MyMachine Global Foundation

MyMachine is a 3-step-methodology: in 1 school year: 

1. Children in Primary invent their "dream machine". Anything goes, as long as they really, really want it. (IDEA)
2. University Students, help design the Idea into a CONCEPT.
3. Technical Secondary/Vocational Students, help build a WORKING PROTOTYPE. 

They all collaborate as we make sure that we cluster participating schools based upon each other's proximity.  

MyMachine has proven to elevate students in teaching them the potential of their very own ideas and how to bring these to life. We have collaborations now on all continents, which is the result of growing our model in 2 ways: 

1. with social franchise partners that set up a local MyMachine Chapter in their country (8 Chapters so far);
2. via MyMachine DreamsDrop: an online world-map inviting anybody to upload their dream machine idea; once a year, we organize a call to primary school teachers worldwide to join with their class. Then we pick ideas from that map and bring them to life with college students.

We are closing in on reaching 1 million student hours (of creativity and building confidence), and aim to scale to 1 million student-hours each year. The time is now.

We envision a world where all people are confident to believe in their ideas. No matter the scope of your ideas (personal, local or global), it requires confidence that your ideas matter and could make a difference, plus bold action to bring your ideas to life. This is where -in the words of Harvard- "MyMachine delivers the 'I can do that' perspective to all participants".

I'm deeply convinced that this is not the privilege of a handful of intelligent, brave and 'lucky' women or men. We believe all of us can do this as long as we could learn this in a supportive and safe ecosystem, like the education space. 

While the world has evolved dramatically since the first industrial revolution, the education system hasn't. The vast majority of children and students are still in schools that do not really go beyond knowledge transfer nor invite children to be creative, collaborate, or teach students how to bring ideas to life. The problem is that once students graduate, society expects them to do exactly that. Yet most of them haven’t found or already lost that creative confidence, the one thing we definitely need to tackle all Development Goals.

According to the UN World Population Dashboard, 50% of the world population is under 24. Imagine if we could tap into the creativity of those billions of young talents? 

We bring them a growth mindset allowing them to dream and think bigger. Because the best version of yourself is the best tool you have to being a contributing team-player to the human race. And we need a lot of strong team-players since we face exigent concerns. The global challenges we face can’t be won by some individual efforts. From climate change to inequality, from global health to poverty, these are all areas that require collective, long-term responses.  

The biggest tool we have to turn this into success is education. But we need to change how we define success at school because that shapes students’ mindsets and behaviours for the rest of their lives. 

In MyMachine they learn that their ideas can make a difference. So, education done right is a context to find your passions and talents, with the support to get better at them. As they then will thrive, they’ll be ‘winners’, they’ll be contributing to a better future we all need to design together.

Our unique methodology has 3 core elements in its DNA: 

1. MyMachine unites students of all educational levels as peers in an intergenerational collaboration.  
2. MyMachine is open-ended: we are not imposing a theme upon the students. Otherwise, the adults would again tell children what they think is essential instead of listening to them. So we listen to the children and commit to helping them. While some adults argue it might be a waste of time dealing with "useless" ideas, we know for a fact that by valuing their ideas at this young age, they grow with that positive experience. And that creative confidence will empower a lot more people than we see today, engaging in creating new solutions, products, services, new companies/organizations; whether that would be in health care, space-technology, the arts, community building initiatives, renewable energy, or coming up with ideas to tackle climate change. 
3. MyMachine is not a competition: rivalry is everywhere. It's common in business, sports, and education. While competition makes us perform better at specific tasks, it hardly ever teaches us to help others. MyMachine is a context where kids choose to be kind to others instead of aiming to be 'the best'.

While they work for months on bringing ideas to life, the students use creativity, collaboration, design-thinking, communication skills, mathematics, physics and all the other knowledge and skills they need for this inspiring endeavour. For many, the learning process becomes much easier. The joy of creating their prototype is a giant propeller of their learning hunger. It is often problematic for students to understand why it's essential to know the basics of mathematics, physics, or collaboration dynamics. Their buy-in is the engaging factor of bringing their ideas to life. Their commitment to learning is firm, driven by wonder to look for the solutions needed to conceptualize and produce a working prototype of their invention. And they learn along the way that nothing comes easy, that bringing an idea to life means you will need to rely on teamwork, empathy, respect for each other's talents, and persistence and resilience.

That is how we empower young people, with the skills they need to contribute to the challenges described in all Development Goals. So there will be a lot more of us, doing a lot more. And while doing so, finding and creating happiness for themselves, their loved ones and our communities at large.

• We’d like to point out that MyMachine goes deep. It is not a (rather shallow) quick interaction. We are a long, in-depth co-creation collaboration.
  We know organisations that consider students to be ‘fully impacted’ when they interacted for three hours per student.  In MyMachine, we interact with students a lot more, for some even up to more than 220 hours. That is why we also use Student-Hours as an impact parameter. 

• We currently serve (directly) 105,000 student hours (3,000 students) per year. Next school-year we will serve 210,000 student hours (5,500 students).  In total, so far, we have delivered over 730,000 student-hours (=over 93,700 working days (of 8 hours a day) = over 256 full-time years of creativity and authentic learning).

• As explained, we work on 2 levels: 1) creating local Chapters, and 2) creating international co-creation through our DreamsDrop Campaign: the latter is brand new (recently recognised by Fast Company for their World Changing Ideas List 2021), and has a equally tremendous potential in growing far and wide (and exploring regions where we don't have a Chapter yet).  

This combination of efforts has an amazing potential to boost our impact.

Our strategy works on two levels: we establish 

• MyMachine Chapters by social franchising. These partners set up the local/national collaboration of primary, secondary, and higher education.
• MyMachine DreamsDrop Campaigns aiming at schools around the world: setting up international collaboration.

We aim to grow on three levels in the next six years:

1. Establish new MyMachine Chapters in additional countries: we aim to have at least 5 Chapters on each continent, growing to 800,000 student-hours annually;
2. Grow our MyMachine DreamsDrop Campaigns with schools participating from all continents, growing to 200,000 student-hours annually;
3. Strenghten our organization to support the impact-targets mentioned above: that is why we welcome any leads towards donors that are willing to support our endowment funding.

The overall aim is to grow our impact to 1 million student-hours annually (based on 8-hour workdays, this equals over 342 years with 365 days of authentic learning compressed into one year).

To enable this mission to become real, our strategy has five main focal areas:

1. Growing the brand: articles, publications 
2. Growing legitimacy: measuring impact, prizes, endorsements, books
3. Growing the model: creating new chapters, growing MyMachine DreamsDrop 
4. Capacity Building: endowment funding, fundraising 
5. Commercializing Products: diversifying our income, growing the brand.

1/ Concerning MyMachine Chapters: 

The number of Chapters is rising (currently 9 (+1 since we filled out part 1 of this Elevate application)). We have the best experience with 'outside-in'-partners: outside of education, interfering (with our model) in the education system. Growing our number of Chapters is, in its essence, finding the best partner for that specific region or country, and build up trust. To support this growth, we look to tap into existing networks of community and private foundations, community building organisations, and other types of institutes. The global network of Elevate will surely be very helpful! 

2/ Concerning MyMachine DreamsDrop Campaigns:

These are curated campaigns. Primary school teachers worldwide use our guidelines and templates to run the ideation in their class. Once they have uploaded the dream machines, we curate the selection and match it with the participating universities. We organise an onboarding class for participating university students. Once their work is finished, we process their results and circle back to the primary school teachers.

Growing MyMachine DreamsDrop means we’ll need to grow our team. That is why we are in the process of setting up a fundraising campaign for which we teamed up with Kindful.

1/ Concerning MyMachine DreamsDrop Campaigns:

While users can upload their ideas in their mother-tongue, we plan to set up campaigns in different languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Portuguese), targeting primary school teachers around the world.

We plan to showcase concrete impact results from around the world to grow a fanbase for annual fundraising.

2/ Concerning MyMachine Chapters: 

We plan creating tailor-made campaigns, taking into account the (cultural) specifics per Chapter and in their native language, helping the national Chapters to grow their fanbase, reaching more stakeholders. A broader recognition equals more significant opportunities for

• teachers to come forward in joining with their class
• companies to step in as a sponsor
• the general public to join national fundraising campaigns.

3/ Concerning MyMachine products:

We plan continuing collaborating with companies to commercialize some ideas that arise in the MyMachine context. We have now 3 products (3rd expected fall 2021) in the market in collaboration with a Belgian company. Royalties on sales return to our non-profit. We are in the midst of setting up additional similar partnerships with other companies for B2C product launches to be expected in 2023. To boost sales, we plan campaigns highlighting these products to the broad public.

Please allow me to address this first from a personal angle: as the youngest of five, I grew up with four strong women, shaping me to embody diversity, equity, and inclusion. My neighbours had a boy (my age) with down syndrome. Throughout my childhood, he gave me superpowers into understanding what it means to be ‘different’, better yet that ‘different’ actually doesn’t exist. We are one human race. When I later became a youth-movement-leader, I also put these values central stage. I do the same in my professional career.

Fast forward to today: it is an essential part of MyMachine. Our Global Team exists of 30 people as we speak (16 woman, 14 men) with different ages, backgrounds, family settings. The composition of our future Global Board will obviously be reflecting these values as well.

MyMachine unites girls and boys from primary to university level, collaborating as peers, which is magical to see. Numerous people say that -more than any other program out there- MyMachine so easily grabs the attention of both girls and boys, and -as all efforts in our non-competitive approach evolve around empowering all talents to build the dream machines- unifies students of every walk of life. 

1/ Personal level: 

As co-founder of MyMachine I helped build it up from the very start: locally, nationally, and internationally. Before MyMachine, I worked at a university, bridging the gap between academic research and industry on a global level, including Fortune 500 companies. The collaborations ranged from teacher training, pedagogy, to AI, and product design. We partner with and even (co-)founded different industry networks, where we share expertise between managing-directors.

2/ Organisational level: 

• In the early days, we established a steering committee with primary, secondary, and university educators, community builders, industry and government representatives. Ever since we continuously talk to our stakeholders (both educators and students) to ask for their feedback, and we run different surveys. 
• We constantly reach out to experts for what we do in the global education space (preferably those who have also gone from local to global). That is how we collect input and expertise from the likes of Wendy Kopp (Teach for All), Aflatoun, HundrED, Harvard, New York Academy of Sciences, Sir Ken Robinson, Tom Vander Ark (Getting Smart), Garry Salole (European Foundation Centre), and consultants from Mckinsey, KPMG.
  Creating a Global Board will be the next step.
• Our MyMachine Coordinators know the local contexts.

I’d like to share two examples:

• When we just finished our first cycle, we gained huge (media-)attention. Consequently, many educators contacted us to join our next cycle. We said ‘yes’ to all of them. Now our second cycle was six times bigger, coordinating the in-depth collaboration of over 1,200 students (dispersed over the country). That early enthusiasm turned into an extreme logistic challenge. Yet, as always in MyMachine, we did deliver. But decided to scale down in our third cycle to give room for reorganizing our back office to support such growth, starting from cycle 4. 

• Because some of those dream machine ideas have commercial potential, we started contacting companies. Each idea is something different, so we need to get different companies. In the end, we finally were able to sign our first contract. These were exciting times seeing this idea turned into an actual product. Months into this process, the company ran an additional market-potential study that convinced them to discontinue the development of this product: deeply disappointing. Yet, we never give up. So, here we are, having now three products out there (obviously with a different company), and other exciting collaborations are in the making. 

• Global Creativity Spotlight by HundrED and the LEGO Foundation: https://youtu.be/dh7Mn83guuk (you can see me at 0:51 and 3:50)  

We have been speaker and keynote in many conferences in 21 countries.

All five of the five key areas of support that Elevate mentions will help us a lot! The funding would be an incredible push forward, as it would allow us to strengthen our team to support our growth, independent from the results from our first fundraising campaign in the fall. It’s important to mention that fundraising in many countries is a lot harder than in the USA. This is a reality for many reasons. For example, in a country like Belgium, people and businesses pay so much taxes that one expects the government to organize health care, education, fight poverty. It also means that there is almost no (family)budget left for donations, and there is no tradition in doing so. 

The Elevate funding would secure our next important step for our growth and give us many more options to strengthen our team and approach. And because of the combination with the other four areas of support, an absolute promise is that we would prove to the Elevate Prize stakeholders, to be an effective, worthy partner to team up with in elevating the world towards this better future we all need to design together. Simply because in MyMachine, we always deliver!

There are so many, in many countries on all continents. Here is a selection: 

• Our current Chapter partners:
  • Basse-Meuse-Développement, Belgium
  • Howest, Leiedal, Streekfonds, Belgium
  • IPOI (Institute for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Education), Croatia
  • Cultiva Foundation and Univeristy of Agder, Norway
  • Technology Park, Portugal
  • Carpathian Foundation, Slovakia
  • Josef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
  • Initiative for Community Advancement, South Africa
  • Fondacion Tr@ms, Spain.
• For advice, connections, collaboration:
  • Agoria Technology Industry Association (Belgium)
  • The New York Academy of Sciences (USA)
  • Getting Smart (USA)
  • HundrED (Finland)
  • Qatar Foundation (Qatar)
  • Gerry Salole, European Foundation Center (Europe)
  • Kelly School of Business (USA)
  • The India Platform (India)
  • Open Design Afrika (South Africa)
  • The American Toy Industry Assocation (USA)
  • The Toy Industry of Europe (Europe)
  • Chamber of Commerces in different countries
  • World Summit Award (UN) (Austria)
  • Invent Future Global (Canada)
  • Vanhalst NV for commercializing myBOO
  • Kindful for our donor management platform
  • ProProfs for our survey system
  • KPMG for accountancy advice
• Primary schools, secondary schools, and universities in many countries worldwide
• Companies and social profit organizations in many countries worldwide.

This is a good moment to say thank again to our esteemed partners!