Calling all youth, 30 and under, to rise to the prize!
Young people see opportunities in our communities and are ready to meet them with innovative approaches. Do you know northern youth who have ideas for their communities but don’t have the funding to get started?
The Arctic Inspiration Youth Prize can help! The Youth Prize awards up to $700,000 each year, with up to seven different youth teams able to win up to $100,000 each to get their project off the ground. With winning teams able to affect the changes they want to see, the Arctic Inspiration Youth Prize is supporting the next generation of northern leaders.
The Youth Prize is an award for teams. It’s about inspiring groups of young people to find new ways to make real impact on life in our communities.
To be eligible, the Team Leader and more than half of the team need to be 30 years of age and younger. But non-youth members, including mentors and Elders, are also welcome to participate. For the Youth Prize, being a Northerner is defined as:
- an Indigenous person of the North preferably working and residing in Yukon, NWT, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Nunavut, Nunavik or Nunatsiavut; or
- a non-Indigenous person working and residing in those regions.
The Youth Prize helps get new projects off the ground. Photo courtesy Arctic Inspiration
Find an opportunity, build a project.
Any new project that helps bring positive change to our northern community can be considered.
A project can have one or more focus areas such as:
- Education
- Health and well-being
- Culture, arts and language
- Science and traditional knowledge
- Climate change
- Economy
“We have the Arctic Inspiration Youth Prize to say thank you for believing in us. Másin cho.” – Geri-Lee Buyck, Team Member, Yukon Youth Healthcare Summit
Big ideas from past winners.
The Arctic Inspiration Youth Prize has been funding and supporting grassroots efforts to bring about positive change in the North since 2017. Some past winners include:
- Yukon Youth Healthcare Summit was awarded $90,000 to address the need to increase the number of Indigenous Yukoners in post-secondary education – particularly in the field of healthcare – by exposing them to a variety of healthcare professions through a series of multi-day summits.
- Nunavut Youth Creative Collective won $100,000 to work as a social enterprise to increase Inuit representation in advertising, media and other digital platforms like social media and website design.
- Artspace won $100,000 to offer arts programs in the evenings and on weekends, as well as daytime drop-in space, that cater to youth, individuals experiencing homelessness and professional artists.
The call for nominations is now open!
The 2023 edition of the Arctic Inspiration Youth Prize is now open for nominations. The first step is submitting a short Inspiration Proposal to explain the project. These can be submitted until November 30, 2023. If you know youth with a great idea, now’s the time to let them know about the Youth Prize and encourage them to get started.
You can read all about the Youth Prize and the nomination process at arcticinspirationprize.ca/youth-prize.
Don’t delay! It could be you – or a youth you know – that is celebrated at the coming 12th annual Arctic Inspiration Prize ceremony in May 2024.