Project Builder

A toolkit guiding students to craft an individualized impact journey with their community.

History
The Project Builder originated during the summer of 2020 when COVID-19 presented unprecedented challenges for families, institutions, companies, and, of course, students across the globe. In a survey of college students across the country, 35% of students learned that their summer internships were canceled, 24% of students were informed that their summer opportunity will be virtual, and 100% of students were crippled with uncertainty regarding the reality of their summer experience. In these trying times, student lives were turned upside down, and the conditions of the world’s most vulnerable communities intensified.


The Project Builder began as an antidote to this dilemma but has additionally grown to be a toolkit for students inspired to independently mobilize social impact in their own communities beyond the summer of 2020.





Vision

In an effort to provide more students with an important and meaningful opportunity to develop their skills and gain hands-on learning experience in social impact, the Beeck Center has created the Project Builder, which acts as a roadmap to crafting an individualized impact journey for your community and is split into 5 phases:

  1. Define what social justice means to you and how you can ethically pursue impact work.

  2. Discover what work is being done in this community and how you fit into their existing ecosystem.

  3. Design ideas for initiatives, campaigns, and opportunities you can pursue to engage with your community.

  4. Develop every step of your process.

  5. Digest your work and your impact!


Goal of Project Builder

This guide aims to provide students with an understanding of human-centered design and how to center the community in their work. It is intentional about decolonizing social impact and incorporating anti-racist efforts into social impact. The Project Builder discourages the narrative that community problems can be solved in one summer project and instead encourages students to spend time learning about communities, the challenges they face, and what is already being done to mitigate them whilst interrogating your own identity, skillset, and potential contributions to the problem and the antidote.


Through the Project Builder, students will gain clarity around social impact, broadly, and potential career paths modeling social impact themes. The goal is for emerging change agents to connect their academics with applied work and project implementation. This guide serves to help students interested in social impact work toward a self-directed community journey. The Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation has provided students with pre-recorded workshops on human-centered design, tips to secure mentorship, and resources for every step of the Project Builder as additional and accessible means of support. This toolkit is designed to be open source and we hope it will be both utilized and optimized by students, educators, and organizations.



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brand logo which reads "beeck center social impact + innovation"

About the Beeck Center

The Beeck Center works alongside experts and students, to surface, accelerate, and scale promising interventions to fill market, policy, or structural gaps that may impede faster positive social change. Through Georgetown University, we are an experiential hub with two key mandates: operate as a training ground for students and lifelong learners, and be a catalyst for scalable, leading-edge ecosystem ideas. We’re an orchestrating broker across sectors to increase the probability of scaled positive impact, ultimately provoking grassroots and institutional leaders to think, behave, and collaborate differently toward a shared vision of prosperity for all.