I’m sure that by now you’ve noticed my 2020 interests: startups, education and people. The good thing about social startups is that they are valuable for society no matter who runs them and who is the original creator. So here I am sharing another idea for a social startup. If you have some opportunity to create it – be my guest. My goal this year is to make my Fintech startup successful enough so I can run a social startup on a side without the need of looking behind shoulder for funding.
If you read my previous blog posts, this idea is a little bit combination of at least 2 posts in the past. It is about teaching children real-life lessons and volunteering.
The idea
Every one of us travels, even if it’s visiting family in the neighbouring town. And every one of us works. No matter what that job is. This means that every one of us has some knowledge that you can teach in schools outside of big cities.
One of my biggest issues with the current educational system is that they don’t really connect with businesses and they don’t educate children real-life case studies. Don’t get me wrong, I respect teachers and their role in society, but you can’t teach anyone how the job looks like and how it should be performed based on books only. Even worse, as little humans, we’re expected by the age of 18 to come up with this idea of what we’re going to do in the future, pick the university and off you go. So I wanted to study IT cause I loved computers but did I ever know how any IT jobs look like? Hell no.
And it will be even worse in small towns and poor countries where access to anyone highly skilled is extremely difficult. But those skilled people are the ones travelling the most. The solution would be connecting those skilled people with the school and asking them to volunteer for a couple of hours of their time.
The idea is very simple. Create and promote a system/app where the school can register and ask for “professional case study presentation for children”. Professionals can then submit their travel plans and put a few empty time slots into the calendar when they can spend some time with local children show them something that they specialise in. The rest is just a matter of arrangement. Do you travel to Samoa for a week? Put 2-3 time slots of 2h in some days of your trip and a school in Samoa will be able to invite you on those time slots to interact with children. You don’t have to spend too much time on preparation since whatever it is you’re presenting will be what you’re doing every day. Imagine how big difference you can make in Samoa where the technology is not as advanced as in Australia or New Zealand. For me, for instance, I can run a simple 1h HTML workshop, an extremely easy lesson of very basic programming. You don’t have to know maths or algorithms, you just need to understand the basics of computers which most of the kids do anyway.
This way we can improve our education system and give opportunities to unprivileged children. A lot of them can’t imagine how it is to be a banking analyst or marketer, they just hear those words and hope that this is going to be a great career path. It would be so much easier for our society if kids have first-person interaction with as many jobs as possible to be able to decide what they want to do in their life based on experience not based on hope and money promise.
So here it is, free idea – grab it. If it’ll work, believe me I’ll be one of the first people to subscribe..