Pond-Deshpande Student Ambassadors to Host Third Youth Entrepreneurship Summit
FREDERICTON–The Pond-Deshpande Centre’s 27 student ambassadors are gearing up to host this year’s Youth Entrepreneurship Summit, a two-day summit designed to help “change the story” in Atlantic Canada.
The Youth Entrepreneurship Summit, or YES Atlantic, will be held on March 18 and 19 and aims to engage and motivate youth in the area to create communities in which they want to live, work and create meaningful employment. YES Atlantic will showcase positive and inspirational stories and organizations from the East Coast.
“Our ambassadors look around and the current attitude in the region confuses them,” said Pond-Deshpande Centre social innovation manager Joanna Nickerson. “They see the issues, they aren’t blind to them, but for every issue they also see an opportunity to make a difference and this is what drives them. People working together to make meaningful change. That’s the story of the Atlantic region that they want to tell.”
YES Atlantic will host students from different backgrounds across the Maritimes to take part in dialogues, workshops, networking opportunities and a pitch competition.
“This is the third cohort involved in the planning of YES since its inception, and it’s always amazing to see each group’s interpretation of the event,” said Karina LeBlanc, executive director of the Pond-Deshpande Centre. “One thing that always stands out is that no matter the theme or the different content, there’s one core message of the summit: our youth want to be heard and want their peers to be heard and they use the summit as a way to facilitate this.”
This year’s summit will also feature the public premiere screening of The Millennial Dream, a documentary film about the driving factors in careers for millennials and the issues around outmigration in the region and the rise of companies that focus on positive impact.