Problem Statement
The social justice playbook needs an update. Public servants have long championed society’s critical needs, waging campaigns against injustice and imagining a society better suited to human flourishing.
Meanwhile, engineers are inventing and scaling technologies that change the dynamics of society. The distance between technologist and activist needs to be closed: we need to cultivate a generation of activist-technologists.
System Analysis
We talked with more than 50 activists, public interest technologists, NGO leaders, impact-oriented engineering students, and government tech officials.
We heard that social impact tech incubators rely on traditional startup logic: provide funding to entrepreneurs with domain experience and an exciting product.
We are hacking the incubation ecosystem. We find student-activists and technologists who, together, can discover game-changing innovations.
Year One Goals
(1) Scope, build, and embed two technologies in public service sectors. We want to be known as builders, not just theorists.
(2) Create an intercollegiate community of activist-technologists. We aim to build a movement and collective of students suited to helping solve the world’s pressing problems.
(3) Renovate (or invent) the framework for building movement technologies. As students and professionals begin imagining alternative visions for a just and sustainable future, we provide them with the space and resources to ground their engineering dreams.