Problem Statement

Young professionals and tertiary students in Latin America need to improve their project management skills and get in contact with mentors in order to create a positive impact for small businesses and NGOs.

 

Target Group

The young Latin American students and professionals have benefitted from knowledge they obtained by creating solutions for local small businesses and NGOs with the help of mentors. The mentors, who are professionals already in the job market have benefitted from the contact with the youth. The small businesses and NGOs have benefitted from the solutions that will be developed. In the end, everyone has benefitted from the connections created between the volunteers and participants from all Latin America.

 

Proposed Solution

Through the project "Connection journey 2020", the Brasilia Hub has worked with professional project managers in order to support Latin American university students and young professionals to develop their skills whilst they competed with each other in order to develop solutions for local NGOs and small businesses that they knew and that were facing problems. The competition was completely online and was held in three phases: in the first phase, teams had to work in order to identify the problems the NGO/businesses owners were facing, in the second one they worked to create a solution and in the last phase, they have identifies ways to apply these solutions. Each phase took two weeks and the volunteer mentors, who were professional project managers, have supported the teams since the beginning. Also, online training sessions and manuals were provided to provide the youth with the necessary tools to create and apply solutions. Each team was formed by a group of 4 to 5 students who chose a company/NGO in their city. The project took place between October and December 2020.

 

Hub Activities

- Promote the Connection Journey in social media so that people could register to participate in it

- Provide mentors who were supporting teams of young professionals and university students to develop solutions for the NGOs and small businesses. The role of the mentor was to help the students in the different phases of the project, from the problem identification until the application of the solution proposed by the team and approved by the company owners.

- Provide online training so that the students could learn about tools that might be useful for them to create the solution alongside with their mentors and the company owners.

- Support the logistics of toolkits for the teams, evaluation requirements, support the jury, provide the award for the winners, etc.

 

The Hub delivered one hour training on project management and introduced the network for 60 participants and volunteers from all over Latin America. One of the Hub members was working as the general manager of the event, organizing all the deliveries and the volunteers activities and the materials that were sent to all the 148 participants.

 

Two other shapers worked as mentors, helping three Brazilian teams to develop their projects, which one of them came until the phase of developing their solution and two of them came to the final phase of applying it, and now working with the 1000 Brazilian Reals each of them received to improve and scale up their solutions.

 

Available Metrics

In total, 30 teams registered for the Connection Journey, summing up 148 participants from 5 countries: Brazil, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico. Among these, 21 teams fully identified the problems for their chosen companies/NGOs, helping them to diagnose their gaps, 14 went on and created solutions for them and after the three phases, 11 teams (from Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Costa Rica) had delivered solutions for their respective chosen local NGO/company. Among these, the best project received 10 thousand Brazilian Reals to improve the solution and scale up the project, the runner-up received 4 thousand Reals and the remaining nine, 1 thousand Brazilian Reals. There were also prizes between the phases where the teams received online courses and were able to participate in local congresses of professional project managers. The project also mobilized 80 volunteers from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, Portugal and Germany to work as mentors, jury and representatives. 

 

Collaborators

• GPjr (Center of Project Management or Junior Entrepreneurs)


• PMI Latin America (Project Management Institute Latin America)


• JEGlobal (Junior Enterprises Global) and International Conferences Perú.