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Deakin: Illuminate Business Challenge

Seven year 10 students, filled with enthusiasm and determination, set off on an endeavour to compete against 13 teams from other schools around Melbourne in the Illuminate:NextGen. We were there to design the best social enterprise.

Our team (comprised of the fabulous Lee-Ling Bristow, Anthea Guerra, Joshua Nai, Ryan Basser, Grace Sporton, Eva Lu, and Johnson Sarcasm Duong) created Bambook, a social enterprise that aims to help provide children in Niger with better education by giving schools  books, stationary, teachers and classroom. We would raise the funds to do this through the sales of our environmentally friendly bamboo pens, which we would sell in Australia.

Over the five days at Deakin University in Burwood, teams were required to create and submit 12 tasks! These included creating a detailed business plan, marketing package and a pitch deck presentation.

On Friday, the 27 July, the Bambook team set foot in Deakin for one final time, and after a delicious free meal, left that evening proud to have come fourth place in the competition - only short of reaching third by 0.2%!

Everyone of us had a tremendous experience, from the building of the financial tables (our favourite, of course), having utterly (excessively) passionate “discussions” to the cold morning bus commutes.

The Bambook team would like to thank Mr. Verlin, Mr. Evans and Mr. Fernandez for supporting us throughout the week and giving us the opportunity to participate in the challenge,  Illuminate Education and all the student ambassadors at Deakin for their support.


Lee-Ling Bristow, Joshua Nai