Social Entrepreneurship for Youths

Make The Change is honoured to be part of Y.LEAD 2019, under the invitation of River Valley High School to share with the youth a different approach of doing business to become leaders of tomorrow.

As MP Baey Yam Keng has mentioned, “Our youth are growing up in an era of rapid change and global uncertainty – yet also a time of great opportunity as we become more and more connected, with new ways to live, work and play.”, we hope to hone these leaders of tomorrow to make a difference to the community through social entrepreneurship, which Forbes has mentioned as the new business model.

The workshop started with the introduction of social entrepreneurship:

1. What is a social enterprise

2. Examples of social enterprises in Singapore and overseas

3. The different business model of social enterprises

4. An activity to differentiate different social enterprises business model

The students were quick to catch on the different business models of social enterprises and we were pleasantly surprised with their deep knowledge of them. They were not hesitant to ask questions when in doubt and even probed us further to give them a deeper understanding of what social enterprises were.

We continued the workshop with design thinking where we shared what design thinking is and how to apply it through emphatising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. To give the students a clearer understanding of the processes, we used a youth initiated project Sondering Slate as a case study to show them how the different phases were carried out in real life.

An activity followed after where they have to think of a social issue they want to tackle and use design thinking to create a solution for it. The students never fail to surprise us with their creative and innovative thinking skills when they presented their ideas, some seemingly so viable and easy to carry out yet so ingenious.

The workshop ended with a group photo and we separated with happy memories made. We hope that this workshop has been a fruitful one for them, with useful skills like design thinking to take away, and we look forward to seeing some of them become changemakers after this!