SOCIAL ISOLATION, LONELINESS, BOREDOM AND ANXIETY during the time of such crisis. OUR TARGET GROUP would be 10 to 18-year-old middle and high school, students.
According to the UN, up to 850 MILLION students are currently staying at home. Even once the current quarantine is lifted, the repeated waves of various viruses and other crises might make this situation of isolation more common in the future. According to the WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION social isolation, loneliness and seclusion is one of the key challenges affecting our mental health, mood and the feeling of happiness. It is even more acute with teenagers who are cut off from their regular activities and social connections.
The average student stops having many random interactions and meeting new acquaintances that happen during the regular non-Corona times. Most popular EXISTING SOCIAL PLATFORMS are primarily suited to link up people who already know each other, or are suited for fast matchmaking of people with different interests during the regular “fast-moving times”. Existing platforms designed for collaboration, project making and peer-to-peer learning have not reached our target audience to the degree we think is possible, and also don’t have certain aspects and functions that we envision. Evaluation criteria Evaluate the Problem the team is solving

SOLUTION: United World Team

Our solution is the MASS COLLABORATION project of a very large scale that would result in a unique PROJECT AND LEARNING ORIENTED SOCIAL PLATFORM with a working title of “United World Team”. It would be DESIGNED BY AND FOR THE STUDENTS between the ages of 10 and 18, and specifically intended to reduce social isolation, acquire new friends all across the world, and be involved in various projects of unique scale and complexity. Students will be able to learn and teach new skills to each other and especially do the 1-on-1 language learning on an unprecedented scale. The final solution to the problem (the platform) will be created by the process of mass collaboration of the students themselves, and our role is just to facilitate the process and get it going. Before going into the specifics of the platform, we would like to note that we believe that we have a unique competitive advantage that would allow us to be successful in this project because it needs the ability to reach a very large number of students globally in a very short time. I.e. our networks ability to connect these people so fast is also part of the solution to the problem. Darom or LET’S DO IT WORLD that originated from Lithuania and Estonia in 2008, currently has teams in 180 countries, with over 100.000 participating high schools, and over 21 million volunteers in our one-day event. Our team will harness the resources of 3 other behemoth partner networks and many smaller ones: EARTH DAY NETWORK – engages over 100.000 schools FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE (Greta Thunberg) – engages millions of students EARTH OUT NETWORK (World Wide Fund for Nature) – that engages over 50.000 schools Part of the platform will be “Twinschools” function, where every school in the world will be able to find 1 twin school from each of the 6 continents (f.e. Swedish school will twin win one school in India, Australia, Columbia…). Twinschools will have a standardized process of how the students will get to know each other’s cultures and find twin-buddy friends from those countries.