Village to Raise a Child - VTRAC

11/20/2019

We are very thankful for the sponsors that made VTRAC 2019 possible! Your donations are what enables us to support international student entrepreneurs on their mission to make the world a better place ✨

Harvard College Social Innovation Collaborative
Magoosh SAT & ACT
Irving House at Harvard
Boloco
Tasty Burger

11/19/2019

Victor, Ícaro, Marcela, and Diogo are a Brazillian group of young inventors named SCIALL. Victor (17) is a student who is very passionate about engineering and an enthusiast of innovation; Ícaro (17) is passionate about mathematics and programming, and he found in electronics a way to turn his passion into action; Diogo (17) is a young entrepreneur who dreams of changing Brazil's reality with technology, and Marcela (17) is an aspiring designer who loves physics and app design.

Together, their goal is to develop socially and environmentally aware technologies to solve local issues and improve the life quality of their community. SCIALL realized that the current diagnosis process for skin cancer requires the use of complex and expensive methods of tissue analysis, such as dermoscopy and photo analysis. Therefore, they created DocAssist, an electronic device that identifies skin hotspots that might indicate a strange cell growth metabolism through a heat-mapping sensor, which facilitates access to the diagnosis and, therefore, the treatment of these diseases.

11/19/2019

Kaushik Singh and Sachin Singh are students of Inventure Academy, India, and co-founders of SaKu. With roots in a farming family, they’ve experienced the challenges faced by rural populations in two key aspects: health and agriculture. With research beyond the classroom, they amalgamated their interdisciplinary interests in Computers and Life Sciences to find technological solutions to these rural challenges.

The result? Kaushik and Sachin developed a new method for automating cardiac auscultation and built a diagnostic tool consisting of a low-cost digital stethoscope connected to a mobile app for untrained community health workers to collect heart sounds and detect abnormal heart conditions. Similarly, they realized most crop diseases can be diagnosed by agricultural experts with a visual examination of foliar symptoms, so they developed a solution that enables farmers to instantly detect crop diseases themselves by photographing affected plant parts with a mobile phone and receive treatments. Using geotagged images, they also enabled disease tracking and analytics for preventive measures against outbreaks.
Kaushik and Sachin’s projects have won awards from Intel ISEF and Google Science Fair, among others. They are currently working towards a real-life deployment of their solution.

11/18/2019

Raul Guedes Carlessi is 16 years old and was born in Curitiba, PR, Brazil. Raul grew up on the outskirts of Curitiba in places with high levels of violence and crime, and he studied all his life in public school. At the age of 14, he won a NASA competition in Curitiba where he had the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then, he has had the dream of using this amazing experience outside of his country to help the community where he grew up with a smart solution project called Inun, which aims to monitor floods and emit alerts before they happen in Brazil.

Together with the WAAS Institute, he explored the most atypical flood solutions that Brazil already had and noticed that most of them cost billions of dollars for the country. His goal then became to use low-cost sensors on the banks of the river with the scientific concept based on a Danish solution for floods but costing less. In 2019, he got support from meteorological companies to measure weather data and connect with data from his low-cost sensors. In the same year, the Inun project was invited by the city of Curitiba to participate in the Innovation Week, where Raul talked with the mayor of Curitiba about the application of the solution in 2020.

11/18/2019

Next up on our list of 2019 winners is the DREAMS team (Delivering Right to Education and More for Special People), which aims to provide accessible laboratory spaces (PALS), for science and math, in every blind school. Their goal is for these spaces to act as learning areas and catalysts for these students for an interesting and effective learning of STEM subjects.

The DREAMS team comprises of three passionate changemakers who have researched and explored many new innovative ideas together. Ananya is an avid filmmaker and tech enthusiast who has participated in many international children film festivals as a child jury. Mudit is a science and math wizard who has won many levels of science and math olympiads and participated in many specialized math camps. Krish is a multi-talented student who has also published a novel and attends writer retreats along with acclaimed writers. Together, they form a formidable team ready to research and explore new ideas and tasks.

11/18/2019

We are so excited to kick off the 2019 edition of VTRAC in less than 48 hours!! 🎉 We will be introducing this year's Global Trailblazers throughout the next few hours, beginning with Asha Abbas.

Asha is a young African leader passionate about youth, leadership, health, and entrepreneurship. As an agent of change, she founded Aurateen an organization that provides s*x education to youth via online and offline platforms, where teens get a chance to ask questions regarding s*xual health and get direct counseling from qualified health experts. With a need to enrich her pre-existing leadership experience, she enrolled in the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. Asha has a four-year well-versed background with entrepreneurial activities, working with different organizations and companies and running her own organization to impact people’s lives. She believes in giving back to her community and her organization has currently impacted over 25000 youth in Tanzania with s*xual health education via different platforms of delivering the service.

As a result of the work she is doing in her community, Asha received several recognitions and awards to support her organization. For example, she is a 2016 Anzisha fellow, Africa’s premier awards and fellowship for its youngest entrepreneurs, and she is also one of the most influential young women entrepreneurs in Tanzania who were recognized as Malkia Wa Nguvu (Brave queen) in 2017.

07/31/2019

Thank you to all young change makers who took the time to apply to VTRAC 2019. We have received the highest number of applications to the program to date, so it has been especially difficult for us to select finalists out of hundreds of passionate ideas. We wish the best of luck to all applicants in their future endeavors and to our finalists in their interviews!

06/20/2019

2 HOURS LEFT! Make sure to submit your application for VTRAC 2019 before 11:59pm ET (Boston time). We look forward to reading your applications!

Village to Raise a Child is a program established by the Harvard Social Innovation Collaborative that identifies and nurtures five young social entrepreneurs from around the world. These five students—called “Global Trailblazers”—are selected via a global competition that searches for the mo...

06/16/2019

DEADLINE EXTENDED: We are extending the application deadline for 2 days due to an overwhelming number of requests. Applications will be accepted until June 19th, 11:59pm ET. Best of luck to those who have already submitted their apps and those still working!

Link to more information and application form:

Village to Raise a Child is a program established by the Harvard Social Innovation Collaborative that identifies and nurtures five young social entrepreneurs from around the world. These five students—called “Global Trailblazers”—are selected via a global competition that searches for the mo...

06/12/2019

ONLY 6 DAYS LEFT TO APPLY! The VTRAC program is open to any student/group of students with an innovative idea or recently-initiated project that attempts to solve a community-wide problem. Winners will spend a fully-funded week at Harvard University and present their projects at the Igniting Innovation Summit on Social Entrepreneurship!

Link to learn more and apply: https://forms.gle/oPtY6M2kTTva82Gb7

06/02/2019

15 DAYS LEFT TO APPLY!
VTRAC is a program by the Harvard College Social Innovation Collaborative that identifies social entrepreneurs from around the world and sponsors a fully-funded 8-day trip to Harvard University for those high school students. It culminates in a presentation of their ideas at the Igniting Innovation Summit on Social Entrepreneurship, the largest undergraduate-run conference on social entrepreneurship in the country.

Learn more about the program and eligibility criteria and apply by June 17th: tinyurl.com/vtrac2019