Hacking for Good in the Heart of Toronto -Hacking Good 2017

Happy New Year! 2017 was an exciting year for Pledges for Change. Since we began in 2013, we have always been about empowering youth to bring about social change, both in their communities and around the world. Every initiative that we have run has always worked towards answering one question: how can we address the barriers with what our generation could do on giving back to the community? This question has guided us in creating opportunities for young people to create significant social impact through volunteer activity. For example, since 2014, our flagship event Ignite Fair has done just that — connecting over 2,000 youth to volunteer opportunities offered by over 70 different non-profits and community groups.

This past year, we decided to take our mission one step further and launch our first hackathon — Hacking Good. To us, hackathons are a safe space where ideas and resources come together to create the most impact in a short period of time. Traditionally, hackathons focus on an overall theme or idea, and participants are asked to create products or solutions that address aforementioned themes. We wanted to test how hackathons could be applied to encourage the use of technology to address real, complex social problems that the world is facing today, particularly the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In particular, we chose to address SDG #4: Quality Education.

In order to address this challenging social issue, we created two streams for participants that covered two distinct challenges pertaining to education: Financial Literacy (FinLit) for high school students and Education Accessibility (EduTech) for post-secondary students.

As we began to bring together the event, we were thrilled to receive support from a number of reputable industry professionals and organizations — including Cisco Canada, RateHub.ca, The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, PwC, and Global Changemakers. It became clear to us that companies are incredibly interested in seeing what the youth can accomplish and that they believe in our potential enough to invest their time and resources in order for us to effectively execute our inaugural event successfully.

What really impressed us was the caliber of applicants and participants that attended. Over the course of a single weekend, over 60 young, ambitious and enthusiastic students worked tirelessly to ideate and innovate solutions, resulting in extremely inspiring ideas that blew us all away.

Special shout-outs to the winners of our first Hacking Good event — Team LIFE (a project that addressed the financial literacy education gap within Canada’s indigenous population) as well as Team Enquiry (a platform that connects high-school students with experts to provide them with the tools and skills needed in order to succeed in the future). Presenting a well-thought out pitch accompanied by thorough research, Team LIFE and Team Enquiry delivered solutions worthy of first place in their respective tracks.

In addition, TEAM LIFE, Team Budget Buddy, and Team Nomics impressed our judges so much that they were invited to present their idea at this year’s Canadian Personal Finance Conference!

As first place winners, TEAM LIFE also secured mentorship and support from our sponsors Ratehub.ca and Canadian Financial Literacy Lead Jane Rooney.

We couldn’t have been more proud of our recognized teams and all of this year’s Hacking Good participants for taking the time to truly make a difference. This initiative provided an opportunity for us to demonstrate that investing in the youth of today could truly impact the world of tomorrow. The success of our event clearly shows that making an impact doesn’t necessarily have to wait — a weekend could be all it takes to create something wonderful.

Special thanks to all of our sponsors, partners, and volunteers for helping us launch Hacking Good this year. We are looking forward to growing Hacking Good beyond Toronto in the coming months. We are so excited for it to become a movement; a series of events that continue to empower youth to use technology to spark social change.

Check us out on Twitter & Facebook to stay tuned for updates!