Students address worldwide problems through Community Changemaker Challenge
Published: 05-31-2025 9:00 AM |
Students from 13 schools around New England recently took on the Community Changemaker Challenge, including Kearsarge Regional High School and Hopkinton High School.
The challenge, hosted at the University of New Hampshire on May 16 by the Design Challenge Network, invited any and all students to the annual challenge. Students from mostly NH public and private schools made up 29 teams and presented their projects, weeks in the making, to an assortment of judges.
This is the eighth year this event has taken place, and the second year that it has been expanded by the Design Challenge Network, a New England-based education non-profit focused on research and hands-on learning.
Brent Powell, executive director of the non-profit, wrote in a message to the Concord Monitor that “the goal of the Community Changemaker Challenge is to provide a transformative experience for both students and teachers.”
“In doing this work, students develop the skills of critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, research and communication. Our data shows that students love the engagement they experience as they work to solve problems they care about, all the while learning academic content and about civic engagement and public policy,” he wrote.
The challenge itself requires students to identify a problem, design a solution, express their idea in writing or a video and then present the final product at the UNH event. There, each team is broken into different rooms and shares their project with a panel of judges.
Teachers introduce this opportunity to their students, most of whom participate as part of their academic course.
Projects can be about an array of different subjects and address problems that the students decide hold importance. According to Powell, about 50% of students address environmental threats, 25% focus on health issues and 25% look into a social problem.
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This year, one team from Kearsarge and three teams from Hopkinton took on different challenges.
The Kearsarge team, named “Talk Tampon” and made up of friends Layla Morgan, Amber Chamberlain and Joslyn Ingram, researched the recent lawsuits against tampon brands for containing unsafe materials and discovered Diva Cups are a healthier option.
They discovered the challenge as part of the Extended Learning Opportunities program at the school and were interested in joining after hearing about the previous group’s experience last year, the first time Kearsarge participated.
“It was a lot less intimidating than I thought it was going to be, and just a lot more chill and laid back,” said Chamberlain, one of the team members. “I really wasn’t that nervous when I got there and I saw everyone else, and it was really cool to see other people, students like us, coming up with these solutions to big problems.”
Each girl said they would recommend that students join the challenge in the future.
“We were nervous walking up there, and then you look into the judge’s eyes and they’re just smiling at you because they’re so happy you were even able to come up with an idea like this,” said Morgan, another teammate.
A comfortable environment was essential as this was the first time most of the students had presented in front of a large crowd.
“I think that it helps when it comes to thinking about presenting your thoughts and ideas and forming thoughts on the spot to answer questions that you didn’t have any preparation for. Which I thought was really helpful,” she added.
The three Hopkinton teams all addressed different issues the students found important.
“The Pink Pantry” addressed the accessibility of menstrual products for refugees and won the competition in their assigned room.
The group dubbed “NetZero Drive,” focused on finding a new, more sustainable fuel source for transportation by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“Tranquilo” team worked to highlight teenage mental health in a project “made by teens for teens.”
Each group felt that their work impacted the world around them.
“Personally, I think that the climate crisis is the issue of utmost importance for people to deal with,” Kyle Buelte, member of the NetZero Drive group, said. “Thus, it’s something I care about, so anything that combats it is great, so transportation being such a prominent factor in greenhouse gas emissions it was interesting and fun to work towards lowering those emissions and thus fight the climate crisis.”
While working to improve outside problems from the inside of their classrooms, the students were able to learn about themselves in the process.
“It pushed us out of our comfort zones because we had to contact people outside of the school,” said Rebecca Lewine, member of The Pink Pantry.
Julia Martel, her teammate, expressed similar sentiments.
“I have struggled with public speaking in the past, which makes me nervous, but with this project we were comfortable with the information and topic, so it was a good confidence booster for me,” she said.
Hopkinton also joined one other school in implementing a condensed model of the challenge inside the school. This allowed more students to get involved in research-based learning.
To participate in the Community Changemaker Challenge next year, reach out to Brent Powell at brent@designchallengenetwork.org.
Kiera McLaughlin can be reached at kmclaughlin@cmonitor.com