This program was a project I decided to do during the pandemic. It was relatively intense, and it was the first of its kind that I participated in that focused on leadership training. It was one of the few online programs where I actually learned valuable things for the rest of my life. Much of this is mainly due to the fact that, unlike previous opportunities like BSBMUN, Cientista Beta, and NAIMUN, I committed to following through with the activities regardless of their nature. The difference that being intentional and having a well-defined goal makes is immense.
The idea was that in the morning we would have various classes and lectures, and in the afternoon we would work hands-on on the project we were designing based on the Design Thinking philosophy. The first thing I liked about the project was the way they decided to form the group. They used the famous 16 personalities questionnaire and two other personality tests, I believe (I think I have the results saved in my email or on my old laptop, not sure). Based on the results, they created a mix with everyone’s personalities to form the best groups. The most interesting thing is that my group in the end was the one that stayed together the most until the end, which I think was 3–4 months.
Unfortunately, our project didn’t work out very well. But I really liked the idea; it had a certain economic micro-ecosystem that made it work. The basic idea was that we would help the elderly (an idea I advocated for and convinced most to work with) to generate extra income for those who had no means to live on their basic income.
This was the pain point we found after interviewing elderly people from a community support home in Heliópolis, São Paulo. I need to give credit to whichever of our two mentors helped coordinate and arrange these interviews—I had serious doubts it would actually be possible since we had to do everything online. Although the interviews were successful, my biggest fear came true, as the logistical difficulty of getting the project running with all stakeholders online was the project’s downfall.
The idea was simple: we would create a social benefit system for the elderly in which registered stores would give them discounts on purchases, and in return, we would do marketing and publicity for them pro bono.
Finding the elderly was simple; the hard part was making partnerships with the businesses. In the end, we had to pivot, and the person who tried the hardest to make this new, less exciting solution work was redacted—she was informally responsible for managing the project as a whole. The plan was to create a teaching network for digital literacy for a community of elderly women who worked with crafts. Basically, tutorials that I’m not very sure would bring much value to them, since they could easily access YouTube and Google.
In the end, the project died and CEO do Futuro ended; redacted, another participant, and I were nominated for the best student award, but of course, and rightly so, redacted won.
Experience 8/10, it just wasn’t better because of the pandemic. The design thinking part is really cool and useful when you want to build a product/solution that really brings value and doesn’t invent a new problem. The only thing I would do differently is, if we had more time, invest in a more statistical method for the interviews and contact with the target audience, since we interviewed too few people to make a well-informed decision.