Do you believe in an Australia where every young person has a chance to fulfill their potential? Where everyone has the chance to feel trusted, supported, and included?
Hi, we’re Young Change Agents, a youth-led not-for-profit social enterprise dedicated to helping young people see problems as opportunities through entrepreneurship.
We are inviting you to invest in the entrepreneurial skills, capacity, and confidence of young Australians from diverse backgrounds through the “$20 Boss” program.
$20 Boss is a unique program that builds the skills they will need to thrive in the future.
With Young Change Agents taking over management of the program this year we want to ensure that all young people have access to this kind of experience so they can build their skills for the future.
We already have the funding we need to run this program but that’s not enough.
We need your help to ensure that cost is no barrier for schools and young people who want to participate in this program.
Because we don’t just want a more entrepreneurial and economically vibrant Australia; we want a fairer and more just Australia as well.
Please consider joining us in this mission and supporting more young people to be able to access $20 Boss!
Each $20 you contribute allows another young person to participate.
How $20 Boss Works
$20 Boss is a free-to-access program that provides a tangible way of supporting students to learn, identify and talk about the skills they’re building. $20 Boss supports students to solve a real problem and helps them better understand their relationship with money.
$20 Boss is about trusting and believing in young people.
Give them $20 and a chance to make a difference and you will be amazed by what they can do!
This experience builds their confidence, skills, and entrepreneurial thinking, setting them – and Australia – up to thrive in the rapidly-evolving world of the 21st century where change is the only constant.
Developed in consultation with students and educators, the $20 Boss program is the largest entrepreneurship program in Australia. The program was designed and delivered by the Foundation for Young Australians from 2015-2020. Over 180,000 young people from 1,500 schools across Australia have participated in the program since 2015.
From 2021, Young Change Agents will be supporting $20 Boss to be delivered in schools across Australia.
The program itself is funded and proven to work, but what we do not have at this point is any funding to give each participating student the initial $20 required to make the program work.
And not every family has $20 to support their child to participate.
We want to make sure that every young people has access to experiences and opportunities like $20 Boss.
That's what this campaign is about.
For just $20 you can give a young person this life-changing experience.
For $100 you could sponsor a team of five to work on an idea together.
For $1,000 you can support a whole class to participate and
For $10,000 you can ensure the program is brought to your local school or region.
Because we already have program funding 100% of your contribution will cover the initial $20 for each young person to participate.
But it gets better! Each $20 doesn’t actually just support one participant but many because the funds get recycled. Over 95% of funds are returned by the participants each year after making it back from their own entrepreneurial efforts. This means that your $20 will renew over and over again, supporting young people for years.
That’s a pretty amazing social impact for your funds!
Supporting Educators
$20 Boss doesn’t just support young people to gain the skills they need for the future; it supports great educators who want to ensure their students are set up for success.
There are great educators all around Australia who are working hard to build up the confidence and capacity of their students, sometimes with very few resources and working with kids who need additional support. We want to connect with and back those educators and make it easy for them to bring $20 Boss to their classroom.
$20 Boss provides a framework to prepare students for the future by providing educators with the tools and frameworks to facilitate important enterprise learning. This is an accessible program for all educators to run because it is:
- Mapped to the Australian curriculum: $20 Boss has been designed to fit seamlessly into the Australian Curriculum and is mapped against general capabilities and relevant learning areas for years 5-10 and VCAL.
- Skills-driven learning: $20 Boss puts the development of enterprise skills like critical and creative thinking, teamwork, and entrepreneurship at the forefront of learning.
- Has comprehensive toolkits: A full teacher toolkit and a lite teacher toolkit are available for free to support teachers to deliver the program providing lesson plans, resources, and more.
Your support will ensure that $20 Boss is available to educators in all schools and to students from all backgrounds.
More About Young Change Agents:
Young Change Agents is an NFP social enterprise with a mission to help young people see problems as opportunities through entrepreneurship. Our focus is on building the mindset, skillset, and toolset of young people and we do this in a scalable way by investing in eco-system development, teacher capacity building, and proprietary technology to support our face-to-face programs.
In 2020, Young Change Agents is a key delivery partner for the Australian Government initiative, the Academy of Enterprising Girls as well as a Digital Futures Partner of Telstra Foundation reaching youth in regional and rural areas across Australia. Our programs are inclusive of all youth including marginalized and disadvantaged young Australians.
We see a world where young people:
- View problems as opportunities
- Can make a difference
- Feel empowered to start something good
- Stand up for things that they are passionate about
- Believe that they are good enough to be entrepreneurs, leaders, and world-changers
We believe that youth-led initiatives such as Young Change Agents provide young people with the opportunity to exercise leadership, build decision-making skills, and increase their ability to work in a team. This approach allows young individuals to develop multiple core competencies, ranging from cognitive to emotional, physical, moral, vocational, and cultural, ultimately contributing to the young person’s sense of self-worth and identity.
While adult-led and government-organized initiatives target youth with specific problems and behaviors such as drug abuse, we believe that a youth-led approach is a next step forward, as it challenges young people to lead the way by deciding what needs to be achieved and then accomplishing it. Enabling young people to meaningfully engage in initiatives that they create not only makes youth the stakeholders of their immediate future, but of their community’s long-term well-being. The development of these skills and competencies is crucial for preparing young people to both create their own careers and to become innovative employees
As a social enterprise, we have never before done a public fundraising campaign and we are not asking you to fund us, we are asking you to fund young people to access this program. This will help grow our enterprise and the social enterprise movement, inspiring a generation of young entrepreneurs to make a difference.