Enabling emerging local changemakers in some of the poorest places on the planet.
- Social Investment
- Community development
- Income generation
- Poverty alleviation
- Philanthropy
- Scholarships and grants
- Social enterprise
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Founding Story
Aaron
Tait
Spark* International
, NSW
18-34
Male
1‐5 years
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Operating for 1‐5 years
Access to financing, Access to talent.
In Papua New Guinea, 360 children are now in school, and 25 jobs have been created because of Spark* Changemakers. 13 new Changemakers graduated from the Spark* Summit last week, and we are excited to work with them through the Network and the Fund in the coming months and witness their impact. In South Africa, 240 at-risk youth are in support programs and 25 jobs have been created. In Kenya, our newest project site, our first Changemaker has provided 30 at-risk children with daily meals through a feeding program and created 2 jobs. We are nearing the end of our pilot, and are excited by the incredible potential of the 35 most active Changemakers we have across the globe.
Our projected growth model will have us enabling 500 Changemakers across 10 countries by the end of 2015. It is our goal that these Changemakers are directly impacting 50,000 people living in poverty through job creation, education opportunities or support programs.
Build up the BETA platform for the Spark* Something.
Finish our round of engaging 300 people to go through market research.
Build up wire frames for the new online platform and take it through user experience testing.
Launch the BETA site, begin to market it and begin tweaking based on feedback and donor activity.
Build up the BETA platform for the Spark* Something.
Turn our BETA site into a Gold Site with a strong user experience optimised platform.
Market like crazy, and inspire loads of people that this is a great way to enable great local change in very poor communities.
Begin to work on ways that we can maximise the number of Spark* Changemakers that we work with and have on the site.
We are currently in discussion with World Vision regarding a global collaboration which would see the Spark* Changemaker Program scale to 10 new countries. Later in 2012 some of our team will work out of San Francisco in order to continue to foster partnerships with other organizations who enable social entrepreneurs (Ashoka, Echoing Green, Unreasonable Institute etc).
Our team are talented leadership and social entrepreneurship facilitators and where appropriate we can provide support to other organisations. One facet that we are really working to secure is technical support in the form of programmers, coders and software developers in order to achieve our vision of the Spark* online platform to connect people across the globe to the Spark* Changemakers.