SEVERE Cohort 2: What have they been up to?

This January 2023, SEVERE welcomed a second cohort of students interested in social entrepreneurship, and they have been busy! These motivated students are composed of six teams divided by the social issues they want to tackle: 

• • Group 1 is working on Fast Fashion 
  • Group 2 is working on Food Security 
  • Group 3 is working on Mental Health 
  • Group 4 and 5 are working on Homelessness 
  • Group 6 is continuing the work on Publicus, the Social Finance platform from cohort 1.

Here is a summary of the workshops that have been run by the SEVERE team of mentors and consultants to help them develop their ideas and build their own social enterprise: 

• • 24th of January 2023 – First Ideation workshop. After a talk from Zakia Moulaoui, founder of Invisible Cities, students got to know each other and began forming groups based on similar interests. 

• • 31st of January – New group meeting. A week later, the newly formed groups came together to introduce themselves and develop their first ideas with the help of their assigned mentors. 

• • 8th of February – Glocal seminar. The groups were further introduced to the online Glocal platform which they use to access resources and share the progress on their own project.  This is also where they gather material and converse between each other. 

• • 28th of February – Concept board meeting. Students presented a concept board detailing the problem they are addressing and how to reach the desired impact. Mentors were gathered to provide feedbacks across all groups and help them concretise the next steps. 

• • 3rd and 4th of April – Catch up sessions with Mark Anderson. Each team got to meet with GCU’s Research and Innovation Office director, Mark Anderson. With him, they went over their current progress and received valuable feedback. 

• • 14th of April – Design Thinking workshop with Peter Robbins. Innovation and Entrepreneurship professor at DCU Peter Robbins confronted the teams with important questions to further their road to market. It allowed them to consider essential questions like the scalability of their project or what resources are needed.  

• • 18th of  April – Active Citizenship Workshop with Vietnamese students. Students from our 6 partner Universities involved with SEVERE had the unique opportunity to exchange with Vietnamese students from GCU’s SILKEN Vietnam project  on the question of Active and Global Citizenship.  

• • 21st of April – Student teams met with Lorna McKenzie Social media Officer at GCU, to better understand the subtleties of using Tiktok as a communication platform for their social enterprise.