Who you work with#
Dream a Dream, as described in Brief 01. This problem covers three of their questions at once: staying connected to alumni, helping young people learn from each other, and connecting them to people who can open doors.
The situation#
Young people spend time at a Thriving Centre, build skills and confidence, and then leave. Some go into work, some into further study, some into neither. The centre loses touch with almost all of them.
Meanwhile the young people still at the centre need two things the centre cannot supply on its own: someone slightly ahead of them who has done the thing they are trying to do, and someone outside their world who can make an introduction.
What is going wrong#
The alumni are the answer to the mentoring problem and nobody can find them. Phone numbers change. There is no reason to stay in touch, so nobody does.
Dream a Dream is explicit that the connection has to be worth something to the alumni too. A network that only asks past participants for favours will empty out.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Alumni networks fail everywhere, including at wealthy universities with full-time staff running them. They fail for one reason: people join, nothing happens, they stop opening the emails. Building the database is a week of work. Making anyone come back is the actual problem, and it is a design problem more than a technical one.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT. Suits students who want product and behaviour work rather than heavy engineering.
- Technical skills — Mobile-first and messaging-based interfaces, lightweight backend, matching logic, privacy-aware data handling.
- Other skills — Behavioural design, running a pilot and measuring it honestly, interviewing, safeguarding awareness.