Breakthrough solutions: Fellows Friday with Juliette LaMontagne
Juliette LaMontagne’s Breaker offers millennials a unique, hands-on alternative learning opportunity — working on projects with serious social impact. Breaker teams take on such challenges as illiteracy and feeding the city, while gaining valuable real-world social entrepreneurship skills.
Take us through the Breaker process — how does it work?
Each three-month Breaker project convenes a multidisciplinary group of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 to design product or service solutions to a global challenge. Projects are led by two visionaries — experts in the field who provide inspiration and context to the challenge. The first project we did, the Future of the Book Challenge, addressed the rise of functional illiteracy in the US, and asked the team to consider how emerging technologies might be harnessed to get adolescents reading. Our current Urban Agribusiness Challenge addresses the need to help urban agriculture grow from small-scale ventures to having a wider social impact.Over three months, the Breaker team works with a series of collaborators — leading innovators in the field inform the research; industry experts guide the team throughout the process. The team approaches problem-solving using design processes they learn from IDEO, fuseproject, Frog and more; they’re exposed to start-up perspectives by working inside innovation ecosystems like AOL Ventures and QLabs. The project concludes by having the team pitch its products to an audience of all the existing collaborators, as well as members New York’s venture community. We set the bar high, but we also bring in the best of the best to support the process, offering the team access to the people and companies driving innovation in the space.
Majora Carter presents a talk to the Breaker team and project collaborators to kick off the UrbanAg Challenge at the TED amphitheater in NYC. Click to see larger size. Photo: Juliette LaMontagne
To read the complete interview, visit the TED Blog.
Posted by Karen Eng
