It all started when…
Jing and Lauren got together to run a workshop on US-China relations. We believed that our passionate group of friends could come up with a novel “Grand Strategy” for how the US & China can work together on problems like climate change.
Taking inspiration from our personal work and study abroad experiences, we wondered if we could scale the kinds of humanizing friendships we developed with “the other side” to thousands of young leaders in cities across the US & China. If it were possible to achieve such scale, we’d have the potential to seed an entire generation of young leaders who have the cultural exposure and entrepreneurial skills needed to collaborate on problems facing the global community.
Putting our social entrepreneurship hats on, we realized that with technology platforms such as Zoom and WeChat, scaling relationships between young leaders is 100% achievable.
Our “video chat pen pal” idea rapidly evolved into our pilot program in August 2019, when we graduated our first 9 high school Community Leaders: 4 from China and 5 from the US. We call our young leaders “Community Leaders” because of their commitment to serving their local communities. We hypothesized that bringing local leaders together to tackle common problems facing their communities, would not only serve as a vehicle for developing entrepreneurship skills, but also seed the beginnings of cross-border friendships.
During our pilot, our 9 Community Leaders and Coaches met daily for 2 weeks, with a final Demo Day to present team projects. Our groups launched 2 projects during this short period, a “Yelp” or “Dianping” review site for sustainable fashion brands, and a low carbon food research project.
As we look towards 2024 and beyond, our vision is to scale GenDream from 9 high school Community Leaders in the US and China to 100, 1000, 10K, and 100K+ Community Leaders globally by 2030. We believe that our virtual-first model enables GenDream to source the highest potential Community Leaders, Coaches, and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence from around the world. Our intent is that GenDream Community Leaders graduate from the program with not only entrepreneurship and leadership skills, but also genuine friendships with teammates from cities across the US and China.
If you’re a high school leader in your local community and want to amplify your impact by meeting local leaders from cities across the US & China, apply to become a Community Leader here, or email us at apply@gendreamleaders.org with questions.
If what we’re up to resonates with you, find out how to become a Coach or Entrepreneur-in-Residence, or simply drop us a line at hello@gendreamleaders.org.
See us on press:
Shanghai Dailyhttps://www.shine.cn/feature/lifestyle/2202182051/