One Plant: Global Initiative Empowering Youth to Green the World

Website/App store links:

Summary:

One Plant Per Class is a global initiative of students empowering students to green the classroom. We're a social plant journal (think Instagram+Foursquare) that allows anyone to share their plants as team to get points. Once users reach a certain number of points a sponsor provides a plant to someone in a developing country.

We use technology as a platform to enable students to share directly with other students, building student leaders and communities. For every plant students setup, partners will provide a plant to someone in a developing country, having a local and global impact. Providing a plant such as a tomato plant in a developing country can mean extra income to feed a family and purchase other essentials needed to live.

We created an iPhone app to enable teams to "check in" and report on the plant's progress. With this we will then have a database of all the plants. The team are given points and the top team is awarded, but all schools see the local and global impact. Through the data we're collecting, we are also doing a large scale crowd sourced study on the best conditions for growing plants.

Greening the world, one class at a time.

Built by: Nicholas Montgomery, Peter MacDonald, Eric Floresca, Chris Chung, Kowsheek Mahmood, Husayn Dharshi, Matthew Mihok at RHOK TO.

Why we are working on this problem:

With energy efficient buildings, indoor air is 5-10X more polluted than outdoor air. Fortune 500 companies have seen double digit productivity increases by adding plants to office environments. Academic studies in Norway to Taiwan to Texas have quantified the immersive psychological and environmental benefits of indoor plants. Plants are essential to humanity’s survival and existence and we believe they re essential to the classroom as well.

One of the greatest benefits is getting students, teachers, parents and the entire community are involved building student leadership. By working towards a common goal everyone can benefit, we can realize that taking care of a plant isn’t difficult. Even if students don’t yet have a green thumb, they become involved educating themselves and the world.

When students are put in charge, they come up with innovative solutions and findings which we share with the global community of schools using technology. Through our collaborative tools and utilization of social media, students can easily audit their classrooms to share what is growing and what isn’t and learn directly from other students. Students are disconnected from the environment and we want to create the simple and achievable goal of One Plant Per Class.

What we accomplished during the event:

Ideation

General concept sketches of app
Determining the UX
Determining what are people tagging when they “check-in” to plants

Business Model Canvas

Create document outlining Key stakeholders, key partners, key revenue/costs, allocations, value proportions, target audience.

Funding

$8M in relevant funding opportunities from 39 sources

Growth

Generated database of 60 stakeholders, including schools boards and environmental faculties to pitch engagement opportunities.
Created several blog posts for peopel to learn about taking care of plants

UI Design