Startup Weekend Santa Cruz: Sustainable Solutions & Social Impact

Startup Weekend Santa Cruz: Sustainability & Social Impact is coming to downtown Santa Cruz in November, presenting a unique opportunity for developers, designers, social justice advocates, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, students, marketers, product managers, changemakers, nonprofit leaders, startup enthusiasts and many others to team up and build several new social enterprise startups in just 54 hours! This grassroots event takes place November 18-20, 2016, at Nextspace in downtown Santa Cruz during Global Startup Weekend.

The Startup Weekend event model is part of a large entrepreneurial community with 80,000 past attendees at 905 weekend events in 501 cities within 135 countries, as of 2014. This three-day event encourages a fun and engaging environment for changemakers of all backgrounds. It creates a forum for creators and idealists to gain insight and relevant, real-time experience for growing a social enterprise while expanding their networks, portfolios, and resumes. Weekend activities include rapid-fire startup pitches, prototype building, customer development, mentor feedback from experts, and conclude with a Shark Tank-style judging session. Prizes awarded add value to the winning social enterprise startup teams and of course come with bragging rights.

Participants arrive the evening of Friday, November 18th. Those with a social enterprise startup in mind get 60 seconds to pitch their idea (not required), attendees vote for their favorites, and teams naturally form around the top ideas. Days two and three involve collaboration as teams take their ideas from paper to working prototype including interaction with potential customers.

This event is focused on Sustainable Solutions and Social Impact to encourage cross-pollination of communities within Santa Cruz County who might not often get together for a shared cause. For this event, sustainable solutions and social impact as related concepts refer to the conservation and equitable distribution of environmental resources that focuses on the needs of current and future people, ecological systems, and economic vitality. This can include topics like food, water, health, energy, transportation, housing, waste, and more. However, given that these topics can mean many different things, participants are invited to bring their own interpretation to the event and let their unique perspective inform the challenges and solutions they present.

Sponsors for this event include the UCSC Sustainability Office, the UCSC Everett Program, and Santa Cruz Tech Beat. Startup Weekend Santa Cruz will take place Friday, November 18 to Sunday, November 20 at Nextspace, 101 Cooper Street, Santa Cruz. Doors will open at 6:30 PM on Friday and the event concludes at 9:30 PM on Sunday. The full schedule is on the website. Tickets are capped at 100 and are now available. For information about scholarship/student tickets, please contact [email protected].