Students help create impact in the Wellington community during Ignite Consultants’ Combustion Weekend 2019
Kalid Bibby from student charity Ignite Consultants shares their experience hosting the Ignite Combustion Weekend at The Atom Innovation Space.
Ignite Consultants is a student-run charity which works with local charities to develop sustainable and creative solutions to challenges they might be facing. The Ignite Combustion Weekend was a new offering from Ignite Consultants, which ran along its existing nine-week projects with other charitable organisations. Ten students worked together over a weekend in September to collaborate with two Wellington charities—InsideOUT and Wellington Sexual Abuse HELP.
The students used Victoria Business School’s new Atom innovation and outreach space in the centre of Wellington as a place to share ideas and work together.
The students across different faculties split off into groups of five—each tasked with assisting one of the two charities’ strategic directions. During the weekend they were given analysis training from EY and design thinking training facilitated by one of Ignite’s board members.
The teams spent Saturday strategising for their organisation and coming up with ideas to help them with the issues the organisation was facing. They then spent Sunday implementing their ideas for their organisation delivering tangible results for the charities to takeaway.
The Wellington Sexual Abuse HELP Team focused on working with charity representatives to better understand and provide recommendations on strengthening their branding. The Inside Out team focused on understanding some of the long-term financial challenges facing InsideOut, before making recommendations on how greater stability might be achieved in the future.
Our consultants appreciated how open these social organisations were to working with them at a strategic level—an opportunity not often available to students. The students hope what they produced over the weekend will be useful for these organisations.