and Youth Venture, provides young people and youth organisations the chance to showcase their project online around the world. Projects will be evaluated and voted on, and the best projects go on to win a variety of prizes.

EducateDeviate is one of the projects listed for this competition – check out our application page and leave us some comments! You can see all the other projects (from 46 countries) here.

If you have a project and want to give this a shot, you have until October 15, 2008 6:00 pm EST (21:00 GMT) – which isn’t long!

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Brightest Young Minds – Malaysia?

I just came back from 5 days of the Brightest Young Minds summit in Sydney. The general idea of the summit is to get motivated and passionate young people together to learn about creating initiatives, while also developing actual workable projects to be pitched to potential sponsors.

It started in South Africa and it’s now that country’s most prestigious and well-known youth-based development initiative. It recently arrived in Australia and within the two years has created a lot of good.

I love the idea and I think it should be more widely available. I was wondering if people were interested in doing a BYM in Malaysia.

While there are people trying to encourage young people to form initiatives, such as BarCamp and Young Entrepreneur summits, there isn’t really any clear support and education system that’s comprehensive. Also, information on actually STARTING and getting legal/financial support for your project is pretty low. There are plenty of youngsters with ideas…just no idea how to get them off the ground.

Having 100 other energetic young people, plus the support and knowledge of people in their field (we had Hugh Evans, who is pretty much THE MAN when it comes to youth development in Australia) would go very far in getting these ideas into reality. There would also be actual opportunities for delegates to create and develop those ideas before they leave – thereby avoiding the common youth conference problem where people are so motivated to crate change during the conference, but afterwards their energy drops and nothing gets done.

To get BYM in Malaysia we need to know the following:

• Legal aspects of using the BYM name and concept – is there some sort of “franchise kit”?
• Finding and recruiting young people to be part of BYM(M) 1
• Partnerships and sponsorships with companies and organizations
• Convincing people that BYM as a structure can work in Malaysia
• Getting BYM(M) off the ground and sustainable
• Creating a team of people interested in getting involved with BYM(M) behind the scenes
• Connecting BYM(M) to BYMs in SA and Australia
• Timelines – when do we start work, and when do we have our first BYM(M)?

If you’re interested, or know other people who are, leave me a comment or message.

Know a kick-ass indie designer/event manager/promoter?

(cross-posted to EducateDeviate, Wanna Be A KP, and Facebook)

I’ve got some plans to develop EducateDeviate further (to make it more self-sustainable) as well as to boost my chances at getting KaosPilots funding.

To do that, I need help with the following:

• Web design and development – particularly those who can take my list of “I need my website to do this, that, and the other” and develop a nifty CMS that makes the job easy (more details later) while keeping to a certain aesthetic.
• Graphic design, particularly for postcards and brochures – I have ideas, I just can’t design all that well
• Event management – someone who can take my ideas and work out how to make it happen
• Promotions/marketing/publicity – the maven who can get all that above OUT THERE

Now I am a simple college student, which means I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on this endeavour. (I was looking around yesterday and one company quoted $15,000 for a simple website. DUDE. I could go to UWP again and have change with that money.) However, I would love to support indie young up-and-coming artists/designers/practitioners. I’ve been doing that with fashion and I want to do that with more aspects of my life.

I’m looking for someone who can relate to all this as personal projects – too many other options I’ve seen assume I’m a business and get into business-speak. I want someone that’s human. Someone creative and daring. Someone who would pull me out of my box. Someone young is a bonus.

Know anyone who fits this? Are you willing to help? Drop me a line.