The Impact Competition team headed into our second year of partnering with Culver Academies with great enthusiasm and excitement after two truly impressive competitions last year. Our founder, Lance Breitstein, again attended as a judge, and was again hugely impressed with the ideas, presentation, professionalism, and enthusiasm of the Culver Academies students.
For this year's competition, Culver Academies partnered with the Culver Youth Club, a non-profit based at Culver Elementary School that seeks to inspire and support children by providing help with schoolwork as well as offering education and enriching after-school offerings like Cooking Club and Gardening Club. This program provides essential support to working parents who are in need of additional care for their children once the school day has ended. The programmingthey provide is truly essential for the community and offers a safe, welcoming, and nurturing environment where kids can spend time with their peers as well as supportive adults during the after-school hours.
This year's Impact Competition competition included eleven teams of students from two classes of a course titled "Applications of Innovation," taught by Ed Kelley, a master instructor at Culver’s Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur.
Students were tasked with presenting ideas to the Culver Youth Club that would help them 1) better market to the community, 2) increase staff recruitment, and 3) devise ways to collect data from students, parents and staff to help strengthen programming and improve organizational decision-making. Students were presented with a budget of $8,000 for their ideas, a sum provided by The Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur to ensure that the winning ideas came to life.
Culver Academies is currently the only high school that the Impact Competition partners with, and it is due to the extremely high caliber of the students' presentations and ideas, combined with the passion and dedication of the Impact Coordinator at the school, J.D. Uebler, that the partnership is so strong.
While on campus for the competition, Impact Competition founder Lance also made some time to meet with the Culver Academies Investment Club to discuss his experience as a daytrader.
During his talk, he challenged students to think like a daytrader and figure out how recent news items might affect different stocks and markets. There was a huge interest from students in AI stocks: whether AI stocks might eventually be good ideas and how AI might affect the job market in the future. Even after the meeting ended, students were lined up with more questions to ask Lance directly, and overall the event was a huge success, with many students from the competition attending.
Our partnership with Culver Academies grows stronger with each competition, and we are thrilled at the way this collaboration between our organization and their school continues to expand and improve with each iteration. We can't wait to see what the spring semester students will come up with for their competition!