“We’re just regular teenagers,” said 18-year-old Cornel George Ciocoi. We were sitting in the basement of the Rhodes House at Oxford University, where the young Romanian joined 99 other smart and ambitious teenagers from around the world. They’re all there because they have a common goal of changing the world for the better – starting with their own communities. The Rise summit was created by a partnership between Rhodes Trust and Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife and business partner Wendy Schmidt. The couple made a billion-dollar commitment which spans multiple initiatives. Part of it helps fund youth education and development through their program Rise, a program where winners attend a summit and receive scholarships and potential project funding. Out of around 150,000 registrants and applicants, these students stood out because of their commitment to change and willingness to learn and collaborate. Even though many are still in high school, to them, no idea is too small, and no problem is too big to solve.
Luciano Reyes Botello, for example, created a network in his community in Mexico connecting doctors and patients who need life-saving prescriptions during a nationwide shortage. “In Mexico, the public healthcare sector is very corrupt and inefficient. Many people have to go to the private sector. I am trying to systemize and centralize this private sector of medicine with a platform where you can get your prescriptions and book all your doctor appointments,” Luciano explains. At the event, he had the opportunity to connect with other students who helped him look at his project in all new ways. Founder Wendy Schmidt, who did not attend the conference but talked to Teen Vogue on a call, explained that merging young people from around the world in different disciplines to collaborate was the whole idea.
“There is no program in the world that we know of that targets this age group of 15 to 17-year-olds,” she said. “What if you could bring cohorts of such people from around the world, from countries, everywhere, and connect them into a network and dedicate them to a life of public service? Think of the problems the world could solve if people were able to come together from around the world, get a good education, specialize in what they cared about, and be connected not only in their cohort of a hundred but year after year after year.” While the group that came together in Oxford is only the second group of 100 Rise students – each year a new group of winners is picked but they are still considered part of the network – she’s committed to keep the program going each year, bringing in and reaching more teens with each summit. “We have been working with partners around the world on the recruitment of students because we’re starting from a place where we say talent is universal in human societies, but opportunity is not,” she explained. “Increasingly, we want to be reaching into places we are not currently recruiting from. It’s not all about STEM education. It’s not about making a world full of engineers. We need everyone. That’s the theory here, and it’s played out pretty darn well.”
Students who apply are asked to send a video introduction of themselves (though there is a written application for those unable to send videos) and submit a project that benefits their community. After that, 500 applicants are selected and asked to do different activities to demonstrate their strengths, like group project leadership. The 100 winners chosen are asked to attend an annual summit and have the opportunity to work on their projects with their peers, receive mentorship from experts and teachers, and attend workshops on various topics.
After one session, South Korea-based student Seokhyun Baek told me about the potential he saw when the group came together and started collaborating. “The youth is a battery pack of change that society needs to plug into,” he said.
Even for students who don’t make it into the final group, creating a project, interviewing, and honing in on professional skills within the application process is something many felt was worth the time. Sumaiya Bangura from the U.K. had designed a period cramp relief device for the London Leaders Awards (which she won) before hearing of Rise. Applying motivated her to make a prototype, which she plans to scale and make accessible. “It was a very long project, and I was really tired by the end of it, but I had my period pain relief device in the end,” she said. She explained that being with the group gave her a sense of worldliness and a new perspective on her project that she may never have otherwise gotten, even through travel. “I think you learn so much by interacting with people from different countries, different languages, different walks of life,” she said. “People are still very unaware of other cultures and how they operate. Despite us becoming more globalized and traveling more internationally, the reality is we still don’t learn about other people and how they function.”
The group’s diversity comes from their different backgrounds spanning dozens of countries (some are from big cities around the world, while others live in rural communities) and also their varying interests. After one long day of classes ranging in topics from the ethics of AI to climate change’s impact on our food supply, I sat down with more students to discuss their projects. Antonina Frolova, from Ukraine, created a platform for artists in her country to share their work. “In childhood, I was told being an artist is not a job you can have,” she explained. Her project looked at ways of connecting artists so that not only could they sell their work but continue making it, even through hardships like the one facing her country now. Another student in that same group, Mokwe Uche David, developed a waste elimination system in his hometown in Nigeria. He spent time in his community figuring out why there was waste and realized that there were no trash cans. He gathered a group of teenagers to raise money to provide waste facilities. “We were able to purchase enough to position in different sections of our community and explain that they were available to use.”
While certainly expansive in its reach, the recruitment techniques for Rise are ever-evolving. Though dozens of students admitted they found out about the program on TikTok (joking that they had to convince their parents it wasn’t a scam), others applied through partner organizations working with small rural towns and refugee programs. It comes at an interesting time when tertiary education enrollment is rising, and yet, access to these schools in South American and African communities remains stagnant. Using non-traditional techniques and standards, like group projects on Zoom and project-based judging, they are rewarding teens who are brilliant outside of a grading system.
All of the students believe deeply in the power of their generation to make sweeping changes through community organization. Still, the group I spoke to wanted to clarify that young people are not the world’s savior. “It’s easy for older generations to say, ‘we’re so excited for you to fix these issues, but we need them too,'” Rishabh Ambavanekar, a U.S.-based student, tells me during a group breakfast. All eight students at the table nodded in agreement. “If you can learn from any of us, it’s that these problems we want to address are all our problems,” Maneeza Khan, a STEM advocate from India, added. “We need all of us.”