This year’s invite-only HundrED Innovation Summit focused on inspiring K12 innovations, activating youth voice and providing various support for innovators like HundrED Connect, Education Funders Collection, numerous new Spotlights and more!
The HundrED Innovation Summit is now officially over!
At the event, we announced our third global innovation collection, HundrED 2020, highlighting 100 of the brightest innovations in K12 education from around the world. The invite-only three-day event took place from November 6-8th with 250 inspiring educators, innovators and education funders who descended upon Helsinki to share, celebrate and collaborate with the goal of helping pedagogically sound, ambitious innovations to spread across the world.
The Summit program brought leading experts like Li Andersson, Minister of Education in Finland (Left Alliance), Gregg Behr, Executive Director, The Grable Foundation (USA), Vishal Talreja, Founder, Dream a Dream (India), Lesley Mansford, Global Head of CSR, Supercell (Finland) and more.
Each of the innovations from HundrED 2020 has been evaluated based on their impact and scalability. To help inform HundrED’s selection process this year, over 2,000 reviews were made by its Academy Members, comprised of over 100 global education experts (e.g. teachers, leaders, academics, and students) who have expertise from a range of contexts and perspectives in education. The selected innovations this year are from every continent and each has already spread to an average of over 10 countries.
Juan Manuel Pico, HundrED Ambassador from Colombia, and Co-founder of Education Soul shared his Academy Member experience:
It was great to have innovations not only from the Global Collection but also from Spotlight collections who joined us for this exclusive three-day event. Representatives from Spotlights on Switzerland, Pittsburgh (USA), Digital Wellbeing (innovations to be announced on 3rd December), Employability (innovations to be announced on 11th December), Youth Financial Skills and Helsinki Forerunners initiatives, the atmosphere at the summit was truly inspiring and engaging!
For the coming year of 2020, we are also thrilled to work on more regional and thematic spotlights, like the HundrED Spotlight on Bilingual Education in partnership with the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, which works for an enhanced understanding of the value of living in an officially bilingual country (Finnish and Swedish). Through the Spotlight on Creativity, Lego Foundation and HundrED are looking forward to finding innovations that combine structure and freedom in a way that could leverage the beautiful combination of cognitive flexibility and optimistic ambitions to enable our children to start formulating solutions to some of our world’s greatest problems.
Finally, we are also looking forward to the official announcement of the HundrED Spotlight on Qatar with the Qatar Foundation in just a few weeks at the WISE Summit 2019!
The HundrED Innovation Summit continued to strengthen its platform to foster youth engagement and leadership in educational conversations by bringing together a small group of HundrED Youth Ambassadors from 8 countries who participated in the first-ever HundrED Youth Summit in partnership with the city of Helsinki, to discuss education’s potential and how to be a part of its change together.
The Youth Ambassador of the Year, Vrinda Gandhi, 16 from India, shared “The Youth Summit gave me the opportunity to meet inspiring young souls with the potential to become great leaders. I have also met innovators who came from all around the globe for the Innovation Summit to educate, share, as well as motivate others. It was an amazing experience and I am definitely taking the best home.”
The last day of the summit was focused on this larger theme of funding and scaling needs as well as opportunities. The morning started with global innovators from THINK Global School (USA), Kiwix (Switzerland) and Sky School (UK) sharing their biggest desires and needs which can help raise the impact and scale their work to new heights. To further explore the various possibilities of funding education innovations globally, our extremely invested funders community members, Sarah Bouchie, Head of Global Programmes, Lego Foundation (Denmark) spoke about Philanthropy, Jan Lynn-Matern, Founder at Emerge Education (UK) about Seed Funding and finally Lesley Mansford, Global Head of CSR, Supercell (Finland) who explained how supercell has been able to support many education initiatives, including HundrED through Corporate Social Responsibility. Danny Gilliland, Head of Growth and Impact, closed these focused conversations through a Funders Panel exploring questions on how our innovators can best be prepared when asking for funding, what are do's and don'ts to consider as well as what are the funder’s top advice for the innovators' community. We are extremely grateful to Sarah Bouchie, Head of Global Programmes, Lego Foundation (Denmark), Gregg Behr, Executive Director, The Grable Foundation (USA) and Stephen Caleb Opuni, Country Director, IDP Foundation Inc. (Ghana) for sharing so openly and honestly!
HundrED Connect launched at the summit saw a huge interest from both the funders and innovators community as a potential tool to help solve funding and scaling needs! The platform hopes to engage innovators, implementers, advisors, educators, and funders through exclusive and complimentary access to our community, to seek out the help they need and create valuable connections to solve their unique challenges.
“This is our third Innovation Summit. Every year, the quality of conversations and connections has gotten stronger. Most of the innovators paid a small fee to attend the Summit and that fee was used to bring innovators from far and under-resourced communities to Helsinki. We want to continue to find ways to bring this exceptional crowd together and help their work spread.” said Saku Tuominen, Chairman & Creative Director of HundrED.
As we closed the event with these inspiring words from Deepak Ramola from Project FUEL (India), we felt honoured and grounded by the inspiration provided to us by our community of education innovators, funders, youth ambassadors and more.
Thank you for joining us over the last three days to celebrate, connect and converse!
Until next year!
Watch the live streams from all three days on our Summit page!
