UTS StartUps Summit – HSIE Sharing Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The University of Technology Sydney StartUps Summit held in the holiday break on Tuesday 27 July at the ICC was ‘Australia’s largest event to inspire and support young entrepreneurs.’ I had the pleasure of taking seven Year 10 students to present to over 2500 students from other independent, Catholic and state schools. A huge congratulations to Monique Tsabalas who was the keynote speaker for the Santa Sabina presentation. Monique represented the Year 10 Santa Style team and spoke about the learning and challenges working in the student-led initiative within the HSIE Innovation and Entrepreneurship Co-curricula StartUp Project, Santa Style. She shared with the audience how the problem of fashion landfill was identified, the design of the Santa Style StartUp as a disruption to fast fashion as a closed loop model, the challenges of developing an e-commerce website, social media marketing strategies, sustainability successes and future directions for this business. The Year 10 team that supported Monique on stage included: Evie Ash, Drew Babbage, Eve Blanchard, Emily Gilmore, Emily Guerreiro and Georgia Tannous.

This presentation received huge positive feedback from schools who were in the audience including St Clare’s College Waverley who reached out to invite Santa Style Year 10 students to present to the St Clare’s Year 8 cohort about innovation and entrepreneurship and become Innovation Mentors. We look forward to continuing to share our learnings with the greater educational community throughout our StartUp journey. Santa Sabina students continue to shake the world!

Brigida Zagora
Head of HSIE (Humanities and Social Sciences)

Student reflection

We were given the opportunity to be a part of the UTS Startups Summit. At the conference we were able to see diverse, tech-enabled entrepreneurs in action, providing us with much inspiration and enlightening us as to the opportunities available in the areas of technology and entrepreneurship. Over 2 000 students from a range of different schools participated, and we were given the privilege of being able to present the Santa Style initiative to the entire conference. We presented a speech in which we outlined the journey of the Santa Style initiative including our challenges, highlights and inspiration for forming the Startup – Santa Style. It was great to be able to spread awareness of the ongoing issue of fast fashion and provide a practical solution to the issue. Hopefully we were able to be an inspiration for many other schools to create their own initiative, tackling climate change.

Since this experience, other schools have contacted us seeking further information on Santa Style and guidance on how they could create their own StartUp initiative. On 20 July we were asked to be mentors to St Clare’s Waverley Year 8, who are embarking on an entrepreneurial journey in which they are creating their own sustainable initiatives. We were able to provide them with advice on the process of creating a sustainable initiative and we hope to be able to continue to be mentors to them, supporting them in their projects.

Drew Babbage
Year 10