optiMize

optiMize is a constantly evolving attempt to help students turn ideas into impact. We're a community at the University of Michigan where you can hone your entrepreneurial skills and build a network of mentors and friends—all while cultivating your passions for social impact. Together, we co-create a range of experiential co-curricular programs, courses, and community partnerships initiatives—which engaged 1175 students in 2020. Our flagship program is the optiMize Social Innovation Challenge (SIC). It’s a 13-week incubator program for students of all ages and majors to develop self-directed social impact projects. Students join with a project, an idea, or even just a passion for change. From there, you pick and choose skill-building workshops, we connect you with mentors, and the power of our community makes everyone better. Some projects from the SIC get funded to join the optiMize Summer Fellowship, where they focus on developing their projects for 8 weeks. Projects get up to $10,000 each, with more than $500,000 awarded annually. In addition to co-curricular programs, we offer a minicourse series called Critical Issues in X—with "X" being topics like sustainability, health, Detroit, education, and more. We also support affiliated faculty in the campuswide Entrepreneurship Minor. Our community co-leads a series of Community Partnerships and Transfer Bridge initiatives in collaboration with community colleges across the state—aiming to make high impact education more accessible and to improve transfer student success. Our flagship program in this area is called moMentum, a social innovation program and fellowship for community college students before they transfer to a 4-year school. All our programs are co-created by students, for students. And for all we’ve built in our first nine years, we’re just getting started. Who will design optiMize’s next innovation? Why not you?