We completed our 8th Social Venture Challenge at the 25th Harvard World Model United Nations (“WorldMUN”) in Rome, Italy, on March 18th. 19 teams pitched ideas for social ventures, and among those we selected seven new Social Venture Challenge winners, representing four exciting new social ventures, as follows:
Saje Molato is the founder of Model City Council, a social venture in the Quezon District of the Philippines that will provide local opportunity for students to participate in simulations of city council meetings. Model City Council will engage young people in local discourse, empower them to influence government policy and decision making, and increase their awareness of and leadership on issues that impact them and their local communities.
Guillame Dabre founded GreenFaso, a youth initiative in Burkina Faso (a new country for Resolution!), to educate local communities about environmental degradation and the benefits of recycling. GreenFaso will place 1,000 trash cans and recycling bins in the capital city of Ouagadougo to stimulate appropriate waste disposal, and will hire workers to monitor and sustain a system of trash removal and recycling. Longer-term, GreenFaso also will work to upcycle plastic waste, and to produce and distribute solar power.
Through their social venture, Connect,Fabian Nagel, Albert Grafe, and Max Wosnitza will bring together refugees and asylum seekers in Mannheim, Germany (another new country!) with university students for exchange of culture and language. In so doing, Connect aims to breakdown long-standing barriers between refugees and German citizens and ease the process of refugee integration into German society.
Sumati Joshi and Urvi Talaty are the founders of Mission Sanscar, a social venture that will work in Mumbai, India to eliminate the restrictions, shame, and impact on school attendance and success that accompanies the onset of women’s menstrual cycles. Mission Sanscar will work to shift women and girls to the use of cotton napkins, and will teach them to produce reusable pads that they can also sell to others. Additionally the venture will provide education and support on reproductive health, sexual consent, and abuse, thereby creating a higher standard of living for women in the region.