Explorer program.

Exploring entrepreneurial potential.

Young Change Agents' first stage social entrepreneurship program is our 2 or 2.5 day "hackathon-style" workshop where teams of students work to identify problems within their communities and then ideate, validate, prototype, and pitch a social enterprise idea to a judging panel.

With a focus on social enterprise young people that go through the Explorer learn the essential skills for creating change in their community whilst also developing their entrepreneurial mindset, skillset, and toolset.

Educators are also encouraged to join the program and work alongside their students as an immersion, which is the first stage of Young Change Agents' 4-stage teacher capacity-building journey.

We can also deliver this program as a 1-day condensed version or spread out into a weekly delivery over 6-8 weeks.

The Explorer program works best for groups of 40-50 students (to allow enough time for teams to present back after activities). If you have a larger group, please get in touch with our team to see how we can best support you in delivering the program, which we can deliver as concurrent programs for your school.

Request an information pack

Explorer in Action.

Check out our Explorer program at Riverside Girls High School and see what happens when Young Change Agents comes to your school

Learning outcomes.

Soft Skills:

  • Increased motivation (demonstrated by leading projects, developing products, participation etc).
  • Better understanding of their leadership potential (personal leadership, task leadership, community leadership).
  • Increase in feelings of self-efficacy and confidence to develop social entrepreneurship and or small business ideas (i.e. how empowered they felt to make a difference in the community).
  • Collaborate with senior consultants and professional mentors in the social enterprise and development space.
  • Collaborate with senior consultants and professional mentors in the social enterprise and development space.
  • Improved goal-setting strategies.
  • Increased understanding and ability to work as part of a team.
  • Improved time management skills.

Social impact and enterprise start-up skills:

  • Social enterprise (what is it, differentiating between a business/social enterprise).
  • Social impact (what is it, how do my actions have an impact).
  • Questioning (what are the issues I care about, what are the root causes of these problems).
  • Problem solving through ideation (how can I think of new ideas to solve problems).
  • Customer empathy mapping (who is my customer, what do they hear, do, think, feel).
  • Creating a value proposition (positioning and elevator pitch).
  • Market research (creating a survey to test assumptions).
  • Prototyping (how can demonstrate my product/service).
  • Budgeting (costs and revenue).
  • Pitching (communication/persuasion).

"What I saw today was five teams who communicated ideas that frankly blew my mind...

ideas that could actually be applied today in practice."

Laurence Street | General Manager, CSIRO

What to expect.

Here are some social enterprise ideas arising from Young Change Agent programs below, you can also explore all our youth projects here.

  • Music therapy app for people for Alzheimer's
  • Edu-Hub - a collaboration tool between students at different schools to assist with difficult homework/assignments.
  • Energy-saving lady-bugs - fun animal characters for kids that remind you to turn off the power.
  • Granny-2-go - a website that links our older generation with young mums/single mums who need occasional babysitting support whilst they carry out errands.
  • PS - a platform that gives students a say in the why, what, and how of their education.
  • A website where students can virtually travel the world and teens from other countries to create more cultural understanding and address racism.
  • An online, positive media-channel for youth that takes the "scary" out of news and instead provides inspiration for the future.
  • Online meal delivery service with food prepared by refugee mothers using school commercial kitchens in off-peak teaching periods
  • A website that allows professional mothers to sell baby goods directly to disadvantaged mothers at low prices (with NFP's acting in support).
  • D-Games - a games company with 50% and higher representation from people with disability. Games are made to bring to bust the myths on disability in a fun, engaging way.
  • An app that allows you to communicate with Emergency Departments in real-time when you have a sporting injury so you can be queued at the hospital pre-arrival.
  • 1:for:1 coding classes to provide free opportunities for refugees and people with disability to learn how to code .
  • Website and service that links farmers with fruit picking and other farm jobs to young unemployed people to provide work opportunities (including removing barriers to starting like transport support etc).