Now on their second year in empowering young social entrepreneurs in all parts of the world and help them address issues concerning their society from education, health care, livelihood, environmental innovation and others, Unilever opens their door for new sets of young leaders who wanted to become pillars of change and development for the 2014 Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Awards. In partnership of Ashoka Changemakers and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership they will be accepting entries until August 1 via www.changemakers.com/sustliving2014.
Here in the Philippines there are so many concerns we wanted to address. For both urban and rural areas our fellow Filipinos face same problem in regards of poverty. With the growing population; education, food, shelter and health care will always be the primary problem because of the lacking or unequal distribution of budget in the local government and its agencies. For places that are usually victims of conflicts and disaster aside from the main concerns that I mentioned there will always be a problem on peace for conflict affected areas, rescue and rebuild from the disaster affected areas and to sum it the common concern is displacement of families from their usual home where they go to work, school and live.
With the Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Awards, it encourages future leaders to stand up and be the catalyst of change that will surely their respective communities will benefit at the same time the possibility of replicating their framework for a larger communities to benefit from it. In order to join, social entrepreneurs and community leaders must submit their presentation and proposal to www.changemakers.com/sustliving2014. They must be at least 30 years old and below to quality.
There will be 7 winners who will be flying to Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in the United Kingdom for a two-day accelerator workshop that will develop their skills and prepare them for the final presentation with the selected panels that will decide who will be the grand winner of the grant. Six will be receiving 10, 000 Euros while the winning proposal will be bringing home 50, 000 Euros or roughly Php 3 Million that will surely help them in fully developing their projects and all the equipments they needs. Winners will be named on January 2015.
Last 2013, there are more than 500 proposals from 90 countries worldwide. Winning projects included: a mobile data and messaging system that tracks water supply and optimized use (India), low-cost chicken-feed made from waste mango seed (Nigeria), water-less toilets in rural areas (Peru), and a work-for-education swap scheme where the children of low-income farm workers received education in return for their parents donating their labor to a farming collective (Nepal). And the grand winner was Gamal Albinsaid, a 24 year old Indonesian, who addressed two sustainability challenges with one idea: converting the value in household waste into health insurance for low income families. This inspiring initiative is now being turned into a repeatable model in communities throughout Indonesia.
With the creativity and bold concepts of the youth it will surely help their communities in bring change. Be that first Filipino to join the Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Awards.
