Category: General

Congratulations to the Youth CITIES March-to-May Bootcamp Class of 2013!! The March-to-May Bootcamp is Youth CITIES' flagship program and designed for middle school and high school students from diverse backgrounds. The students work with real-world executives to brainstorm different ideas to start a venture with social impact for their community. Youth CITIES partners with prominent executives from the business and nonprofit communities who teach fundamentals of leadership, entrepreneurship, presentation skills, and business plan creation. These professionals also share strategies for leveraging business principles to drive change in society. The rigorous 10-week bootcamp inspires, educates, and equips youth to take action and make a difference. Youth CITIES moves beyond the academics of business, to framing real-life problems, real-life constraints, and real-life success criteria as the launch pad for students to create…

Last weekend, winter storm Nemo dumped more than 2 feet of snow on most of New England. In some places, high winds led to drifts piling 5 feet or higher. We all saw the fresh white landscape. We all dealt with the snow. Some of us are still dealing with it. What does any of it have to do with Youth CITIES? On Saturday morning, while I was shoveling out my car (see pic;-), I was telling my wife about the snow storms I experienced growing up in the ‘90s. (My wife is from Jamaica; and, although, she’s lived in the US for 8 years, this was her first official blizzard.) I recounted stories of my two younger brothers and I traversing the neighborhood like it was a frozen tundra…

Last September, Youth CITIES participated in an open-source philanthropy event sponsored by TUGG (Technology Underwriting the Greater Good). For the event, our Founder, Vicky, spent the evening networking with hundreds of Greater Boston's entrepreneurs and technology professionals to tell them the story of Youth CITIES. Then, at the end of the night, attendees had to choose from among a handful of worthy social-enterprise ventures (like Youth CITIES) and vote for which organization would receive some grant funding. Youth CITIES is a great program, obviously, and Vicky did a terrific job of sharing her vision with everyone she met that night, including me. From that event, Youth CITIES won a small but valuable grant from TUGG, and the funds are committed to this year's March-to-May Bootcamp. Coming up, on January 31st,…

Eliminate Waste - that is one of the key objectives associated with current sustainability thinking and teaching. Some organizations, like Terracycle, strive so far as to eliminate the idea of waste. Yet, whether in practice or in principle, the goal is to examine existing waste streams (outputs) and find ways to make them inputs into some other useful process. It may sound easy, but it’s not, which is why we do not yet have ways to reuse and recycle everything we throw away today. This week’s post was inspired by the reality TV show Shark Tank (Episode 409). [As a general rule, I dislike reality TV. But, I make an exception for Shark Tank simply because I love to hear the creative business ideas of regular Americans. I find many…

No, I don’t mean Mark Wahlberg’s talking teddy bear. (Though, we could make this a topic for a future blog post;-) This is a long awaited post for me. Two weeks ago, on November 17th & 18th, I attended a series of locally organized TED Talks. TEDxBeaconStreet featured more than 90 talks by innovators, teachers, scientists, businesspeople, thought-leaders, and others tied to Greater Boston. [I was holding off the blog entry until I could share this highlight reel with you.] At the two-day conference, I got a chance to listen to intriguing and inspiring presentations on topics ranging from music & food to science & technology, including one talk about flexible computer chips you can wear on your skin!! Of course, a favorite talk of mine was by given by…

As I mentioned in my previous post, Youth CITIES is actively supporting Ingrid Li’s campaign for youth entrepreneurship. Ingrid is an amazing Winchester High School student, and Founder of the Entrepreneurial Youth Society (EYS). EYS is dedicated to promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship among youth across America. If you are interested in supporting the campaign, feel free to drop by the State House (Nurse’s Hall) on July 25th at 10:30am. There will be a rotating list of speakers, followed by a networking reception. The State House speaker agenda includes the following: Representative Jason Lewis, District Winchester Representative Senator Katherine Clark, Vice-Chair of Committee on Small Business Representative Alice Peisch, Chair of Committee on Education Tim Rowe, CEO and Founder of Cambridge Innovation Center Vicky Wu Davis, Founder and Executive Director…