Essential Futures Challenge Community Building Hackathon

Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Location: A secret secure venue that will be revealed on November 1st
Whether you're new to hackathons or an experienced innovator, this event will provide insights and guidance to help you succeed. Through optional workshops leading up to the culminating Community Building Hackathon on November 26th you’ll be equipped with the skills, resources, and guidance to create innovative solutions for designing a sustainable Net Zero city block. Each workshop not only offers students important skills, but also current Georgian students will receive a co-curricular record for each workshop attended.
✨✨✨ Plus, there's over $3,000 in prizes to be won! ✨✨✨
It’s the perfect opportunity to collaborate, share ideas, and contribute to shaping the future of semi-rural communities by 2050.
What is it?
The Essential Futures Challenge, presented by COLABORATORY through Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at Georgian College, is an exciting community building hackathon where post-secondary students come together to innovate and build a Net Zero city block for a semi-rural community in the year 2050.
Welcome to Glenville, Ontario – Your Challenge:
You’ll collaborate to create a community block that balances environmental, economic,
and social sustainability—envisioning solutions that go beyond today’s standards, all the way to a regenerative future.
Your design should be created for residents of this 150K population town reflecting their current 2050 needs and help the population thrive for decades to come.
How Will You Do It?
Your team’s mission is to design an assigned portion of a future-oriented community block, working alongside other teams to construct a collective vision for life in 2050. Inspired by , your design positioned around this cutting-edge car as a key element of this 2050 environment.

On the build day, you’ll bring your ideas to life using Place-making—a community-centered approach to this time limited Hackathon.
What is Place-Making?
Place-making is a community-centered approach to urban planning that involves designing public spaces to encourage interaction, accessibility and sustainability. It focuses on creating environments that reflect the needs, desires and cultures of the community, while enhancing social connections and environmental resilience. In this challenge, place-making will guide the design of your community block to ensure it serves as a hub of activity, equity and innovation.
Your Objective
Imagine, design and create your city block with this innovative 2050 community. Think forward to 2050 - what will technology, energy, food systems, and social equity look like in this future world? Did the world one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? You’ll need to use your imagination to think forward and figure out how today’s latest advances in technology, green infrastructure, and social equity are transformed – for both good and bad - in this future community.
Evaluation Criteria
Teams will be evaluated on several factors:

· Sustainability: How well your design integrates energy efficiency, waste reduction, regeneration, and renewable energy for a Net Zero future.

· Innovation: Creativity in problem-solving and use of new technologies. How future forward thinking was your team?
· Feasibility: Practicality of implementation and scalability of your solution in the context of the realities of 2050

· Social Equity: How your design supports social inclusion, social justice, indigenization, gender equity, accessibility, and community well-being.

· Collaboration: Effective teamwork and integration of interdisciplinary knowledge. How many different academic perspectives did you integrate into your team and design.
What You'll Create

· Conceptual Design: A conceptual design that contributes to the Net Zero aspects of this community block in the year 2050. It should integrate with other team designs to address a collaborative future oriented to place-making.
· Prototype: You will build then build physical or digital/physical prototype of your design that demonstrates your idea and can be added to the physical creation of ‘place’ for this community block in the year 2050
Judging
A panel of judges that includes academic professionals, industry and community leaders, will then evaluate the collective 2050 Community Block design as well as the individual team contributions. Over $3K in prizes will be awarded!
Sign up now!
Be a part of this transformative experience where you’ll gain real-world skills, connect with industry leaders, design the future and have a chance to win a CASH PRIZE!
*Co-curricular records will be provided to current Georgian College students for participation in this Hackathon.

Host or Publisher Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre