ABOUT EXPAND YOUR IMPACT

Expand Your Impact (EYI) is a student-led organization that connects international school students across the Central and Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) network and beyond, through service for their collective communities. We foster student collaboration, innovation, and community-driven change. Founded in 2020 by Louise Madigan and Toma Vilcu amid the challenges and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, EYI was created to reignite the buzz of student collaboration and provide a platform for young change-makers to band together, and devise innovative solutions to common community challenges online, across borders. 

In 2021, we held the first service-focused, student-led CEESA conference, attended online by over 200 students across 13 international schools. Over the span of two days, students from a diverse array of backgrounds banded together in groups focused on Sustainable Development Goals of their interest to identify challenges common to all their communities and begin devising a community and student-driven plan to address them. With the support of a series of workshops and guidance of Youthopia's Melati Wijsen and Circle of Youth members, students developed coherent plans to address their challenges and would continue to collaborate on them for 6 months until a second conference, where they had the opporutnity to present their interventions to a Youthotpia panel, receive recognition for their work, and feedback on how to best implement their community-driven solutions. This conference-challenge format, repeated again in 2022, is now known as the EYI challenge and has culminated in the first in-person iteration of EYI in Baku, Azerbaijan, in October 2024, just two weeks ahead of COP29. A handful of our participating students had the opportunity to speak at a COP29 panel hosted by The Extreme Hangout, a collaboration secured by our partnership with Youthtopia.