Creation. Innovation. Inspiration.
The world’s biggest social problems are complex and urgent. No company or organization can solve issues like violence, economic inequality or poverty alone. We need leaders with different perspectives, skills, and experiences to come together to create fresh insights, ideas, and action to make progress and to help our students:
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​Deepen their understanding of concrete, real-world problems.
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Generate hypotheses about key causes of the problems.
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Design and test potential solutions.
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Capture and share insights about what works and what doesn’t.
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Identify opportunities to adapt and expand promising approaches.
Social Impact Labs
The world’s biggest social problems are complex and urgent. No company or organization can solve issues like economic inequality or poverty alone. We need leaders with different perspectives, skills, and experiences to come together to create fresh insights, ideas, and action. Social Impact Labs connect high school students in Allegheny County with college interns, private sector professionals, educators, and various community experts to focus on practical solutions, shaping new policies, campaigns, or products that can improve young lives in our community. 5A’s Social Impact Lab is an experiential learning hub generating positive impact through incubating youth-led sustainable concepts, social initiatives, and social-entrepreneurship activities.
PeaceBuilders Institute for Social Impact Strategy
The PeaceBuilders Institute for Social Impact Strategy is an action-oriented training center and research lab where 6th-12th grade students partner with us to design innovative, youth-driven tools and resources for social impact with the aim of making these tools and resources available to any student, anywhere. Because we believe in providing cutting edge content with immediate real world application, our system serves as an effective on-ramp for partnerships, collaborations, and innovative CSR strategy execution.
Institute Includes...
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Design Challenges: formal lab events to familiarize participants with human centered design tools and principles as well as the scope of the annual design challenge.
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Ongoing Accelerator: teams of high school students partner with university students, multi-sector industry professionals, and trusted community experts to put what they learn into practice building a business, initiative, campaign, or movement.​
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Design Fellowships: partner organizations host competitively selected students for a paid work experience focused around a specific research initiative or project designed to amplify or accelerate a unified project.
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