Videos for Change

We believe that young people all around the world have unique visibility on social problems they see and experience. They care about addressing climate change, cleaning our air, repairing our food systems and so much more. They want to have a say in the future they will inherit; and some have the creativity, passion, and motivation to contribute to solving them. But many do not have the skills, confidence or opportunities to speak up and to lead. And importantly, they often feel that their voices will not be heard.

Young people have a widespread sense of anxiety about the future because we have not succeeded in effectively addressing challenges like the pandemic, climate change and racism. This sense of anxiety has, for many, given rise to a feeling of economic and social exclusion. Disengagement and despondency are present in the lives of many people as they are with their friends, family and colleagues. They are experiencing a profound sense of pressure and confusion given the increasing challenge of defining one’s own identity as ethnicity, gender and sexual identity have all become more fluid concepts. 

For many young people, it has become harder than ever to find a community where one can truly belong. The world does not promote a profound and stable sense of human responsibility in young people. We need more community-minded people who value inclusion and treat others fairly, who are inquisitive and respect other people’s opinions, and who feel empathy and are willing to help those in need.

Videos for Change is a worldwide community where young people create short-form video content on issues that matter most to them. The delta of our work is social change where young people fill the frame. 

One idea. One video. One minute at a time. 

We go deep. Videos for Change is a learning environment that unearths essential skills like creativity, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, and storytelling. As a result, confidence, artistry and agency take root inside each young person. 

We go big. The Videos for Change Global Competition and Festival is the ultimate gathering of young people from around the world sharing their visions for a better future. It’s the seminal event for hundreds of other national, regional and local competitions globally. We commit to sharing this work widely with audiences around the planet. Videos for Change – it’s where social action and storytelling intersect.

Videos for Change activates young people to make one-minute videos on a range of issues important to them. It helps them build advocacy skills and to amplify their voices. We ask young people to create one-minute videos on issues that are important to them. The platform provides free resources for educators/trainers to guide young people through a structured process to create content that raises awareness, builds empathy and inspires action in seven languages. We then amplify their messages through film festivals, events, competitions and media partnerships. In 2021, in response to a growing network of interest, Videos for Change launched the inaugural Global Competition to showcase the creativity, passion, and desire for contribution that young people can make to solve the issues they see in the world. Videos created by students on a wide range of social topics have reached a combined audience of over 100 million.

Everyday, we cultivate young people’s innate sense of human responsibility and boost their wellbeing and resilience. By participating in our deeply engaging experiences, young people learn to look at themselves, and others, and to make conscious choices about whether to act in their own self-interest, or a longer-term interest of a broader collective of people.

The Human Responsibility Accelerator, as the key content curation, creation and distribution hub of the High Resolves Group, has evolved from the leader in citizenship education in Australia to a global ecosystem dedicated to the activation of human responsibility. We have divisions specializing in the creation and curation of transformative learning experiences and scalable digital platforms. We also have a growing set of regional distribution entities that have deep local knowledge and are embedded into their respective education systems. Together, we operate under a distinctive team-of-teams culture that is both collaborative and entrepreneurial. In terms of our content and platforms, iThrive Games is our center of excellence for the design of transformative learning experiences, both digital and in-person. The Human Responsibility Accelerator takes the lead in the curation, consolidation and promotion of content from several dozen other providers onto our scalable platforms. The Kind Learning Group specializes in digital learning experiences around diversity, equity and inclusion for adults in the workforce. Our two technology partner entities are OpenLearning, an ASX-listed EdTech company, and Team8, a leading web developer based in India.

Everyday we cultivate young people’s innate sense of human responsibility and boost their wellbeing and resilience. By participating in our deeply engaging experiences, young people learn to look at themselves, and others, and to make conscious choices about whether to act in their own self-interest, or a longer-term interest of a broader collective of people. We believe there are four aspects that are distinctive about our value proposition, but most important is our ability to bring deep expertise in both global challenges and interactive learning experiences designed for young people.

Deep focus on youth – We focus on 13-25 year olds. Others may have experience in running global challenges but it is one thing to do that and quite another to do it for young people, especially teenagers.

True education partner – We recognize that running a global challenge is only half the solution here. We have been deeply engaged in educational settings for almost two decades and we will bring a whole ecosystem of education providers with us to this enterprise.

Security, privacy and legal settings – It is easy to pay lip service to the security, data privacy and legal settings required to run this sort of challenge. It is a tangled web of complexity and we have worked very closely with lawyers, ethicists and technology experts to design processes that provide the right level of legal and regulatory compliance, especially with regard to and COPPA, but without creating a bureaucratic and painful experience for participants (and their caregivers).

Experience with amplification of youth voice – Our work has enabled us to learn a great deal about the amplification of youth voice on social media, traditional broadcast media and major events. We know how to partner on these initiatives and to make their contributions most effective within the broader project settings.

We are applying to Solve to firstly connect with your incredible network of wisdom-holders. As we scale, we need to be held accountable to our animating impulses and connected to the Solve network of dreamers. Our vision is: Young people shattering indifference to create a brighter future. How might the Solve community walk alongside as we endeavor to see this bright future become a reality? We are strategizing to play in a bigger sandbox. We aim to embed Videos for Change in multiple sectors. We wish to “norm” Videos for Change in classrooms around the globe and elsewhere in the creative economy. We simply need Solve to help us achieve our mission to cultivate narrative change through original, short-form video content by young people who imagine, create and share their calls for action on our platform and at gatherings across the planet.

Our competitors are social media companies like TikTok and Instagram which allow people of all ages to create video content. Alternatively, Videos for Change is a learning environment that supports young people as they immerse themselves in social issues that matter most to them. We partner with them to develop their skills and knowledge. Videos for Change is a safe environment designed to foster a sense of belonging, one that values prosocial behavior, knowledge and skill development as well as creativity. It's also an environment, unlike social media, where young people cannot "judge" each other negatively. Some examples of youth-produced media such as Radio Rookies and Five4Five films support young people to develop short films following face-to-face workshops. Videos for Change is a scalable platform that goes deep locally (with classrooms, schools, youth programs, etc.) and can be used by anyone globally, which promotes broad participation.

At Videos for Change, young people fill the frame. Their voices sit at the center of our work. It’s their points of view that are amplified in public forums globally. Young people collaborate with teams to bring their short-form video content to life. Our business model leverages the relationships between young people and those who educate them. Our platform is utilized in classrooms in high schools and universities around the world as an easy-to-use tool for young people to engage on social issues. In 2024, we will create intergenerationally-led Labs for creative learning at the intersection of social action and storytelling.

Videos for Change is seeking to measure impact after content from the site is consumed. For example, what action is taken as a result of screening video content? Did the viewer donate money, change a behavior, or activate something because of the video? There are some emerging technologies that we are exploring to measure this impact. The founder of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes, is leading this effort along with members of the brand storytelling network. Simultaneously, we are seeking to ensure our platform is available to more young people worldwide, particularly in communities that have not yet had the opportunity to engage with it. We aim to reduce or eliminate the barrier to engagement for those who are financially under-resourced. To accomplish this, we will examine our income stream that, to date, has come through platform sales to schools. It is our desire to “flip the script” and obtain philanthropic dollars to ensure schools and universities of every kind can access the opportunities that Videos for Change provides.

We measure progress, in part, by the total number of young people who register on Videos for Change as well as those who submit video content. We also collect backstories from winning videos to showcase anecdotal change occurring on the local level.

Our immediate outputs include deep collaboration with others when young people create their video content in teams of up to six people which not only consists of identifying the specific issue(s) they are seeking to address, but also what action they wish us to take. Additional outputs include the sharing of this content within local schools and communities and broader amplification to global convenings like the International Day of Peace and COP28. The impact of this work is a process that unearths essential skills like creativity, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, and storytelling. As a result, confidence, artistry and agency take root inside each young person. Additionally, Videos for Change impacts educators in classrooms and civic leaders at global forums. Based on our experience, we have witnessed impact that has been communicated through interviews with teachers, students and others. The ripple effect isn’t just the adult who sees these videos, but also young people looking to one another for visions of our collective future. Our “living archive” of content, direct from the voices of young people, continues to provoke and cause us to take action. The Reboot Foundation recently released “The TikTok Challenge: Curbing Social Media’s Influence On Young Minds.” The report reveals that 61 percent of TikTok users ages 13 to 24 would give up their right to vote for a year before they would give up social media, and 40 percent said they disagreed with the statement “Science helps the world more than it harms it.” The survey results paint a picture of a society that is both influenced by – and wary of – social media platforms that have emerged as the dominant source of news and entertainment for the nation’s youth. Videos for Change is the solution to this problem. It is the safest of spaces for young people to not only share what is close to their hearts with one another, but also for the global community to engage with stories that compel us toward meaningful change.

Videos for Change is a modern web-based application that allows young people to have a say on the issues that matter most to them. We leverage powerful technology solutions to allow students to collaborate on their project remotely, submit videos from anywhere in the world and have their entries be automatically entered into any competition for which they're eligible, without having to resubmit their video each time. This dramatically improves the potential reach and impact of all submissions. Our platform also allows for schools, universities and other community organizations to run their own competitions in order to address the needs that are most important to them. We provide a 'one-stop shop' for these organizations to be able to run their competition from start to finish.

A corporate commitment to justice, diversity, equity and inclusion lies at the very heart of what we seek to do. Our theory of change is all about activating a sense of human responsibility in our participants. We do that by building capacity in four quadrants of what we call citizenship competencies. The fundamental starting point for the High Resolves curriculum is an exploration of the themes of identity and purpose followed by a deep dive into what makes for a just society. Developing a sense of collective identity and a sense of social justice is critical to all that we do.

As an organization that was born and bred in Australia, Reconciliation is also core to our heart. We have designed a “Reconciliation Action Plan” (RAP) because we recognize that collective transformation is required to help us to move towards a more just, equitable and inclusive world. We partner with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to improve teacher capacity and educational outcomes for young people. Through our RAP process, we work to define our spend with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organizations and continue to foster positive experiences in procurement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander products and services. We are pursuing similar approaches in our other geographies.

Videos for Change is an initiative of the not-for-profit Human Responsibility Accelerator, a 501(c)3 organization that oversees a distributed operating model of partners. We currently provide the Videos for Change platform to distribution partners in Mexico, Brazil and Australia who, in turn, generate revenue for Videos for Change through their network of local and national relationships. Videos for Change is primed for scale through our proven model of partners in local contexts. This allows us to operate Videos for Change in multiple languages and with a variety of partners across sectors. We also turn to philanthropic partners to offer standalone competitions like NatGeo’s Slingshot Challenge. Our financial stability is important and our aim to be fully sustainable with this business model.

Nothing about our approach involves the simple rollout of one formula across different communities across the world. Quite the opposite, our approach recognizes the powerful mix that blends success in one corner of the world with local innovation and adaptation in another. This form of “last mile engineering” into a wide array of cultural and socio-economic settings has been another critical aspect of our success. We recognize that social development can never be a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another. Our programs have a high degree of flexibility and have been adapted into different languages and diverse social settings around the world. Today, we have distribution partners on the ground to cover the Americas and Australia/New Zealand, but there are discussions underway with potential partners in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East which should allow those regions to be added over the next 12-24 months.

We have many examples of how our business model has been successful so far including with companies who turn to Videos for Change to find a solution to their challenge of engaging young people. An example of this is NatGeo’s recent Slingshot Challenge which resulted in reaching over 2500 young people in 106 countries. Our multi-year partnership with companies like NatGeo is revenue generating with support from the Paul Allen Foundation. We also have firm relationships with universities in Australia, like UTS and others, who have adopted Videos for Change as they seek to encourage young people to attend their institutions. We also have established corporate sponsorship opportunities for the Videos for Change Global Competition and Festival that continues to see support from companies like Edesia Nutrition and philanthropic organizations like The Rockefeller Foundation. We receive ongoing general operating support from the McNulty Foundation and others who help us achieve our mission. Our media partnerships, with NBCUniversal International Networks for example, help to build our reputation globally so that we remain attractive to donors across categories. We are dogged in our pursuit for long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships with individuals, companies and foundations to help us achieve financial sustainability.