The opportunity to experience a fully-funded trip to connect with the passionate and bright sustainable innovators and entrepreneurs of ASEAN-China-India Youth Leadership Summit intrigued all three of us enough to sign up for the Indian Sustainability Starthaton in India.
What we had then signed up for was an intense period of learning and growing as we sought to understand how the worlds of sustainability and entrepreneurship combine to creatively solve real world issues.
The Indian Sustainability Startathon (ISS) 2024 began with a two-day boot camp, wherein, we ran through several sprints to focus on a problem statement that we would then begin to solve for.
By the end of Day Two, we were in the top 58 teams with ‘Pedestrian safety’ as our focus.
For the next two weeks we worked on developing the idea of using a combination of two traffic calming measures, virtual crosswalks and virtual speed bumps, distinctly designed in school zones to reduce accidents caused by over speeding.
We attended several master classes and met up with our assigned mentor when with honed problem-focused research skills, we were finally able to pitch our idea at the grand finals, winning us a position in the Top 3 out of the top 58 teams of India.
Given the focus on cross-national collaboration, once we landed in Singapore and the ACI Youth Leadership Summit (ACIYLS) ‘24 began, we were all assigned to multinational teams with members from across ASEAN and China.
Within 48 hours, we picked a problem statement and worked at finding innovative solutions for the issue. Getting to experience the challenges of working in a diverse team allowed us to see the importance of overcoming cultural barriers, while also allowing us to see how interdependent we are as a people, and how sharing our perspectives and ideas only serve to enrich our thinking and approach to problems at a global scale.
The varied backgrounds of each participant further helped to highlight how an interdisciplinary approach is the way forward.
The ISS aims at finding individuals with a real drive and passion for making a difference, and allows for creative solutions to issues of sustainability to find a platform.
The ethos of the ISS is an investment of not just the ideas of individuals, but the individuals themselves.
The overall process effectively equipped us with the ability to identify real world issues and then tackle them with a problem-focused approach while still encouraging us to use our imagination and ensure creativity is a core aspect to our problem solving attitude.
The opportunity brought to us through a collaboration of Future Founders Co and RV University, wholeheartedly endorsed by both the Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of School of Liberal Arts and Sciences (SoLAS) allowed for this fully funded scholarship to be a comfortable and enriching time.
This experience was made that much more rewarding to see our skills built up through research based university assignments transfer and be refined through the competition.
One of our major learnings is the realisation of our values as individuals. Each of us have unique perspectives, skills and contributions that have inherent worth.
Our ideas are worth having and our voice is worth being heard, but the beginning of seeing all of this impact starts with recognising our own potential.
We're some of the many students out there who are passionate and eager to make a difference in the world. This whole experience has done so much more than simply reiterate that the future belongs to the youth, it has given us the resources and platform to act on our ideas and vision.
It means that as youth, we’re closer than we’ve ever been to making an impact on our world.
(The article is written by Ms Tabassum, Ms Nathania, and Ms Subhiksha students from RV University's School of Liberal Arts and Sciences (SoLAS))
