UTS students tackle the big issues
Congratulations to Alex Connor, Kathy Walsh and Mihajla Gavin on receiving the Teaching and Learning Award at the 2023 UTS Business School Achievement Awards. The trio were recognised for their outstanding work developing the Big Issue Hackathon student initiative.
Read more about the initiate below.
The UTS Business School, in collaboration with The Big Issue and UTS SOUL Award, hosted students from various faculties to participate in the UTS Big Ideas Social Impact Hackathon.
Over two weekends in August, participating students developed a project idea to address social disadvantage and marginalisation, with a focus on creating meaningful employment opportunities for those experiencing homelessness.
Learning from lived experience
The Big Issue mentored the students throughout the program and provided guest lectures and resources for students to design business ideas with social impact. The Big Issue is a not-for-profit organisation that supports people experiencing homelessness, marginalisation and disadvantage by creating work opportunities.
Students had the opportunity to hear from a panel of speakers from The Big Issue with lived experiences of homelessness, helping them shape their project ideas whilst challenging their assumptions.
“I came to day one [of the Hackathon] as one of those people that had solutions already in mind and tried to almost make it fit the mould. And then I learnt that it’s really important to listen and to understand what [people experiencing disadvantage] need. And it’s also prevalent to [understand] the barriers to get out of that trap of homelessness.”
Mihajla Gavin, Senior Lecturer at the UTS Business School, said it was important for students to understand what it was like to have lived experience of homelessness.
I think many students had their assumptions tested. Rather than tackling issues ‘solutions-first’, students learnt the value of genuinely understanding social problems and hearing directly from those with lived experience to shape their actions.
– Mihajla Gavin
Students were also challenged to think about the role of business in society for creating social good.
“We learnt that businesses don’t need to be built on the foundation they need to make money. Having a social and community purpose makes it better for everyone.”
The winning project idea
The student groups pitched several ideas addressing the following issues:
- employment opportunities for people experiencing homelessness
- helping newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers
- programs for upskilling migrants
- supporting education in juvenile detention
- re-skilling older workers
A panel of experts in social change carefully assessed the project ideas and chose the most innovative, evidence-based idea. Students benefitted from panel feedback on their project ideas, including from Professor Carl Rhodes (Dean, UTS Business School) and The Hon. Professor Verity Firth (UTS Pro-Vice Chancellor (Social Justice and Inclusion)), Mangala Martinus (Managing Director of Payments Consulting Network), and Chris Campbell (State Operations Manager for The Big Issue). The winning idea, led by students Aya, Christina and Thea, focused on public speaking opportunities to support refugees arriving in Australia.
Driving social change while developing 21st-century skills
The Hackathon helped students develop critical employability skills, including teamwork, problem-solving, cooperation, and leadership.
For me personally, I learnt a lot about myself in terms of my confidence to speak and how creative I can be. You come up with a much better idea when you work with everyone and get opinions from every source that you can, especially those with lived experience. – participating UTS student
The Hackathon was made possible through funding from a Social Impact Grant provided by the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion and UTS Business School.
So the hackathon came about in partnership with the big issue. And we were quite lucky to actually start the partnership in the first place, through a grant that we received from the Center for social justice and inclusion. And the real spirit behind this program is to be getting students across a range of different faculties and a range of different year levels to be considering how we can tackle really big issues like homelessness, like marginalization, like people experiencing disadvantage within communities today.
So we thought that working through a hackathon model with a community partner would make sure that students were working on a real live issue with experts who could help guide the work. Doing it as a hackathon meant it could be extracurricular, so students could work across faculty and really connect with new and different people. And we thought that really just coming together and getting them to ideate and getting their passion and ideas in a room, we could really show people what action they can take towards making the world a better place, because people are struggling with barriers in the fact that they don't really know where to go next. So it's kind of a act of hope, and collaboration. And we're just really excited to see what the students can come up with and how we can support them to take that first step to making social change for the rest of their lives.
So we thought that working through a hackathon model with a community partner would make sure that students were working on a real live issue with experts who could help guide the work. Doing it as a hackathon meant it could be extracurricular, so students could work across faculty and really connect with new and different people. And we thought that really just coming together and getting them to ideate and getting their passion and ideas in a room, we could really show people what action they can take towards making the world a better place, because people are struggling with barriers in the fact that they don't really know where to go next. So it's kind of a act of hope, and collaboration. And we're just really excited to see what the students can come up with and how we can support them to take that first step to making social change for the rest of their lives.
So over two days, students are coming together working groups to be solving this really big social issue that we do have in the community, and designing business plans, or project ideas that they'll be putting forward to a panel to be thinking about how we can tackle some of the major issues that we have in society today.
So the big issue is a social enterprise. We provide work opportunities for marginalized or disadvantaged people in the community, giving them the option to be able to work their own business by selling the magazine, they make a profit for every magazine that they sell. But they choose sort of when and where and how many magazines to sell. So it's time to give independence and help people to help themselves. And hopefully there'll be some ideas come from the social impact project that might help us improve and build what we do we create more opportunities for people who have barriers to work and connecting with the community.
So I signed off this program just to get a better idea of social enterprise, and what social, what social change really looks like in action. I think being around other people, is a really great way to do that. Because I get to not only collaborate and bounce ideas off. But it's a fresh perspective. I think I really appreciate that, because social change is only derived through this fresh perspective. So my opinion, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to kind of collaborate with people with other in other faculties and discuss a big social issue and the way that we can potentially tackle that, being able to, you know, get insights from other people collaborate on ideas with other students, and really be able to make a positive impact. I think that's the main thing, I think the only way to learn about something is to hear from someone that's experienced at first. And you know, being given that insight and being given that kind of subjective response allows you to understand the issue a lot more and really be able to empathize with an individual that's been through that. And through that empathy, you're able to come up with ideas to actually assist them and know exactly what they want and what their lived experiences are. And I think that's going to be the best way to be able to tackle this issue.
So this was a program that we were really happy to support where it was actually a successful recipient of a social impact grant from the Center for social justice and inclusion. And we're really happy to partner with the business school because we knew this would be something that could really deliver an opportunity for students who were already involved in, in our student volunteering program in the sole award, to actually get their teeth into some serious issues, social issues, and think really creatively about how those issues can be solved. And particularly in this case, in a social enterprise space in a way that is sustainable and ongoing. We were really looking for students to use all their skills across all the different disciplines to help us solve some of these issues. And it was really impressive seeing what they came up with today.
Basically, it's a great way of getting people exposed to different ways of thinking, but then also teaching them the skill sets to be able to pitch that idea to their universities, to the corporate world with employees and employees and so on and so forth. And again, innovative and new ideas. The corporations have the real world experience and usually the financial backing to create those solutions that come out of the university. So I think that it's really a marriage that needs to happen. Works really well.
You know, the importance of social and economic well being, to business education and to to students in more general and to ensure that our students leave here with knowledge of how to be good citizens now not just how to be how to be good workers. This program is of course, attended by people from across the university, but to have the opportunity to take some leadership and that really speaks to our own vision of being a socially committed Business School.
