Over the past couple of weeks, 2 of my friends and I have been preparing for the Youth Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition. Because I already went into detail about the competition in one of my previous blogs, I will only provide you with a brief 1-2 sentences about requirements. The competition requires that you implement at least 1 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal into your business idea. It was also encouraged that rather than making a specific product, we make a broader business idea. 

Because this competition asked for an idea instead of a  product, like most competitions do, the brainstorming process took us a bit longer. Now, instead of just thinking about the product and how well it would function, we also had to consider adding employees or labor into the mix. 

After a couple of brainstorming sessions, we decided to target goals #12,13 and 14. These sustainable goals are, Responsible consumption and production, Climate action and Life below water respectively. We felt that if we chose the goals first then created the product after, it would save us the hassle of trying to find a way to implement the goals in our already created product.

The idea or rather non-profit we ended up coming up with, was a process that would involve different schools in New Jersey to send a certain amount of kids to the shoreline and help in cleaning it up. Considering that around 3 million pounds of trash were collected on 20,000 miles of U.S shoreline in 2020(a year of very slow economic movement), in 2022 it is safe to infer that this number has most likely greatly increased. After 3 months of this collection, we would send however much plastic we gathered in small increments to a recycling center, where the plastic would be usable once again. Once this plastic is refined we would send it over to green toys, a company that makes toys for babies and toddlers with 100% recycled plastic. We would then only ask for 5% of the sales made with the recycled plastic we provided in order to find our future operations. 

Now that the process is over, I can say that because this competition tends to value general good more than profit, which is not my ideal business competition. Even though I value social finance heavily and only enter business competitions that revolve around social finance, I believe that the most important part is keeping profit in mind. Youth Citizenship’s competition seemed like an outdated type of social business competition, as they haven’t yet accepted that profit can indeed come with environmental or general good.