WE NEED YOU! – YOU HELP THE TEAMS HONE THEIR PITCH AND SELECT THE AUDIENCE CHOICE WINNER
Doors open at 5:00 p.m. FREE Angelo’s Pizza out at 5:30 p.m.
The University of Evansville has for several years supported Changemaker Challenges to their students as well as to regional high school student teams. The results have been outstanding and have resulted in several programs now making their impact on Quality of Place in Evansville. UE has ambitiously extended the Changemaker Challenge to the entire community using these parameters to select the 15 teams pitching at our event. This Year’s Challenge: Make Evansville More Fun and Exciting!
Tonight’s event format:
When you arrive, you’ll receive monopoly money for your investment
Each team gets a 60-second pitch
At the end of the pitch portion( about 25 minutes), teams will move to stations around the room
You go to work, asking questions and giving consideration to how your investment will make our community a better place to Live/Work/Play
We’ll reassemble and count each team’s investment raise to select our winner.
Our winner receives the audience choice award
The Changemakers judging panel will select four teams to appear on the televised pitch event
This Year’s Semi-Finalists:
- Balloon Fest – Hannah Jaramillo and Andrea Onyett
- Sun Steps – Patrick Sewell
- Art Murals – Kenzie Paul
- Victory International Film Festival – Matthew Ulm
- Basketball Murals – Mandy Ford
- International Spring Festival – Summer El-Khodary and Abdul Ashraf
- Steam Lab by Teachers – Amy Benson and Carrie Otto
- Community Wide Treasure Hunt – Jamie Born, Phillip Boyd, Breann Marrero and Victoria Flaherty
- Music Speaks Piano Project – Casey DePriest
- Evansville Watersports Initiative – Phillip Jacobs, Randy Mills, Bob Hurley, Art McDonald
- Self-e-Lights – Hannah Jaramillo and Andrea Onyett
- Portable Showers for the Homeless – Wendy Brown
- BlockFest – Theda Soldatou
- Small City Big Eats – Kennedy Moore and Chandler Moore
- Team Green Music and Arts Theme Park – Austin Whitledge, Hannah Prow and Morgan McDonald
Prize
The final four teams will each:
Receive $1,000 in prize money to be used as they wish.
Have the chance to pitch their ideas to real community investors in a televised “Shark-Tank”-style format on WNIN.
You may pitch for funding to help start your event, purchase supplies, get a business off the ground, or any other reasonable costs associated with getting your idea on its way to implementation. The maximum amount any team can request is $10,000. We encourage you to request less than that, however, as it will be much more likely that our investors will fund things at lower levels such as $2,500-$5,000 or even less. Many of the best ideas don’t take a lot to get started!
Our event is the final qualifier from which a final four teams will move forward to a televised pitch competition. The pitch competition will feature real community Angel investors considering investing seed capital in these concepts.