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IMPACT 0523: LIVING MORE SUSTAINABLY, ONE STEP AT A TIME

Youth Action Challenge (YAC) is a platform for youth to provide solutions that tackle the issues we are concerned about. Since October 2021, over 80 teams and more than 310 youths have undertaken the YAC Season 3 journey.

Georgia Ho, 29, has been a content marketer for most of her career. She is currently working full-time on ecocentive, and wears many hats! ecocentive aims to create a marketplace platform that verifies the purchase of eco-actions between individual eco-actors and eco-minded organisations. Today, she shares more about the project and what they are passionate about!

What was your role within your YAC project?

During the programme, I did anything and everything from building the pitch deck to conducting surveys to understand our target customers. Right now, my role consists of speaking to our potential users to better understand the problems that they’re facing. I also am working on anything that’s related to marketing, and planning out content for what comes next.

What motivated you to join YAC?

I’ve been wanting to work on my own startup for awhile now, so I quit my job last May in order to try my hand at entrepreneurship through the three month “Antler Spark” programme. YAC was a natural next step, plus this time, I get to join a team with my friends and focus on something that I care about.

Can you share with us your experience with your YAC project?

It was a hectic but inspiring few months where we got to not only speak to super helpful mentors, but also learn more about how to build a social enterprise from people who have already done so.

We meandered a little while working on ecocentive, but that’s okay. I think the road to success is not a straight line anyway. Any mistakes that we’re making now, to borrow a phrase from my lecturer back when I was in polytechnic, is a “missed take”. There are always lessons to be learnt from missing that take and trying again.

What are some challenges you faced while working on your YAC project?

I’m not a very good speaker on stage so I challenged myself to walk onto the stage and deliver a pitch without looking down at a script or missing a word. I was so worried that I wouldn’t do well, and I was still incredibly nervous, but I did what I set out to do, and I spoke confidently on stage.

Another challenge would be that my team consists of two people who have day jobs (my co-founders), and one person who’s doing a course on top of this (me). It was definitely difficult to carve out time to focus on our project and bring out its potential as best as we could. We did it anyway, and I’m excited to see how ecocentive can grow from here!

Could you share more on how your project has a positive impact?

We’re building ecocentive because we know it’s hard for an individual to make a change, let alone one that’s “good for the environment”. There’s also the problem of not knowing if something you’re doing is making any difference.

So, ecocentive does that for you: we make each action for change as simple as possible, back it by research, and verify that what you and your friends are doing has actually made an impact by using blockchain principles.

I really believe that ecocentive can help the wider community to live more sustainably, one step at a time.

Were there any key takeaways or learning points from your time with YAC?

Focus on listening to what your users really need. I think it’s so easy to be caught up with what we want or what we’re building that we lose sight of what people actually need. So, this is something I keep at the top of mind now. I think it helps bring us back to the ground and really focus on what matters.