OUR IMPACT SDG SOCIAL INNOVATION AND STORY JOURNEY
What Sustainable Development Goals are about? — And which is our part to this cause?
Starting our third year as students at Panteion University we became members of the “Dare to Challenge Team”. And what is “Dare to Challenge”? First and foremost, it is directly connected with the semester’s course “Social Issues, Social Innovation and Corporate Responsibility”, initiated by Associate Prof Betty Tsakarestou (Dept. of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University, Athens) and the student teams. The project is all about learning and acting as social innovators, change makers, daring to challenge our own and social circumstances into co-creating viable social, entrepreneurial solutions with a positive impact in our networked digital and physical communities. At this course, we apply Human Centered Design and Co-Creation Methodologies. More specifically, we worked as teams on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and developed our own, unique initiative, based on our goal of choice.
A few words about the 17 SDGs according to the Official Site:
“The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the world’s best plan to build a better world for people and our planet by 2030. Adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, the SDGs are a call for action by all countries — poor, rich and middle-income — to promote prosperity while protecting the environment. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, equality and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and working to preserve our ocean and forests.”
The last few years many governments, organizations, companies and brands have supported this initiative and have taken steps to move along with the goals. Until today, 193 countries have agreed to put an end to poverty, hunger and inequality worldwide. Surprisingly, numerous companies, as you can see here, are participating in this initiative very passionately. For example, there is the ECO-SOC Partnership Forum, organized by The United Nations Economic and Social Council. ECO-SOC takes place every year and it aims to provide an opportunity to every thinker out there come up with an idea, define it and promote it as an effective partnership. The primary requirement is that every idea and every partnership has an impact in the sustainable development effort and helps for the advance and achievement of the 17 SDGs.
That being said, there are many companies that have participated in this initiative suggesting their solutions and taking action by helping the achievement of the UN sustainable goals. For instance, Google, Master-Card, Coca Cola, Ericsson are some of the companies who have contributed in completing the 8th Goal about Decent Work and Economic Growth, the one we decided to promote ourselves as a team.
The following are some examples of companies who took action upon the Goals we specifically choose.
8.6 THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY: Disney’s Code of Conduct for manufacturers explicitly prohibits the use of child forced labor. Disney funded a project with the Center for Child Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility in China to help local organizations identify and re-mediate child labor in factories.
8.8 THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY: Since 2012, Disney’s supply chain investment program has given nearly $8 million to human rights organizations to promote safe and secure working conditions in the global manufacturing sector. In 2014, Disney funded a project to promote ethical recruitment practices to prevent forced labor among migrant factory workers around the world.
The Walt Disney Company: Is the only one who tried to include in their initiative the achievement of two targets of the 8th Goal.
8.8 GAP’s job training and internship program “This Way Ahead”, provides low-income teens and young adults with the necessary skills, training and experience to succeed in their jobs. Graduates of the program can apply for paid internships in Gap stores, were they can apply what they have learnt right away.
Despite these encouraging efforts, concerns came up that maybe the 8th Goal will not be completed on time. According to The International Organization of Employers, based on extensive statistical research, including 36 countries, the progress that has been made on the 8th’s Goal’s targets is not enough.
The reason why this is happening is the inability of policymakers, in governments and many businesses to put in action the national development plans. The global community should put a plan in action as soon as possible or let the opportunity of succeeding in this development agenda to pass by, by causing catastrophic consequences. But as you can see here, we should take some action too, in every way it is possible.
Our team decided to focus on Sustainable Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth.
More specifically, we focused on goal’s paragraphs 8.7 and 8.8. Human trafficking and child labor are two issues that touch not only us, but the whole world. At first, we decided to focus on women, victims of trafficking and create and initiative dedicated to them: An NGO that will focuses on the rehabilitation of female victims of human trafficking. The main goal of this initiative was to help girls and women have a normal lifestyle again, after the traumatizing events in their lives. The NGO would support the victims socially, psychologically and financially by providing doctors, houses, education and any other form of care a trafficking victim may need. Our vision was to give human trafficking survivors live a normal, safe life of happiness. We worked passionately on this initiative but, sadly, we had to change paths. Our attempts to reach trafficking victims or bigger NGOs that could help us start our mission, failed. However, we decided to dedicate a paragraph to this first idea to inspire anyone who reads this and has the passion and the ways to make it happen.
After the decision to change the focus area was taken, we had to start fresh and find a new idea to work on withing a very short period of time. After a lot of consideration and of course, many researches, we decided to focus on the “economic growth and decent work” part of Goal 8. Taking into consideration our generation and the problems we face at the working environment such as lack of experience and practical knowledge and
poοr financial earnings we started working on paragraph 8.6 this time.
In general SDG n.8 focuses on today’s problems that are identified even in developed countries, such as lack of decent work, unemployment, poor social protection, and infringement of rights at work. The goal aims to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. The goal, though, does not only focuses on decent work but also, on social protection, on development of a modern, green economy and on a pursuit of a sustainable form of tourism.
OUR DARE TO CHALLENGE JOURNEY
Our team’s journey started the day we decided to use the 8th SDG to take action for the best of our generation. We chose to focus on paragraph 8.6: By 2020 substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training. To start working in a correct line we decided to make deep researches that lead to the following findings:
Problems and issues we noted
•Lack of youth’s education, training & employment
•Not enough jobs
•No decent earnings
•No equal opportunities
What we are offering
•Investing in young people’s education
•Providing them with skills that the market demands
•Make young people productive through internships programs.
•Collaborate with companies for job openings and internship offers
Our project idea: After a long period of research, questioners and consideration we came up with our big idea: an APP that offers young people the opportunity to get into the job market by providing them “custom made” and exclusively offered internships. We wanted to develop an app easy in use and ready to offer the internships young people need to make their first steps in the market, the way they want it! We provide: the PERFECT student service. Created to be practical and easy. We guarantee that people get to find their ideal internships easily and fast.
At first glance, our app may seem just like another job finding app out in the market. But there is an aspect that makes it unique and unconventional is the fact that it offers exclusiveness. In a few words, exclusiveness means that the internships we offer our users are provided by the cooperative companies or organizations, exclusively to us, exclusively for our users. That way, we ensure that our users will face much less competition and will have more chances to get their preferred internship position.
Our Design Thinking Methodology
When considering what would be the best way to deliver our service to our users and engage with them, an application was the way to go. Always focusing on a human-centered strategy we started giving form to our ideas. The way to success was clear: simply follow our teacher’s directions and suggestions. We followed, strictly, the “5-Stage Process of Design Thinking” and took each and every step carefully. The following articles where the once we used throughout the whole process and helped us give flesh and bones to our ideas.
What is Design Thinking b
Prototyping the idea
In order to prototype our idea, we created an app/service that, although at first glance it may seem similar to others, has several aspects that make it different and unique.
First of all, MyPraktiki has exclusiveness. One of our many values, as you can read in our website, is exclusiveness. Our app offers internship positions for graduate and undergraduate students. Of course, there are plenty other websites or even applications that allow people to search for positions like the ones we offer. What is different about MyPraktiki app is that these internship positions are offered from businesses and organizations exclusively to us and people who are interested can compete only with the rest using our app and not all the other out in the market. For example, if a company, an organization or an employer in general wants to cooperate with us and offer us a position to share with our customers, then a contract will be signed to reassure that this same position will not be offered to any other similar aggregator. Customer wise this means than someone interested does not have to worry about external competition. When applying for a specific position, he/she can even see how many others are interested as well, so he/she know what he is coming up against.
Another aspect that makes MyPraktiki unique is the ability to offer personalized positions. This benefits both the intern and the employer. When someone interested downloads the app, the first step is to create a profile set their criteria and qualifications. Users can also submit their preferable location and schedules, if they are looking for a paid or pro bono internship after of course they have deposited their diplomas, CV and any other academic qualifications they may have obtained. That way, the list of positions that MyPraktiki will suggest after that procedure will be -almost- perfectly suitable and measured up to their needs and preferences. Therefore, one interested can find exactly what he/she is searching for.
On the other hand, from the perspective of an employer, MyPraktiki saves a lot of work and time. Under other circumstances, after someone’s submission to an internship offer, the employer has to spend time or money on checking if the applicant’s qualifications are matching with the position’s requirements and this is a process that can take a long time and many organizations even have to hire people to do that and then go on with the interview. Needless to say, all the employers can tell throughout this process if the applicants
fulfill the criteria and even if they match with his requirements, such as work schedules, locations and the salary. When using MyPraktiki, employers state the job offering and then take charge again straight at the interview. In that way, they can be absolutely sure that the candidate in front of them is exactly what they were looking for in the first place when they offered the internship position.
In general, users found the app very easy to use and we obtained their trust quite quickly. There were no reluctant at all to use it due to the zero cost of the app. These prototype ideas resonated perfectly with them and, in fact, they were the ones which pursued them to use the app. Of course, given the premature stage of the application, they came across some issues. For example, one of our usershad trouble finding a position concerning her domain. To be exact, she studies Russian Language and Literature at the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens. MyPraktiki app back then had only positions from law firms and shipping organizations, therefore she could not reach to something related to her studies. We reassured Marianna that as we grow as a company, we will definitely expand our offers.
Another user, Stefanos, shared with us a different kind of problem that inspired us to add a new feature to our app. Stefanos lives in a suburb of Athens that makes it is challenging to travel to the center of Athens and back, so he faces difficulties when trying to attend several interviews all over Athens. Hearing Stefanos’ issue, we realized that this could also be a problem to many people who live in smaller continents of Greece and have trouble travelling. What we did was to provide the option of a web interview. This solution gives the opportunity where we communicate with the employer and schedule the interview before we announce it to the candidate. Therefore, we made the app more accessible and applicable in real life.
During our Journey we cooperated, among others, with a Law Firm. They were exited to use our app and found it very innovative and handy. The only issue they pointed out was the bond of reliability between them and the intern. They were concerned that if the intern turned out to be not capable enough during the internship, they would have to bear with him for a whole year. That is why we soon created 6-month contracts and invented another rule: Every employer has to keep the intern for at least 6 months and if he/she finds him/her adequate then he/she will be able to renew his/her contract to 1 year. After that, it is up to him/her if we would like to hire him/her or not.
In order to make our idea work we build a prototype of our app to test it and optimize the details according to the users’ advice and feedback.
Users are supposed to create a profile and search for an internship through the companies we are working with. The app could be characterized as an aggregator where all internships and openings are collected and posted here. We tried to make it as engaging and easy to use as possible for our clients.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND PLATFORMS
Until now we have created social media accounts in platforms like Facebook and Instagram as the most popular among the rest. As new in the market we have to earn some trust, engage with our clients, be more popular and widespread our idea through social media. Instagram features and partnership with influencers are the most suitable way for us to achieve that.
First of all, we could advertise our app through our personal profiles in social media, but also, we could talk with people on Instagram who would care to make a post about this subject of unemployment among students and advertise our app as a solution. It could be really effective especially if they have an influence in younger audiences. By doing that we will promote our services in our target group in instantly and increase our profile visits letting people know what we are offering and how they could apply.
Another solution is using paid advertisements in order to promote our posts and reach more users. Also Instagram competitions are very popular technique for companies to earn more audience and “followers” which we could maintain by uploading engaging content, but promoting our work too. But as we cannot offer a discount for an internship we could try something else. For instance, our purpose is to promote our app not only as business, but as a company who really cares about young people, the students who want a career but are too inexperienced to start one. We are here to give you the experience, the knowledge you need to continue your path as a professional. We care for people’s education and improvement. So, in order to help you with your education, we can cooperate with colleges and offer every year 5 scholarships for students who have not the means and resources to begin their studies.
We also have created a website where we explain who we are, what services are we offering and why are we different from other sites and platforms who offer openings. You can see all the details here. There are also stories of people who have faced unemployment and shared their story with us. You can also contact us trough the site and share your story too.
To sum up we would like to point out the impact, the benefits of achieving Goal 8 for the society, for the whole world actually, and therefore why we chose it too. Economic growth would be a positive force for the whole planet. So, we all should act on making sure that financial progress which being developed, creates decent work for everybody, and also that the available jobs which being provided are meaningful and fulfilling for the employees. Of course all that should get accomplished without causing any harm on the environment. We also must protect labor rights and more importantly we should put an end in slavery and child labor phenomena. So achieving Goal 8 it is not only about economical success and decency, but it will also solve very important social matters and problems we all are suffering from. We all are going to live in a more safe and secure environment, protecting and respecting each other.
Regarding our target, 8.8 as part of 8th SDG is about promoting youth employment, education and training. The efforts being made are about reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training. If this end up in success we will have been created a better generation, more prepared, more ready, more powerful, full of knowledge, capable to get out on the market and renew every area with their expertise. That is what we tried to do trough our own platform. The whole idea could be very helpful especially for students 18 until 28 years old who could never had a chance to work in their field, practice their knowledge, get prepared not only by memorize words of the book but by put these words in action. We are offering a unique benefit where people can learn, do mistakes, fix them before they actually apply for a job as professionals. When they do that, they should be ready, and we want to help them be. So, if we make this true, if we grow our business and offer more opportunities that could make a difference in the pre-market.
After all, how was this semester beneficial for us? We learned a lot in a very short period of time, we worked very hard to find an idea, and make it happen, we contacted many organizations and companies in order to build our app, our idea and make something from scratch. At the end of the day, after many disappointments and many up all nights, we have come to a position to be happy and proud of the long way we have come and the things we have created.
