The Future Founder’s Fellowship (F3) trains teenagers in leadership, entrepreneurship, and digital skills. It aims to nurture a formidable network of young social innovators collaborating and leveraging technology to address critical challenges affecting their communities.
Fellowship Benefits
How the fellowship works
The Future Founder’s Fellowship (F3) is a very practical learning experience where a cohort of participants are supported to work as a team to create a community development project. Such a project must be aligned with one of the sustainable development goals. Participants are supported by the Impact Toolbox team, community based mentors and a dedicated teacher mentor who will coordinate and guide the students throughout their journey of creating and implementing their community development project.
While working on their project, fellows will participate in leadership and entrepreneurship training sessions and opportunity to be mentored by experienced entrepreneurs and leaders from within the Impact Toolbox network.
Fellowship Implementation
- The fellowship is for teens between 13 to 19 years old. It is highly inclusive and prioritizes diversity. We strongly encourage the participation of girls, minority youths, and teens living with disabilities.
- We partner with schools, community centres and other organizations serving youth to implement the F3 fellowship.
- The F3 has been designed to be flexible, adaptable and customizable to the circumstances of diverse youth communities.
- The fellowship is delivered through a blend of virtual live and pre-recorded training sessions. Depending on our partner(s), we also host on-site convening and workshop sessions.
- Partner identifies and nominates a cohort of students and provides support throughout the program.
Alumni Spotlight
KSS Thrifty Thursday is on a mission to change the consumption and production cycle of clothing while giving back to local charities. Clothing is an essential part of our daily lives, and our current way of producing it has a massive cost to the environment and wallets alike. It’s crucial to change our relationship with clothing; the current fast-paced one-time system isn’t sustainable for anyone. An estimated 10.5 million tons of clothes and textiles in North America are lost to disposal every year. On average, clothes are worn only seven times before being disposed of. Thrifty Thursday is helping to combat this problem by running a school-based and online thrift store where students and community members can shop, swap, or donate used clothing. With the swap shop, we promote a circular economy while increasing the wear time of items that could have ended up in the landfill.
Testimonials
"I think If I could have gone back in time and told my nine year old self about an online thrift shop that I helped to create I don't think she would have believed me. I always was ambitious in one way or another but I felt like I never had the tools to make it a reality. The barrier against my dreams was always the uncertainty and the fact that many people believed that I would amount to nothing. Those people had given up on me before I had even gotten the chance to show my true potential. Impact Toolbox through this program presented me with an opportunity I could have never imagined."
Julia Soleski
Kelowna Secondary School Thrifty Thursday
"We were building an online school thrift store with the help of Impact Toolbox through coaching and strategy sessions. It was tremendous help as we were taught step by step in detail with advice and received helpful feedback from an experienced professional. When it comes to entrepreneurship and leadership, I am usually easily intimidated. However, the stories from others' experiences we were told made me realize that it is not as bad as I thought, and I am more capable than I thought."
Priscilla Lao
Kelowna Secondary School Thrifty Thursday
Program Updates
Announcing Our 2023 Future Founders
Impact Toolbox is thrilled to announce the second round of the Future Founders Fellowship (F3) and introduce this year’s
Future Founders Fellowship and the sustainable development challenge in Kelowna
Impact is not just a part of our name but an action we carry out in every way possible.