Electric Potential: Gen Z-powered social change

Take a quick scroll through your news app. What do you see of the world, the legacy you're leaving to the younger generations? How do you feel about it?

Many of us are feeling the 'existential dread'—hopelessness, defeat, and anger. But at the same time, you might have seen Greta Thunberg fighting against climate justice, Malala Yousafzai advocating for women's education, or Amika George breaking the period stigma. What do they have in common? They are Gen Z. And they're not alone.
 

Gen Z is the most outspoken, justice-driven, and empowered generation that seeks to take control of our lives early on and take action towards building a better future we want to live in.
 

Gen Z has the power and motivation to build a better future. But after speaking with over 500 students, we learned that the lack of clear guidance on where to get started, unbiased information on social issues, and representation that helps them break through the impostor syndrome is all holding them back, and decided to do something about it.

Who are we?

Electric Potential is Gen Z's digital community and information hub for creating social change. Through powerful tools and resources, we help passionate Gen Z students worldwide create change in their communities and build an equitable, sustainable, and positively charged world. How do we know this works? Because this is built for Gen Z, by Gen Z.

Here's how we're solving the problem:

We guide students to first build awareness on social issues, take small actions step-by-step, and continue along their journey packed with tools, resources, and support from our community.

1. An accessible entry point and a clear path for anyone getting started on their impact journey
    
2. Rich education on ongoing social issues with contexts, statistics, and multiple narratives that leads to diversified perspective
    
3. A community of changemakers that keeps them motivated and inspired
    

More about our programs:

• Action Plan Quiz helps students get a personalized, step-by-step monthly action plan towards social change based on their needs, skills, and causes they support.
   
• Issues around the world provide unbiased, educational content on 27 social issues spanning across political, environmental, societal, and individual topics.
   
• Impact Database is a comprehensive, filterable list of doers, nonprofits, grassroots movements, digital communities, brands, and social ventures that are Gen Z-led and impact-oriented, so students can easily find, support, or join any person or organization.
   
• Gen Z Spotlights is an interview series with Gen Z changemakers to shine the light on their work and break the status quo that we're too young to make a difference.
   
• EP Community enables students to meet others on their social change journey, find their sense of belonging, continue to diversify their opinion on issues by engaging in open discussions and encouraging each other.
   

Ultimately, our goal is to unlock the potential of any Gen Z student in any phase of their social impact journey to evolve into impact leaders that can educate the public, drive policy changes, and fund effective programs—improving the standard of living, working, and learning for our future generations across the globe.

Our Story

We started in October 2020 to break the bias and misinformation on news outlets and social media platforms that create echo chambers as well as lead to more extremism and division. This was a time of intense political turmoil with added stress from the pandemic and we noticed that Gen Z was getting more active than ever before, seeking a community of changemakers to make waves together, and seeking resources and tips to embark on their social impact journey. We noticed a lack of a go-to platform for all things Gen Z-powered social change and wanted to promote clear, digestible information on social issues along with simple action steps anyone can take.
 

Today, we are a team of 25 Gen Z students and recent grad volunteers, building this with a dream of creating a more socially just and equitable world in a way we can — creating resources and support systems for other Gen Z's for a ripple effect of social impact.
 

And we start with diversity and inclusivity within our team.

We launched our Alpha with 30 testers in June 2021 and Private Beta with 300 Gen Z high school and college students in October 2021. We have learned that students have been actively seeking an action-oriented, guided, and non-biased platform as well as a community of like-minded people to learn about and work on social change together, and that Electric Potential makes them feel "hopeful", "empowered", and "motivated for change".

Help us make a bigger impact with your funding

Electric Potential is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Organization. We are currently in the Beta stage and aim to launch publicly in March 2022.

With the funds that we raise from this campaign, we will:

• Expand beyond our initial 300 students and publicly launch our website to support over 30,000 Gen Z high school and college students looking to start their social change journey from anywhere in the world
   
• Launch a full-scale digital community so that students can share resources and amplify each other's efforts and voices
   
• Launch the Policy School Beta, where we teach the basics of civic education and policy to our students, in hopes of producing a future generation of policymakers, policy funders, and advocacy leaders
   
• Cover the software and operational cost for the next 6 months as we continue building this community
   

Thank you for caring and investing—every little bit helps us make a positive change by uplifting young changemakers.
 

• To learn more about us, please visit electricpotential.org or email us at [email protected]!
• Share this campaign on social media to help us get the word out about Electric Potential
• Talk to your friends and community members about Electric Potential —they may also want to support our campaign.