PCA Student's Team Wins 2nd Place Prize at Paris 2024's Social Business Competition
It’s hard to miss that Paris will be the site of the 2024 summer olympic games – the city continues to celebrate this designation. But a lesser-known fact is Paris’s commitment to making these games socially and environmentally sustainable. How serious is the city about this? Serious enough to launch a competition that awarded 50,000€ to teams who were judged to provide the most positive and realistic innovations for social business solutions that pertain to the games.
On January 10th, the team of one of our MA in Design for Social Impact students, won second place in Paris 2024’s social business competition, Talent 2024. The student, Amy Dahmen, is part of a team called Kabubu, Swahili for friendship through sport. Kabubu is dedicated to bringing the Paris2024 vision to life through a sports-based refugee integration program that functions as a social business.
Wednesday night, 24 teams of young entrepreneurs gathered at the Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français and pitched the projects they had been developing over the past six months. These 24 teams were selected out of 131 applicants in July of 2017.
At Wednesday’s event, three winners were chosen amongst the finalists. Kabubu won the second place prize of 15,000€ and six months of start-up incubation.
Kabubu’s social business model aims to facilitate refugee integration by building social connections through sport and ultimately providing employment opportunities through careers in sports. Dahmen met Kabubu last semester through MakeSense, and joined the team this December to develop their social business model, which is in conjunction with her thesis project. The thesis project is being mentored in part by PCA Dean Linda Jarvin and by business development consultant and founder of Venture Academie, Tom Wilscam.
The Talent 2024 initiative is a collaboration between the MakeSense organization’s social business incubator, Sensecube, the Marie de Paris, and the Paris 2024 olympic committee. Projects were judged by representatives from the Marie and the Olympic committee.
If you would like to learn more about their project or be involved in their upcoming events, you can follow them at facebook or email at [email protected].