Josefina Peters-Didier, Samuditha Rupasinghe, and Florence Reynolds of the Live the Dream team Plastic Diet. Photo / Supplied
Josefina Peters-Didier, Samuditha Rupasinghe, and Florence Reynolds of the Live the Dream team Plastic Diet. Photo / Supplied
New Zealand's next generation of social entrepreneurs are getting ready to pitch their ideas for a better New Zealand as part of, summer social enterprise accelerator, Live the Dream.
The 10 week programme has seen 18 start-ups in Wellington and Auckland, hoping to make social or environmental change, supported through a range of workshops, speakers and mentorships, to develop an initial business model. On Thursday evening teams will pitch to a room of 120 of the business, government, charity and social enterprise community.
Exactly what teams are pitching for will vary. Some may be asking for specific amounts of investment, others for advisory expertise, user testers or team members.
The founder of Live the Dream and CEO of Inspiring Stories who is behind the initiative, Guy Ryan, said he wished a similar accelerator programme had been an opportunity for him as a young entrepreneur and University graduate.
Ryan, who was recently named a finalist for the 2015 Young New Zealander of the Year, said "the start-up game is hard - the best accelerators in the world have a less than 1 per cent success rate.
"I think in New Zealand we have a lot of support for high growth commercial enterprise but there are gaps, especially for young people, who are looking to grow ideas."
He said most participants began Live the Dream with a strong passion for creating better social or environmental outcomes however they lacked "commercialisation experience".
Live the Dream aimed to provide with them with the tools to "get a viable enterprise off the ground that can be sustained".
The programme offered participants intensive, practical learning in a fast paced environment, he said, with the opportunity for them to learn "from so many amazing people".
However, come the end of next week, the goal was not necessarily to have developed a successful business venture.
"Even it for participants this venture doesn't succeed for whatever reason, we hope participants will learn a lot form that. Maybe it's not until their second, or their third, or their fourth venture before they create something that really flies."
Ryan said the long term goals of Live the Dream included expanding the programme to include Dunedin and Christchurch in 2016, and offering a greater network of support for teams both before the programme had started and once it was over.
Plastic Diet
Florence Reynolds,22, is a member of Auckland team Plastic Diet. Founded in 2013, the youth organization aims to reduce single-use plastic consumption and pollution.
She said her team saw Live the Dream as a way to make its advocacy work financially sustainable "so we can carry on doing that work better and wider".
Reynolds said the contacts her team had made through Live the Dream were invaluable. "Everyone we talk to says, 'Here are another two or three people that you should talk to'."
At the end of next week the team would pitch an idea for an app which allowed consumers to express their ideas on packaging. The idea had been developed over the course of the last 9 weeks and the team had been in contact with ethical-shopping app Conscious Consumers.
Check out Plastic Diet's 100km plastic bottle kayak expedition down the Wanganui River:
Fellow member of Plastic Diet, 20-year-old Samuditha Rupasinghe, said the app aimed to encourage producers to re-consider their plastic usage.
"It's about opening up a conversation that actually there is an option and it's a choice you make as a producer to make a product in a responsible way".
CoPlay
Vic Jack is the founder of Auckland team CoPlay - a social play platform which the 44-year-old says aims to "engage communities, build resilient communities and alleviate obesity".
A graphic and digital designer by trade, Jack said she had been working on the CoPlay venture for a number of years but had struggled to get funding. Live the Dream enabled social entrepreneurs to look at their venture "strategically from a business point of view".
"A lot of people struggle with doing something good and then how to commercialise and monetize it".
The PHD graduate said she was planning on making CoPlay a full time job after Live the Dream wrapped up next week. Her pitch would be for funding to help her launch CoPlay.
