Yesterday – Latin America’s fastest growing NGO brought us this exciting news – “Socialab” was made public as a part of TECHO, formerly Centro de Innovación.
You might ask yourself… what and who is Socialab?
Socialab is a social entrepreneur platform which aims at developing solutions for the problems of the poorest communities in Chile (e.g. poverty, inequality, etc.) through co-creation and networking with a variety of people in the society.
TECHO Chile and its new born initiative Socialab are convinced that, first of all, we need to understand these kind of problems that we associate with those living at the base of the economic pyramid (BoP) in Chile and the whole continent in general, but with a multidimensional perspective.
How does Socialab do that?
One distinguishing characteristic is that Socialab wants to identify, promote and accelerate technology and transformational business in order to create a better well-being for low-income people.
“We will inspire, seek, find, finance and incubate geniuses with transforming ideas. We believe that they will be the endeavors of the future, a different level of consciousness of a society that is more just, altruistic and sustainable.
Today, there is a huge opportunity to generate strong positive transformations. The problems we occur in Chile are basically also existent in Latin America and other parts of the world and therefore our plan is global.
We want to reach hundreds of people, and so will it be in the future”,
explains Julián Ugarte, director of Socialab.
Even though Socialab is an initiative of TECHO (supported by FOMIN and Movistar), it is completely independent from it, because the way they work, based on innovation, is way different than the work TECHO does by actually working in the villages and vulnerable communities of Chile.
So Socialab is really meant to be a pioneer with regard to unconventional solutions related to social exclusion.
How is this done?
The “Key Challenge”
This morning the contest called “Desafío Clave” (Key Challenge) was launched.
This contest aims at motivating young people to come up with innovative and creative ideas of overcoming poverty in e.g. health, work, education and home/neighborhood, etc.
It’s really worth trying to be creative, because a total of CLP 170 million (USD $340k) will be divided among the winning teams to implement their projects and actually help those poor people who are at the bottom of our social pyramid.
What idea can you contribute to Socialab?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsY7OZ8wLPg[/youtube]
