UNLEASH is a non-profit global innovation lab that selects 1,000 young people each year to develop solutions for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The solutions are developed at the “innovation lab,” which is hosted in a different country each year. UNLEASH 2019 took place in Shenzhen, China this past November.
There were 18,000 applicants for UNLEASH 2019, and I was one of the lucky 1000 “talents” (as they refer to us) selected to attend. The 2019 cohort was comprised of young people from 162 different countries. It was diversity unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Every person that I introduced myself to was from a different part of the world. We played an icebreaker game at the opening ceremony where a mic was passed around the room to identify every unique language that was spoken amongst the participants, and the game went on for so long that I lost count! Yet, amidst all this diversity in background and experiences, there was a strong sense of community – a shared feeling of purpose, urgency, and excitement for what was to come.
After the opening ceremony, we split up into 10 tracks – 8 tracks focused on selected SDGs, one track was for returning alumni, and this year there was a new Storyteller track.
My track was SDG3, for Good Health & Well-being. We were hosted by the China National Genebank in the beautiful Dapeng Peninsula of Shenzhen. There were approximately 100 talents in the SDG3 track, consisting of all types of healthcare providers, scientists, researchers, advocates, and entrepreneurs. As a recent graduate fresh out of the MSL program, I was completely awestruck by the company that I was in.
The SDG3 track was further divided into sub-theme focuses. My sub-theme focused on non-communicable diseases; there were about twenty of us in the group. We were then matched into teams based on our interests and strengths. It was in this sub-theme group that I met the team I was to spend the next several days working with. And what a team it was: a physician-entrepreneur trained in the UK and based in South Africa, another physician-entrepreneur from Indonesia, a supply chain manager from Cameroon, a Deloitte consultant from China, and me, a Canadian based in the United States.
I absolutely loved working with my teammates. They were brilliant, insightful, and focused, but also thoughtful, supportive, and extremely fun to be around. We quickly found our rhythm working together, bonding through all the exhaustion, elation, and every other emotion you can think of.
The next several days were spent getting up at the crack of dawn to head to the Genebank and working straight into the night before returning to our hotels. We were guided by experienced facilitators who checked in often and helped us move intentionally through the innovation process – problem framing, problem framing, and more problem framing, before ideation, prototyping, and testing. Each milestone in the process was marked by a “gate check” where we would present our progress to the Lead Facilitator to see if our work was solid enough to pass us into the next stage.
Here is a summary of what our group researched and developed:
Our insight: Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of death in world, and the majority of these deaths occur in low-middle income countries (LMICs). Effective health promotion can lead to significant reduction in the incidence of such diseases, but strategies deployed in LMICs have been ineffective in part due to a lack of data and research about tailoring messages to individuals and their local context.
Our solution: A health promotion program that offers free cardiovascular health screenings while simultaneously providing personalized health promotion messaging to individuals based on their identified cardiovascular risk profile and the local resources available to them. The program would then aggregate de-identified data to conduct regional population health monitoring, in order to facilitate data-driven resource allocation.
Solutions that emerge from UNLEASH are ideally brought back and implemented by the talents in some way. We tailored our design to the Indonesian communities that one of our teammates was already embedded in, so that he could draw upon our work in the innovation lab to enhance his ongoing projects as a physician-entrepreneur in the community.
As the innovation lab drew to a close, all teams presented their final pitches on stage to our peers and a panel of judges. We also had the opportunity to showcase our ideas and prototypes at a Marketplace event open to the community.
And just like that, the UNLEASH experience was over before I knew it. We reunited with talents from all the other tracks at the Closing Ceremony to celebrate the finalist teams, and we heard from two Nobel Peace Laureates (Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Leymah Gbowee) who shared their advice for following our hearts and continuing to advocate for the SDGs.
As the program wrapped up, we returned to our hotels and began to leave one by one (on flights that were offset to be carbon neutral because SDG 13 = Climate Action). It was a bittersweet moment, saying our goodbyes to this group of people who had gone from strangers to family. Who knew if we would ever cross paths again?
Well, there’s always UNLEASH 2020!
Sign up here to show interest in future UNLEASH events. And feel free to reach out to Alice Lu, UNLEASH ’19 talent and Northwestern Law MSL ‘19 alum, if you would like to learn more about the experience.
