While students on college campuses across the country are inundated with messaging about how they have an opportunity to make a difference in the world, they are too often left quietly wondering at their lecture hall desks ‘how do I make a difference?’ Young people are naturally energetic, charismatic, empathetic, and often service-minded. Many of them, though, don’t have the luxury of time or resources needed to get intimately involved with the challenges their communities face.
For all the emphasis that higher education institutions place upon students about the skills they are developing h, and the opportunities they are provided, the connection between these two assets is too rarely bridged. Consequently, the promise that higher education will lead to the ability to affect change can begin to feel like a lotto ticket paid for with one’s last dollar.
Student Empowerment. While this is a phrase that is often used to infuse press releases with buzz-words, it is nonetheless a concept that we believe bridges the gap between the skills that students possess and the doors they have open to them to become changemakers in their communities. There is a large-scale need to help students develop an entrepreneurial mindset: one that cultivates constructive inquiry, creative problem-solving, collaboration, and effective networking. SolveCC facilitates empowerment through the cultivation of these skills by developing platforms with our academic partners that incentivizes and challenges students to identify problems in their community, and construct solutions to them in a peer-to-peer collaborative environment.
By developing social networks of peers, mentors, partners, and collaborators, we empower students to harness their entrepreneurial spirits and expand accessibility to innovation. We encourage the development of skills that foster flexibility of the mind and enable the next generation of students to craft new ideas in a dynamic, fast-paced world. In doing so, we empower them with the knowledge and confidence necessary to become changemakers.
Our platform helps spark this creative flexibility by facilitating the journey of innovative problem-solving through competitions that invite individuals to build a team to address local issues, and then connects them to support networks that can guide their solutions to fruition. This “sandbox” approach to developing creative thinking skills supplements classroom learning in a way that is not restricted to the rigidity of classroom curriculum. Students are free to explore out-of-box thinking, with real-world application and benefit, with real cash on the line.
SolveCC is a collaborative platform where students are incentivized to create teams to identify problems and design/implement solutions to address these problems in a peer-to-peer process. If we believe that talent is everywhere but access and support are not, we need to address this disparity. And this is exactly what Solve CC is focusing on.
Empowering students through these networks of impassioned problem-solvers, instilling in them confidence in their ideas, and nurturing their creativity is what we believe to be the answer to the challenge of equipping our next generation of leaders, scientists, philanthropists, activists, and entrepreneurs with the tools they need to flourish.
By Jared Sclar
Political Consultant – Jared Sclar & Associates, LLC
