Eureka 438: beVisioneers

0:14You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Mariah Levin is the Executive Director of Be Visioneers, a Mercedes-Benz-backed fellowship for young environmental entrepreneurs. With a thousand changemakers supported each year until 2030, Be Visioneers is the world's largest program of its kind, offering mentorship, funding, training, and a global network to help them turn their ideas into scalable impact to combat climate change. So how do you help young people bring their vision for a better world to life?

0:57Well, here is Mariah Levin with more on how this perhaps unlikely journey began.

1:07My name is Mariah Levin. I'm the executive director of Be Visioneers, the Mercedes-Benz Fellowship. In 2022, Mercedes-Benz auctioned off the world's most valuable car called the Uhlenhaut Coupe. There are two of them in the world. It was a 1950s race car, and they sold it to an American billionaire for 135 million euro. And Mercedes-Benz had an internal conversation about, OK, well, what do we do with these funds? Do we start our own foundation like BMW or do we give it to a social enterprise to, you know, inspire the next generation of pioneers? So the folks at Mercedes-Benz decided that they would establish a fellowship program.

1:51They wanted it to be something super ambitious and pioneering because they've got this sort of pioneering spirit as a company. and they ended up giving the donation to the DoSchool, which is a German social enterprise that has experience running fellowship programs all over the world. There are about 60 ,000 folks who have gone through educational training that's really hands-on applied learning. And we are now operating across 55 countries in the world after two and a half years, which has been very, very exciting. We work with 16 to 28-year-olds. We work with people who have an idea. They've observed something going wrong in their communities or they've observed a real pain point related to sustainability and in the environment in their community and they want to address it.

2:41And our role is to equip them with a peer community where they can come home to when they need an injection of resilience, connections around the world so that they can lean on expertise that they themselves don't have. And then, of course, we also have seed funding that they have access to.

3:07What we're doing is almost constructing an applied learning complement or possibly in some cases even just an alternative path for highly motivated young people. So we do have partnerships with different universities or different schools or different nonprofits that work with kind of our catchment population, the 16 to 28 year olds. But a lot of our fellows hear about us on Instagram or TikTok. We've looked at how other organizations like the African Leadership University, Minerva University, how other universities are sort of identifying talent. And we've drawn from those models. And we have a very basic kind of demographic, largely demographic intake form.

3:52Then fellows with a description of the project or the project idea. Then fellows have a self-assessment test and also do a video interview. And for the fellows that are above a certain score on the self-assessment test, which is all related to what we've observed about what we're looking for in terms of passion for the idea, commitment to making something happen. resilience around, you know, sort of persistence and not giving up. That's what we're looking for. We're not looking for, you know, someone who has particular engineering experience or what have you. It's a three-year fellowship, the first year of which is a shared curriculum.

4:28The curriculum covers leadership. It covers environmental knowledge around sort of 10 environmental themes. And then the last is about venture building. You know, how do you go out into a community and do user testing? How do you understand what the real problem is that you're trying to solve? We have a lot of online components because it's a global community. So including on-demand content and live sessions. And then we also have four times a year fellows coming together in person in their local cities. And the reason that is, is because innovation ecosystems like funders, etc., they're usually quite localized.

5:07and so we want fellows to be building and connecting with existing innovation ecosystems. And then they also come together once regionally to sort of meet, understand one another's ideas and then a subsection, the fellows who demonstrate the highest level of engagement or show the most potential with their projects by this time in the year are invited to come to the Global Summit. So that's what this event is. This event is really for those fellows who've demonstrated that they're actually progressing, not just passionate, but they actually demonstrate progress on tackling or building out the idea that they're looking to bring to the world.

5:55So we've got two grades of funding. One is$3 ,000 and the other is$20 ,000. So the fellows who are successful at attaining those funds have a second year in the fellowship program. And during that second year, we are providing sort of venture coaching support. We're hooking them up with speaking opportunities. We're trying to provide more bespoke support to help them continue on their growth path. And then by their third year, we're assessing where they stand and, again, how we can support them. And we also recognize that these are really young people, right? So it could be that they attain the 20K, they do what they can do with it, and then they decide, you know what, I actually have to make ends meet or I can't give my all to this venture anymore.

6:42And so we also support them to figure out, OK, well, do I need a side gig? Can this become something that doesn't need to generate revenue for me? Because that's the entrepreneurial journey, right? Like it is so twisty. And we want to be with fellows along those twists and turns to assure them that, hey, there's no such thing as failure if you're trying. Every fellow also is paired with a mentor. So as we work with a thousand fellows, we're also working with a thousand experienced professionals. And the aim is that we, I mean, many of those experienced professionals are corporate. And the aim is that there's an exchange that ignites change, drives sustainability and sustainable approaches on both sides of that coin.

7:31I think a lot of our fellows are very interested in waste, waste management, consumption and sort of sustainable consumption. How do we make this possible? In India, a lot of fellows are working on, in particular, material science around flooding, agriculture. So thinking about, OK, what are some porous asphalt alternatives that we can use so that, you know, when flooding happens, children aren't prevented from going to school. In North America, I think across the board we see, well, in Mexico, I've seen a lot of fellows working on sustainable tourism. And then I think, generally speaking, energy is a topic that a lot of fellows are working on.

8:13You know, how is it that we can have green, sustainable energy that doesn't pollute the planet? I'd love to talk about Debbie. She works in South Africa and she's been, you know, sort of two-pronged work. One is there's tons of pollution related to menstruation in her community. So she's tried to develop a sustainable solution that is compostable, etc. And then also she's trying to demystify and kind of destigmatize the reason why so many women and children and young girls end up missing school. I came into the Global Summit. We were chatting about the collaboration that she's been working on.

8:51And there was another fellow, Josephine, who sets up stores in townships in South Africa around Johannesburg and sells bulk food items. She said, oh, did you know that Josephine, this fellow, has started selling my menstrual products in her stores? And so it's that kind of, you know, customer-supplier relationship that is able to take shape in this community and to think that it's, you know, just two years old, that fellows are looking to support one another in those ways. You know, maybe this won't be a huge revenue generator, but the fact is these products are making it onto new shelves and being available for communities in new places where waste management is an issue.

9:33I think that's really, really neat. And I think a few things that I've come to appreciate, one is just how much courage it takes to innovate, especially for our young people, many of whom don't have ready access to angel investors. I grew up in a context where lots of people had access to uncles who would give them, you know, a couple thousand dollars or what have you, most of our fellows don't operate in those contexts. So sort of the wherewithal, the resourcefulness, the determination that they show, it's very humbling.

10:19And that's it for this episode of Eureka. Thanks to Ian Wiley for his reporting. We'll be back at the same time next week, and do look out for The Entrepreneurs, available every Wednesday. The programme was produced by Laura Kramer, with audio editing by Jack Dewars. You can listen again and find out more at monocle.com, or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. To contact the team, do email Laura. She's on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to Eureka.