An EPIK Launch!
/’epik/: monumental
On July 7, 2014, a group of passionate people from various sectors in the community got together to launch an unprecedented collaborative initiative to create solutions to help Empower Productive & Inoculated Kids. This gathering was a starting point toward sustained community and cultural change.
At this gathering parents, grandparents, youth, non-profit and business leaders, representatives from government and education sectors, and medical and mental health professionals came together to consider the challenges and opportunities children have in our high-tech world. Children are growing up as digital natives, more familiar with technology than their parents and other adults in their lives. While filters and monitoring are important, they are insufficient to help kids become deliberate digital users. The children of today, and the adults who care about them, face complex issues unheard of in previous generations.
So what is to be done?
No one organization or sector of society can address all the facets of this challenge. But we know that when creative, proactive people get together, amazing things can happen.
EPIK was created to help facilitate a collective impact process, bringing people together (using a recognized framework for social change) to find creative, sustainable, culturally-embedded solutions to help kids be more deliberate in how they use technology. Collaborative partners work together to create a shared vision and plan, and to gather and establish benchmarks and measures for success. Their mutually-reinforcing expertise can be combined toward the long-term aims of the collaborative effort.
At the launch, attendees brainstormed what sectors and individuals should be involved in such an effort.
EPIK is prepared to provide support for this collective impact process in the following ways:
– Facilitating meetings
– Facilitating between-meeting communications (using various tools, including a customized asynchronous video tool created in partnership with RED marketing and Mike Griffiths)
– Hiring measurements experts
– Hiring consulting services as needed
– Helping facilitate a flow of funding to the collaboration
Are you interested in joining with dozens of others who want to help prepare a deliberate digital generation, now and for generations to come?
Come. Collaborate. Create. Email us at info@epik.org for more information.
Below are more photos from our July 7 gathering.
It was so great to be a part of this epik launch! This meeting was the first baby step of what can be a huge cultural shift. I am excited to see what the collective efforts of the cross-sector leaders in the the room will be able to accomplish. And, I am hopeful that epik will be able to provide the facilitation needed to fuel the fire.