HundrED Community, Media & Events

Many individuals across the world are deeply passionate about improving education, expressing a multitude of reasons specifying its importance. Yet, due to the disconnect of insights and information in education, they are too often unaware of other stakeholder perspectives and innovations that are working impactfully, committed to scale, and addressing key needs. Educational stakeholders are often unable to take into account global perspectives and insights in education, hitting language or financial barriers that prevent them from tapping into global knowledge bases, and exploring practical examples: to understand, seek, implement, and reflect for improvement locally. 

Understandably, many initially believe that innovations and changes being made in different countries could not and do not apply to their situation, yet it appears that across the world common issues and goals do arise. This does not mean there is necessarily a cut and paste solution for education, but there is an opportunity to bridge understanding and work together to make adaptations that fit within each individual context. If we are not making this knowledge base and community accessible while celebrating their tremendous value, we are ultimately hindering opportunities for the world’s children. 

This is where the HundrED Community steps in. HundrED was born from the notion that in a world becoming increasingly connected and globalised, education can still be very local and isolated in its practices. We focus on celebrating, inspiring, and empowering all stakeholders to create positive change in education, we strive to keep the conversation open. Everyone’s voice is welcome as we realize that no singular point of view can change education for the better.

HundrED’s Community comprises our innovators, educators, policymakers, parents, and other influential stakeholders. We are passionate about improving education through collectively discovering, creating, and sharing inspiring innovations in K12 education. We further have a booming community of Academy members, Ambassadors as well as Youth Ambassadors, who provide invaluable support in selecting innovations and growing our outreach. 

Every year at the launch of the Global Collection, we bring together inspiring members of the HundrED Community, for a three-day, invite-only event called the HundrED Innovation Summit. This is our flagship event where we celebrate and support the world's most inspiring education innovations, with educators, funders, youth, and other engaged stakeholders from across the world – with talks, workshops and discussions. All innovations selected in Global and Spotlight collections are invited to join us in Helsinki to celebrate, share ideas, forge connections, and build a movement. 

*Numbers as of September 2019

We are obviously ambitious in our aims and truly believe that without representatives spanning all countries, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, and abilities; we would not be honestly portraying the education community globally. 

The main focus of the HundrED Community is to spread the message of positive examples of innovations in education globally. We organise local events, meetups, innovation campaigns, policy discussions, and more led by our community, while our supporters continue to write and promote us and our innovations in their local media. The HundrED Community currently is comprised of HundrED Innovators, Ambassadors, and Youth Ambassadors.

HundrED Innovators are the creators and leaders behind the education innovations available on the HundrED website. With nearly 1000 innovations now published, our innovator community is actively helping children flourish.

On our journey of seeking and sharing these remarkable innovations, we need as much help as we can find. For us, HundrED Ambassadors are our eyes and ears around the world identifying innovations, helping spread them to more students in creative ways & inspiring local communities to come together to discuss, act, and lead change. With over 400 ambassadors from 80+ countries, we have an active group of teachers, school principals, education consultants, and more, who help spread HundrED innovations globally and locally.

Finally, in this changing landscape for education, we at HundrED truly believe in the power of youth leadership and the need to activate the student voice. At the beginning of 2019, we started the HundrED Youth Ambassadors programme, which brings together an active community of students from around the world who are passionate about education’s potential and want to be a part of its change together. With 70 Youth Ambassadors currently connected with the programme, ten joined us for the first-ever HundrED Youth Summit in Helsinki in partnership with the Helsinki Youth Council and the Helsinki Municipality, during the Helsinki Education Week.
 

How Media collaborates with our community

To share the voices of our community, we have a unique approach to media in the field of education. We make sure every story is inspirational and positive, uplifting educators and audiences worldwide to make sure they feel supported and appreciated. All of our articles and videos are of the highest quality, as we believe that those working in education deserve the very best. Our aim is to simplify our audience’s lives by sharing innovations that have been proven to improve education and sharing it in an accessible way that makes innovations easy to implement. We want to make sure that our audience – from parents, to students, to educators to policymakers – feel they can trust the innovations we’ve picked, understand why they’re important, and know-how to make them happen.

To ensure our audience is continually engaging with our innovations as well as within the HundrED Community, we have multiple Digital Media engagements. For example, we have weekly Facebook-live webinars, Twitter Chats, and other online activities as well as face-to-face meetup opportunities. In the last year, we have hosted nearly 40 FB-webinars with an average of 3,500 views. We have also started engaging a larger audience on our Twitter and Instagram channels. Additionally, this year our community members have published nearly 100 articles on our channels, where their innovations and opinions have been featured or they themselves have written an expert piece aligned to key trends in education.

By request of the HundrED Community to continue discussions while building local support systems and communities of practice, we introduced HundrED GLocal events. Hosted by HundrED Ambassadors, the goal of these events is to share inspiring local innovations in education and empower teachers while fostering an inclusive, collaborative movement for innovation in education.

So far, we have hosted HundrED GLocals in London (UK), Helsinki (Finland), Ahmedabad (India), Brisbane (Australia), Karachi (Pakistan), and have more lined up in Macedonia, Liberia, and the United States. 

Since 2018, at the same week of the HundrED Innovation Summit, we have been co-hosting the annual city-wide, international education festival, Helsinki Education Week in partnership with the City of Helsinki and the City’s Education Division. The week’s series of events offer content to learners of all ages and to everybody interested in learning and the development of learning. In addition to international education experts, the target groups include teachers in Finland and particularly teachers, learners, and parents in Helsinki.

To keep the momentum going, the HundrED team continues to present at impactful events and host the global education innovation community at our Helsinki office. For more information on starting your own GLocal or engage with our global network, contact our Head of Community & Media, Pukhraj Ranjan at pukhraj@hundred.org.