Speak Louder, Make Waves

Throughout primary school, secondary school and post-secondary education, most students will have experienced a vicious cycle of anxiety and stress feeding into a complete lack of motivation to do anything at all. Due dates line up like a firing squad, and school starts to take up more and more of your time. You lose sight of your real priorities; instead of actively searching for ways to add value to your life (and to others’ lives) by pursuing a real passion, dissertations, midterms and homework become the bulk of your existence.

Photo courtesy of the American Psychological Association.

This, I’ve realized, is not how it should be. In the peak of our youth, we should be pursuing our passions and delving deep into subjects that we really care about; we should be taking action and applying our innovative ideas to create change. We shouldn’t, above all, be using up our time to study deep into the night for courses that we don’t actually care about.

The Rush Collective was borne out of a desperate effort to solve this problem. How do we make important opportunities more accessible for youth like us? How do we connect all these young people with infinite potential, how do we motivate them to look beyond just school and become the change they want to see in their own communities? The answer lies in harnessing the power of social media, possibly the most powerful communication and media tool to ever exist. To make the process more intuitive, we also devised a 3-step process that is easy to tweak and follow.

Count The Three Cs

There isn’t any challenge in the world that can’t be broken down into bite-sized chunks to be solved, so that’s exactly what we decided to do.

1. #captured

We start by looking for inspiration in the people around us that already making waves in their own ways. For The Rush Collective, those are people like you. Every month or so, we #capture a major wavemaker in the community on video, showcase their work, and have a chat with them. By doing this, we hope to create a connected platform for youth from all walks of life to plug into. This will make it easier to communicate with each other and share valuable experiences and knowledge with like-minded youth.

2. #connected

After feeling pumped and motivated, the next step is to start looking for opportunities — or maybe even creating some for yourself. The Rush Collective has a wide network reaching into the depths of Toronto’s art scene and STEM scene (sometimes even further), and we post up all our findings for competitions, leadership opportunities, volunteer opportunities and more just for you. Signing up for these is just the first step — you’ll find that, the more opportunities you take advantage of, the more you get sucked into this community of ambitious individuals, the more change you’ll want to generate.

3. #challenged

Ultimately, this entire process is meant to challenge you in time management and problem solving, as well as to foster applicable real life skills. Push further by taking up one of our weekly challenges every week, that span from delving deeper into Toronto’s new wave of youth artists, performers and musicians, to looking into possible solutions for the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This will help you gain more experience, reach further into the community, and apply the skills you’ve acquired through #connected.

Join the #rushmovement.

Real talk though? In reality, despite all this fancy framework we’ve set up for you guys, the ultimate endgame is for you to take action and do something that matters to you and to your community, something that has purpose and intent and drive behind it. No matter what you choose to do or how you choose to do it, do it now. It won’t be an easy journey, but if you keep waiting for the right time, there won’t be any journey at all.

#Defy the limits of age. #Rush towards positive change.