Knowledge to Impact: Creating Action with Your Grand Challenge Project Idea
This course provides an intensive, hands-on experience designing and developing a sustainable intervention to an aspect of a Grand Challenge. In other words, converting knowledge to impact. The target audience is students and student teams who have identified and/or worked on a specific problem in a previous GCC course and wish to dig deeper in developing a project plan.
Students should enter the class with a problem statement identifying the challenge they aim to address, a target location or community, and a proposed solution or intervention that they wish to develop. Student solutions should address a problem that is about a broadly defined Grand Challenge; examples of applicable areas include water, immigration and refugees, energy, housing, educational opportunity gap, public health, food and sustainable agriculture. Ideas outside this range are also acceptable.
By the end of class, students will create a plausible design and implementation plan for a solution that addresses their self-created Grand Challenge problem statement. This solution or intervention could take many forms, depending on student interest and problem statement. Business or nonprofit plans, policy and advocacy plans, media and awareness campaigns and activism plans are all possible. Determining the correct path(s) is part of the learning objectives for the course. Students will leave the course with a completed preliminary pitch deck for their plan in order to make the case for initial, or seed stage, support.
Throughout this document (and course), the terms solution and intervention will be used somewhat interchangeably. This reflects the fact that different disciplines use different words to describe similar aspects of the overall process covered in this class. Understanding some of those differences is part of the learning objectives for the class.