Designed by College of the Atlantic senior Clément Moliner-Roy ’18, the project brings together 10 aspiring changemakers to pioneer and co-create this new interdisciplinary education platform in Magog, Québec, Canada this summer.
From July 3 to August 1, these students from around the world will attend experiential workshops, visit mission-driven organizations, and learn from guest speakers as they learn an array of tools and develop hard skills they can go onto using throughout their lives to transform ideas into actions, Moliner-Roy said.
“The program will invite the fellows to creatively combine strengths, interests, and causes into world-changing projects and then scaffold these projects into achievable steps,” Moliner-Roy said. “We hope to inspire participants to do what they are passionate about, and to offer a space to realize that there are others that believe as strongly as they do about contributing to a better world and who will be willing to work with resilience towards those greater goals.”
residency as his capstone senior project, and utilizing coursework in the COA Diana Davis Spencer Hatchery sustainable enterprise accelerator. The venture incubator program provides eligible students academic credit, professional services and access to seed funding to develop their business ideas. Moliner-Roy is launching the
Moliner Roy and his team believe that creating sustainable change takes time, he said, so rather than having participants leave with a business up and running, they hope to help participants understand the complexity of the problems they want to address and to understand how to create synergies with existing projects so as to create holistic and long-lasting impacts.
“Through hands-on activities, we hope that participants will develop the changemakers’ attributes and explore their own potential to create positive change to address the 5Ps—people, the planet, peace, partnerships, and profit,” Moliner-Roy said. “We think it’s so important to be action driven, so we will encourage participants to develop prototypes, but this residency is really just a launching pad. The emphasis is really on empowering the individual so they can reuse what they learn throughout their lives on all the social impact projects they undertake.”
Over his time at COA, Moliner-Roy’s own educational experience has been infused with interdisciplinary insights and experiences, he said. His passion for experiential education was kindled through working closely with College of the Atlantic students and faculty to help launch the Human Ecology Lab and Island Odyssey program, an innovative educational program in Ōsakikamijima, Japan based on COA’s interdisciplinary, student-driven, and community-based pedagogy.
In order to develop the Changemaker Residency, Moliner-Roy has interviewed scores of educators and visited nearly a dozen schools to observe and understand what does and doesn’t work in their practices. The resulting curriculum draws inspiration from innovative practices from around the world, including U.N.-mandated UPEACE in Costa Rica, ImaginEx Japan, Stanford Design School, and Watson University.
“Over the last year I have visited 10 different educational institutions and done over 60 interviews with different educators, social innovators and students exploring how to spark the will to contribute to a better world and looking at how to equip participants with the right tools, skills and resources to create the change they want to see in the world,” he said. “My ultimate mission right now is to see how we can create synergies at a micro level, to see how can we combine the best practice from one place with the best practices from other places to create something new and innovative, learning from what’s already out there.”
Moliner-Roy said he is very excited about the interest the program has already generated.
“We received 27 applications from all over the world and all with amazing projects,” he said. “We heard from a candidate in Nigeria who wants to launch a studio hub to support creative entrepreneurs. We have a candidate from Scotland who wants to empower youth to take action in their environment by bringing them to the outdoors. We have a Canadian candidate who wants to develop an initiatives to break the silos within communities of professionals working in the environmental field. We have applicants from Japan, from Nigeria, from Kenya, from both coasts of Canada.”
To learn more about the Changemaker Residency, visit www.changemakerfellows.com or follow the project on facebook https://www.facebook.com/changemakerfellows/.