Young people are eager to transform our communities for the better.
Join us to provide them with the learning opportunities and resources they need to succeed.
Your gift helps equip the educators, youth mentors, and workers who give young people the tools to imagine, test, and build ideas that can positively transform their communities.
What happens when youth are given a place to start?
Through our youth social entrepreneurship program, they created Buttons & Beyond, designing and selling handmade buttons to fund sensory kits and educational resources for neurodivergent youth in their community.
In their first year, they sold around 1,000 buttons, completed custom orders for five local businesses, attended 11 farmers’ markets, and created their first 12 sensory kits.
Their story reminds us that youth already notice what matters. With the right support, they can turn that awareness into action.
And Buttons & Beyond Is Only One Beginning
More Youth Ideas We’ve Helped Bring to Life
Buttons & Beyond is one story of what can happen when young people are given a place to start. But it’s not the only one.
Across Impact Toolbox programs, youth have looked at the communities around them and asked thoughtful, honest questions:
- Where do young people go when they need belonging?
- What happens to clothing that could be reused?
- How do we care for youth who feel unseen?
- What would it look like to restore the land around us?
From those questions, real ideas began to take shape. Here are just a few from our programs and youth initiatives.
In Golden, BC, youth noticed that affordable, youth-friendly thrift options were limited, while clothing waste continued to grow.
So they imagined something different: a youth-led thrift and upcycling venture that uses second-hand clothing for climate action, creativity, and community learning.
Through Thrift’n Flips, young people began creating a space where sustainability could feel practical, accessible, and made for them.
In Kelowna, youth from the Better World Club who participated in our program turned their concern for local biodiversity into a hands-on environmental project.
They designed and sold #PlantLocalOK stickers to raise funds for Project Mini Forests, an initiative supporting biodiversity conservation in the Okanagan.
What began as a creative learning activity became a way for youth to care for the land around them.
In Kimberley, BC, through our program, students imagined a youth cafe where young people could gather, connect, and access affordable food in a welcoming space.
With a small local grant, a team of six youth researched the market, developed a business plan, created budgets, and soft-launched Lee’s Cafe in June 2025. By October, they had designed, painted, and opened a warm space of their own.
Even though the cafe could not continue in its original model, the project remains a success: youth took an idea from concept to completion and learned what it means to build something real.
Help More Youth Develop the Skills to Lead and the Confidence to Act
What Your Gift Helps Make Possible
Your support helps provide:
- Hands-on social entrepreneurship curriculum
- Resources & training for mentors and educators
- Seed funding to help youth turn ideas to impactful projects
Where Your Donation Goes and How YOU Support Young Leaders
Your donation directly supports the mentors, teachers, and youth workers who bring social entrepreneurship education to life.
Through your support, young people take their first real steps into social entrepreneurship. They explore ideas, solve problems they care about, design projects that respond to real needs in their community, and discover that they can lead change now, not only later. They come away with practical problem-solving and leadership skills, a project they built themselves, and a new belief in what they can do.
They strengthen the skills to lead, the confidence to act, and become a part of a community that stays with them.
01
You Send Your Donation to Us
Your gift goes directly toward helping Impact Toolbox bring social entrepreneurship education to more young people.
02
Educators Receive the Tools
Impact Toolbox uses your donation to equip mentors, teachers, and youth leaders with social entrepreneurship curriculum, training, and facilitation resources.
03
Youth Learn How to Build
Through our educators, youth learn how to recognize community needs, explore social impact, test ideas, build simple business models, and pitch solutions.
04
Ideas Become Real Projects
Youth leave with practical skills, confidence, and ideas they can begin testing in the real world.
05
Communities Feel the Ripple
Youth-led ideas can grow into projects that support inclusion, sustainability, mental health, peer belonging, climate action, and other community needs.
How Far Your Gift Can Reach
Every donation helps create the conditions for youth to learn, build, and bring their ideas into action. Here’s how your support can move through the Impact Toolbox model:
Small, Consistent Donations Over Time
Choose the monthly amount that feels right for you, and we’ll put it toward steady, ongoing support for youth entrepreneurship education.
With the price of just three coffees, help give one youth a place to start with access to social entrepreneurship learning throughout a term.
One-Time Donations
Provides one youth with social entrepreneurship education.
Helps a group of five youth explore a community need, build an idea, and begin shaping it into a real project.
Fully supports one mentor with both course enrollment and a stipend, enabling them to guide approximately 20 students across four youth teams.
Where Mentor Support Comes to Life
Behind every program is a group of young people with ideas, questions, lived experiences, and care for their communities.
That care needs somewhere to go.
Sometimes it becomes a classroom program. Other times it becomes a community partnership, a youth challenge, or a hands-on fellowship. Across each model, the goal is similar: help young people move from noticing a problem to building something that can respond to it.
Examples of Programs Your Gift Helps Support
A hands-on youth entrepreneurship program where mentors guide students through problem discovery, business modelling, action planning, and pitching. In partnership with KAST, mentors received curriculum, training, and a stipend to support youth ages 13–18 in developing social impact business ideas.
A youth learning experience focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, storytelling, and digital skills. In one summer cohort, students developed social change projects connected to biodiversity conservation and youth homelessness support.
Professors bring Impact Toolbox into their classrooms much like a course textbook, turning what might have been a theoretical course into experiential, project-based learning. Students do more than study social entrepreneurship; they explore real community challenges and draw on both their academic discipline and their social entrepreneurship knowledge to develop viable solutions. These courses carry credit and form part of students’ core or elective academic experience. Traditionally, the engineering perspective focuses its attention on the scope of the immediate problem to be solved without necessarily addressing future opportunities once the project is complete. This was a great opportunity to expand students’ perspectives from a project-based mindset to envisioning sustainable and scalable solutions that can have recurring, lasting societal impacts.
A short, immersive program where community mentors supported Black and racialized youth through problem identification, solution design, teamwork, and venture development. Youth teams created actionable social enterprise designs rooted in lived experience and community needs.
A youth social entrepreneurship challenge where local mentors and educators support students to build projects connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Youth move through curriculum, mentorship, and a public showcase, with seed funding helping finalist teams bring ideas to life.
… and more! All of these programs are rooted in our belief that when educators and mentors are supported well, young people have more room to imagine, test, build, and contribute to their communities.
What Our Educators and Youth Mentors Are Saying
What Our Donors Are Saying
FAQ
Your donation helps equip mentors, teachers, and youth leaders with Impact Toolbox’s social entrepreneurship curriculum, training, and tools.
These educators then bring the learning into classrooms and community spaces, helping young people explore social impact, test ideas, build simple business models, and pitch solutions rooted in the needs they notice around them.
Impact Toolbox is a nonprofit that teaches emerging and equity-deserving change leaders to pursue two goals at once: real impact in their community, and the revenue that keeps that impact alive
Through courses, coaching, mentorship, curriculum, and hands-on programs, we support people at the early stages of building something that can serve their communities.
Young people are already paying attention.
They notice what feels unfair, inaccessible, wasteful, isolating, or overlooked. Social entrepreneurship gives them a way to move from concern into action, while building confidence, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and leadership skills along the way.
Youth learn how to recognize community needs, understand social impact, explore entrepreneurship, test early ideas, build simple business models, work in teams, tell their story, and pitch their solutions.
The goal is not only to teach business skills. It is to help youth see that their ideas, experiences, and care for their communities can become something real.
Impact Toolbox supports the people closest to youth, including educators, mentors, youth leaders, and community partners.
By equipping these trusted leaders with curriculum and facilitation tools, the learning can happen in places where young people already feel connected, supported, and known.
Youth-led ideas can take many forms.
They might support inclusion, climate action, mental health, peer belonging, accessibility, education, sustainability, or other needs young people notice in their communities.
For example, youth have created projects like sensory kits for neurodivergent students and thrift-based upcycling initiatives that respond to clothing waste.
Your gift creates a ripple effect.
When one educator is equipped, they can support many youth. Those youth can then bring new ideas into their schools, neighbourhoods, and communities. The impact grows through relationships, learning, confidence, and the projects youth choose to carry forward.
Yes. One-time gifts help us meet immediate program needs, while monthly gifts help create steady support for curriculum, mentorship, educator training, and youth programming over time.
Both forms of giving help young people access a meaningful place to start.
No problem at all! You have complete control over your ongoing support and can modify or cancel it whenever you like. Check out the simple steps here.
Impact Toolbox is a registered nonprofit. Donation receipt details should be provided through the donation platform or follow-up confirmation email.
Our Canadian charity business number is 781118401 RR 0001.
This campaign helps more youth access social entrepreneurship education through the mentors, teachers, and youth leaders who support them.
At its heart, the campaign is about giving young people a place to start and a place to explore what they care about, build practical skills, and begin turning ideas into action.