The university my kids will want to attend

A new challenge for education

In a world where nothing is certain, where half of today’s jobs will have disappeared in 20 years, where businesses are unable to offer enough employment opportunities and struggle to keep their talent, today’s youth have no choice but to rely on themselves!

(Pour l’article en français, c’est par ici)

This is according to Emmanuelle Duez who spoke at the Positive Economy Forum on September 18th, drawing from a study of 3000 under 20 year olds belonging to the famous generation Z.

In the future, retaining talent will require businesses to behave like universities by providing their employees with opportunities to continue learning.

With this in mind, what might the school of the future look like? In fact, what does today’s school look like when we find ourselves learning without realizing it ?

Let’s take a look at MakeSense, a community that’s taking action.

For those who haven’t heard of it yet, MakeSense is a movement that strives to solve our century’s greatest challenges by helping social entrepreneurs, thanks to a community of citizens equiped with tools to support creativity and innovation.

Volunteering with MakeSense is a unique experience. I truly believe that the movement is structured according to an extraordinary recipe, one that reflects the values adopted by our future generations : learning happens by doing, and even more so, by mobilizing!

In 2013 we asked MakeSense volunteers why they continued to participate. They answered : because I learn so much : how to be creative, how to collaborate, English, community management, and so on ». This was true for me as well when I joined the community in 2011. Little by little, as the educational potential of MakeSense unfolded, we began to imagine the SenseCampus. It’s this story that I will now recount.

In need of a new vision

How would this campus be different? We told ourselves that, rather than learning a trade, it was here that we would learn to fight for the greatest causes of the century.

Thirty years from now, a single trade will be replaced by infinite opportunities! School must therefore allow each of us to discover what motivates us so that we might find a place, a purpose, in our societies. How reassuring it is, in a world of uncertainty, to understand our drivers and have the capacity to create our own jobs! Being able to do this while contributing to a larger, more global group centered on social and environmental issues is all the more motivating!

Back on a personal engagement story

I found myself inspired by these feelings early on. In high school, a teacher suggested that we organize a food drive for Restos du Cœur, a French food bank. My friend and I were instantly hooked. Having managed to convince a friends father to let us do the drive at the supermarket he owned, we gathered a dozen friends to help us on the day of. With everyone’s help, we succeeded in filling an entire truck with food for Restos du Cœur. We were so proud!

As the day came to an end, I felt that I had done something good, but also that I had learnt a lot. I had learnt, for example, how to lead an initiative from A to Z… in business that’s what we call project management. I had learnt how to motivate and lead my friends, a skill similar to community management, and to seek solutions to challenges, also known as creativity. These are all highly sought after skills in companies today.

I learnt something else which is a bit more difficult to explain… I felt empowered ! Empowered compared to the sensation of helplessness we feel when we consider how many people regularly go hungry all over the world, when we consider how many people lack access to education, or when we consider the situation refugees find themselves in…

This feeling has not left me ; it has inspired and motivated me ever since.

Having rediscovered this ability to mobilize within MakeSense, my acolyte Caroline and I have developed this theory of education through action with SenseSchool, the pedagogical branch of MakeSense.

Caroline explains it best with B Franklin’s words : « TELL ME AND I FORGET. TEACH ME AND I REMEMBER. INVOLVE ME AND I LEARN. »

And the SenseCampus was born

The mission of SenseCampus is to mobilize thousands of students each year, be they future engineers, researchers, architects, managers, or sociologists, through non-profits and social entrepreneurs, on subjects such as health, education, and poverty, all while helping them develop skills in marketing, finance, design, and much more.

The goal, during these programs, is also to develop soft skills and ways of being, such as empathy, active listening, and curiosity. Why ? because technical know how will one day be reserved for machines, or will be acquired on the job. After all, this is already the case ! Remember your first days at work, how wide the gap was between what you had learnt at school and what you were now being asked to do. Learning to draft a financial plan can be challenging, but once trained, it becomes easy, even mechanical for some.

We believe that this is what tomorrow’s educational system must transfer!

It’s because of this that students can, and will be able to solve questions as complex as :

· How might we make sport a tool for preventative healthcare among seniors?

· How might we use an online class to re-engage high school drop-outs?

· How might we help low income households make savings on their energy bills?

Our SenseCampus recipe incorporates: meaning (learning while mobilizing for a cause), action (learning while doing), and enthusiasm (learning while becoming fulfilled).

Taking it further…

Now that we have the recipe, how might we reach further than our impact on students and supported projects?

If we truly want long-term solutions to these challenges, our students must of course become social entrepreneurs, but also company executives, chiefs of staff, and directors within international organizations such as the World Bank.

For it is by working with all of these actors that we will succeed in solving our challenges. Our students must also find fulfillment within these career paths. These are the jobs that will allow them to embody their ambitions and their new skills.

We observed this in real life with the program What the food, launched to fight against food waste.

This example saw collaboration happen between a group of 6 students, a social start up that had already worked to reduce food waste in supermarkets, the CROUS (a student financial aid program), and the ministry of food and agriculture.

Together, they built a tool that students actually use at mealtimes. And they don’t just go home and talk about it with their parents : even the minister of education has heard about it!

None of this would have been possible if we hadn’t made these actors collaborate. It’s that synergy that allows us to have an interesting impact in the medium term.

To embody this vision, in our campus, students choose a cause they care about. Their professors are directors of development agencies, CEOs and even social entrepreneurs… not because they have more to teach them but because our students too challenge them to go further!

This is exactly what happened with What the Food, a model that really deviates from the hierarchical scheme of traditional teaching. Old ways are left behind so that all may enter a collaborative space regardless of age, gender, competence and reputation.

Our generation has incredible tools and new opportunities with technologies that their elders do not yet even suspect.

Towards new possibilities

Ten years ago, reforesting the Amazon required colossal financial means, logistics and politics. Today, a single drone may be equipped with thousands of seeds and do the job alone.

Imagine the world tomorrow if all students were able to identify and take action on the issue they cared about the most. Imagine, too, that the heart and source of the issue was thousands of kilometers away!

Imagine, finally, that they should have the opportunity to educate themselves there, with actors from the field, at the center of the issue.

For example, an issue that I care about deeply is access to education for women. I’m convinced that it is a pre-requisite for development in many countries.

By joining a SenseCampus, I will be able to head to the field, just as I did in high school, in order to get to know organizations that take concrete actions in varying contexts related to education. For example, I will be able to build a communication campaign in France with Unesco representatives. I will be able to organize a creative workshop in a school that strives to develop leadership skills among young girls.

Only once I have apprehended these issues, live them, experienced the constraints and the complexity of the actions taken by these different actors, will I be ready to start my career at the United Nations, in a social business or by creating my own school.

Be ready!

This fall we are opening the first african SenseCampus in Dakar in partnership with the African Management Institute. Mamba, our onsite community developer has organized dozens of creative workshops for social entrepreneurs as well as a SenseCamp, a large conference with an original format that has helped us reinforce MakeSense’s credibility and impact. Without him and all the work he has done, we could not have imagined creating the Dakar SenseCampus.

We want to build SenseCampuses everywhere in the world so that all students might have the opportunity to learn and become engaged in the causes they care about.

THANK YOU CATHY CHAPPAZ for translating this article from here

Share your ideas to accelerate impactful projects for education and skills development at forward.makesense.org/education