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ISI Post-Graduate Fellowships

The Institute for Social Innovation Incubator

At the Institute for Social Innovation (ISI), our students are excited to turn their ideas into action. To help our students develop their ideas, we have launched the Social Innovation Incubator Fellowship. The ISI Incubator provides the necessary physical space and overhead costs to allow recent Heinz College graduates to launch their ideas and create organizations that address social needs. The Incubator is in its early stages, but has been able to provide modest support to several of our graduates. Some of these students, now alumni, have carried their inspiration out of the classroom and into the world. A few examples of what some have accomplished thus far:

GTECH Strategies

Based on research they conducted at Heinz College, three recent graduates created GTECH Strategies (Growth Through Energy and Community Health) to reclaim idle land to create both energy and jobs. Today, they're growing crops like switchgrass and canola plants, which not only serve as raw material for clean-burning biofuels, but also help detoxify the ground. The process elevates property values and serves as a bridge to commercial or residential development. They're also developing a Green Job Corps program to prepare adolescents and young adults for entry-level jobs in environmental enterprises. As a result of their innovative approach to brownfield reclamation, they have been named 2008 Echoing Green Fellows, a highly competitive program for budding social entrepreneurs of which less than 1 percent of all applicants are awarded this prestigious fellowship.

ePanacea

As a part of a social enterprise business plan competition sponsored by the ISI, ePanacea was conceived as a venture aimed at solving the growing e-waste crisis. E-waste consists of discarded electronic equipment, like computer parts, cell phones and gaming devices. It contains toxic materials such as lead and mercury, and it's currently being dumped illegally in many places, often being rerouted to less industrialized nations. The e-waste is burned and thrown in landfills. Worse yet, in some third-world countries, children are used to retrieve its precious metals. ePanacea’s  plan aims to gather all types of e-waste across the United States and recycle or discard it through legal, ethical business partnerships. This web-based company would allow clients to dispose of all types of e-waste, including bulky printers, while assuring them of secure cleaning and tracking. ePanacea won the Heinz College’s contest, and the team entered the TIC Americas competition held in Medellin, Colombia. Out of 854 entrants, they were recently named one of only 29 finalists. They have since been invited to the TIC Asia competition.

TALK: The New Sex Ed

As the first official Social Innovation Fellow sponsored by the ISI, recent Heinz College graduate, Samantha Bushman is seeking to reinvent the way America approaches sexuality education by inspiring the next generation of advocates to act and changing the conversation from the ground up. She plans to recruit, train and deploy recent college grads to work within communities to change the nature of the dialogue around sexuality. TALK’s overarching mission is to educate and empower youth to make healthy and informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health. Sam conceived and began to develop her idea during the spring 2008 offering of Jerr Boschee’s Social Innovation Incubator class. This past summer Sam piloted TALK with the Carnegie Mellon Pre-College program. During the coming year, Sam plans to develop a formal business plan and continue to conduct pilot groups, while further developing a strategy for positioning the organization.