Our ongoing projects: from education access to youth engagement in policy
2018 is coming to an end. It’s been an amazing year for our hub, with new Shapers joining us and increased participation in the global WEF community. But the core of our work is our projects: our responses to some of the global and local challenges. In this post, you can read about our active projects — the bar for 2019 is set, and it’s high! 🚀
Group-shot from our last workshop 📸
Project 1: Vacation For All
Holidays is an amazing time that provides space for play, learning and restitution. Unfortunately, it can also lead to huge inequalities. Children who can go with their parents on exciting and stimulating holidays over the summer get a huge academic, cultural and social advantage over the classmates who have to stay home.
Vacation For All is driven by the purpose that “All children should be entitled to a good and enjoyable holiday” at least once a year. Vacation For All thus works towards developing new broad programs that can help far more children on vacation in a socially and economically viable way.
Denmark has a long tradition for helping all children enjoying the benefits of a relaxing and rewarding vacation. More than a hundred years ago the organisation Feriebørns Udsendelse organized vacation exchange programs for less priviliged children spending the summer with farmer families.
Vacation for All aims to revitalize this strong and proud tradition by creating scalable vacation exchange based on two basic elements: Active involvement of Danish families wishing to take care and open their doors to less privileged children and combining it with fun, theme-based summer camps.
A pilot for the summer 2019 is currently in the planning.
Contact Project Lead Maria Flora Andersen for more info: maria.flora.andersen@gmail.com
Project 2: Enable for Life
Enable for Life is a Danish NGO that gives 120 orphanage girls in Tamil Nadu a safe childhood. They provide housing pay for their tuition on a private school.
Global Shapers has supported Enable for Life since 2017 with three things, 1) Organizational structures, 2) Investor pitches, and 3) Fundraising and charity dinners. In March 2019, Enable for Life aims to raise DKK 250.000 with a charity dinner event with the help from the shapers.
Contact Project Lead, Mathias Esmann, for more info: mathias.esmann@gmail.com
Project 3: The quota 2 education project
This project aims to help vulnerable youth to apply for their dream education through the quota 2 system. Currently, the system does not increase social mobility, and in some study programs the opposite. Therefore, the project will create a mentor/mentee program that through personal guidance and expert knowledge will support the mentee in the process of applying.
The project is launched by the 5 newest Shapers in our hub, with help from Project Access, a global charity in the same space, which is run by one of our hub members. See some of the stats behind the current quota 2 space here — indicating how important this project is: bit.ly/Kvote2Stats
Contact Project Lead, Tinne Nissen, for more info: tinnenissen@hotmail.com
Project 4: The future-proof investment club
The future-proof investment club is a virtual investment club looking at identifying awesome small listed companies that will be important to our future. We aim to host fun events for Shapers where we present our candidates and make investment decisions together. We would like to share our methods and findings online to inspire other young people.
Catch Teddy Sun, the Project Lead, on teddy.sun@me.com for more info.
Project 5: PolicyLab
The Global Shapers Community was created to give a voice to young people and help them tackle global challenges with local impact. As representatives or ambassadors, we as GS hub members would love to both increase the number of people given a voice, but also increase the volume of the voice by bringing the sentiments of youth to the highest-level decision makers.
PolicyLab has been launched with those two goals in mind. To make it more concrete, a first goal for us is to increase participation in WEF’s annual “This is what millennials want” survey and couple that with interviews of youth in different parts of society, to get the best possible understanding of the people whose voice we hope to increase. When we have a better understanding of what youth want, we will start bringing these insights to high-level decision makers within politics, business and research.
A broader goal of the project is to look at how young people can affect decision-making processes; how to act, if you feel like your generation is misrepresented by the people in power in society.
If you’d like to know more, feel free to reach out to Project Lead, Emil Bender Lassen, on emil.lassen@projectaccess.org
We’re constantly looking for new projects — so if you have a challenge in mind or an organisation you think we should collaborate with, don’t hesitate to drop us a line on hello@globalshaperscopenhagen.dk
By Emil Bender Lassen. Emil is the Vice Curator of Global Shapers Copenhagen. He’s studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at King’s College London & NUS and is the CEO of the global non-profit education startup Project Access.