Last weekend, I had the fantastic opportunity of attending the Creative Minds Hackathon 2015, organised by the US Ambassador to Ireland and hosted by the DCU Ryan Academy.
The event brought over 120 participants from Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US to Dublin, where we worked together over the weekend to come up with innovative solutions to social issues encountered by young people today.
On Friday evening, we were taken to the Ambassadors Residence in the Phoenix Park, where we were greeted with a food and drinks reception. The Ambassador then gave an address, and welcomed us into his home and to the Creative Minds programme.
After our visit to the Ambassadors residence, we were shuttled back to the DCU Ryan Academy, a fantastic facility based in Citywest. Here, everyone was offered the opportunity to pitch an idea. We all voted on our favourite idea, and the top 15 were selected from 50 different pitches. Teams were then formed around these ideas with around 6-8 people per team. The problems these teams wished to solve ranged from obesity, mental and sexual health, to money management, education and the housing crisis.
The team I chose had the goal of engaging more young people in volunteer work. We all agreed that there is a lack of engagement of young people in volunteer causes, despite the countless benefits of volunteer work, and the endless diverse range of causes to choose from.
We began work on our ideas on Friday evening at the Ryan Academy, and continued to discuss them further back at the hotel. The real work started on Saturday morning, when we started to focus on solutions and prototypes.
Over the course of the weekend, we had a number of guest speakers come to share their experiences with us. These included Bart Lehane of KillBiller, Sean McNulty of Dolmen Design and Sean Coughlan, CEO of Boards.ie.
Over the weekend, I worked mainly on the website for our project. We managed to get a really great looking prototype of the website running over the weekend.
We reached out to many people over the weekend, both high-level individuals in non-profit organisations and young people interested in volunteering. We had an overwhelmingly positive reaction from everyone. Among those we reached out to was Dominic Macsorley, the CEO of Concern Worldwide. He has recognised the lack of engagement of young people in volunteer work, and hopes VolunPeer can help address this.
I feel like we’re not communicating in youth channels. What you’re doing sounds very focused. We’re interested – Dominic MacSorley, CEO Concern
On Sunday afternoon we worked hard on creating the slides and a video for our final pitch that evening. There would be a panel of judges, rating each pitch, project and team, so the pressure was on.
The pitches began around 5 o’clock, and lasted almost 2 hours, as there were 15 teams, and time for questions from the judges after. I was blown away with what all of the teams had achieved in developing an idea or problem into a viable business model. The quality of the pitches was also fantastic, and the enthusiasm of everyone in the room was something special.
Our team ended up winning the most devoted team category for our hard work and dedication to the project, and were presented with a plaque by the Ambassador.
Overall, I was honoured to be among so many fantastic individuals over the weekend, who, along with the brilliant job done by the organisers, made it a weekend to remember
Cathal Killeen 