Young people are teeming with ideas.
The Jewish teen organization 4Front, in partnership with the JCC of Greater Baltimore, The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore and Towson University, has a program that is designed to give teens a platform for their ideas.
The 4Front Social Innovation Fellowship is an entrepreneurship program that sees participants develop social enterprises that address problems in the greater community. They work for nearly half a year on their ideas before presenting them to various leaders in the Baltimore community at what is called “Demo Day.”
This year’s Demo Day was held on March 8, and 4Front Engagement Associate Isabel Lunken said it was a great success.
“This was our ninth annual Demo Day, and our second year doing it in partnership with Towson University’s College of Business and Economics and their Department of Management,” Lunken said. “All 26 teens presented and really blew everyone away. I think it was the first year that we had every team make a full prototype. It was great! We definitely had over 110 people [attend] and the judges were phenomenal too.”
Each year, teams start by identifying a problem and then figuring out how to solve it. The winning team created a venture called Justice Bridge, which is a program that addresses the challenge of teens not having as much accessibility as adults when it comes to impacting civic engagement.
“These teens identified that they had some opportunities to engage with government officials, but they recognized that [was through] selective programs that they are lucky to partake in. So they want to gain more accessibility, and realized that the websites that the government has aren’t very teen-accessible,” Lunken said.
The group created a prototype to help change this, and it was well-received at the competition and by people in their personal networks.
“They created a platform that can give teens direct access to their representatives, and since they won yesterday, they were really able to do a lot of research and have conversations with their peers and their teachers and they might actually launch it, so we’ll see how that goes in the coming weeks,” Lunken said.
Josh A. is a freshman at Baltimore City College High School who was a part of the program this year, and he said that the all encompassing nature of the Social Innovation Fellowship was wonderful and helped him become more well-rounded.
“Social Innovation Fellowship is an engaging, fun and career-readying program that mixes Jewish values with social innovation. It includes a boot camp and multiple workshops where we create our own little Jewish community, a business solution to a problem we are passionate about, and a ‘Shark Tank’-style pitch to present that solution to judges and our families,” he said.
In addition to activities like brainstorming sessions and the boot camp, there is a group trip to New York City that helps the teens bond together.
“There is also a trip to New York that combines both fun activities such as a food tour and hours to explore NYC, along with business education with accomplished Jewish business leaders. Through SIF, I not only learned the business mindset, but I also found myself a Jewish community with teens my age,” Josh said.
Mollie G. is a sophomore at Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School, and she said that she found value in not just improving her entrepreneurial skills and Jewish identity, but also improving those two things in tandem with each other.
“Being part of the Social Innovation Fellows program taught me what it really means to be an entrepreneur, while also connecting business with Jewish values. I learned how ideas and innovation can be used to help others and make a positive impact on the community.
This experience helped me discover what I want to do in my future and showed me how my goals can be guided by the values I believe in,” she said.
The adults who help with the program — business and community leaders in Baltimore — typically have a reaction that illustrates the value of the Social Innovation Fellowship, Lunken said.
“The No. 1 thing I always hear is, ‘Why wasn’t this around when I was younger?’” she said.
