MiYork Education strives for sustainable impact through youth consultation

As MiYork Education has been shortlisted in the YSE Global 2022, what motivated you to enter the competition?

Khoa Tran: Our motivation to join the Singapore International Foundation’s YSE Global 2022 stemmed from the potential for global collaborations and opportunities to work with experts from leading consulting firms, such as McKinsey & Company, Bloomberg, and PwC to digitalise and scale our social enterprises.

Additionally, we knew that YSE Global offers data-oriented training workshops, from using data to tell stories in marketing to assessing our current needs for mentor matching. Most of our co-founders have business and legal backgrounds rather than analytics.

What YSE Global could offer exceeds those of other incubators and accelerator programmes that we can access. Therefore,the YSE Global was our best choice to learn and scale our business.

MiYork Education co-founder Tuyet Nguyen has always fixated on how to initiate sustainable and impactful social projects for the community

Can you share more about your business idea that you brought to the YSE Global this year and what is the inspiration behind it?

Tuyet Nguyen: Growing up in Dak Nong province, one of the most underdeveloped places in Vietnam, I have always fixated on how to influence the community positively and sustainably and initiated various social projects with sustainable impacts.

When meeting students across Vietnam, we found out that many students lack access to resources and a conducive learning environment that suits them, resulting in them being unable to unleash their full potential to contribute to society. Additionally, college consulting and career orientation programmes are not affordable, which makes them inaccessible to the low-to-middle income group.

To address this gap, we launched MiYork Education in 2021, aimed at providing a virtual ecosystem for education and youth consultation. The project motivates students to learn via social contributions and rewards them with scholarships to study overseas in the United States, South Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, and many others.

Our services are also oriented towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By having students immerse themselves early in SDGs with hands-on projects, we hope to nurture social innovation and skills within each of them. Additionally, MiYork allocates funds to support student-led projects across Vietnam to scale their impacts.

Our services are affordable with financial aid models and have flexible payments, ensuring all students can use our service regardless of their financial standing.

How do you see your strengths and disadvantages compared with other teams from overseas?

Hoai Luu: Firstly, the services provided by MiYork – bringing scholarships and educational opportunities to students across Vietnam – have passed their minimum viable product stage.

Secondly, MiYork has gained strong traction since we started. We have already started making profits, with strong support from our stakeholders across Vietnam, South Korea, the US, the UK, Singapore, and Israel.

Tuyet Nguyen: Finally, MiYork has a strong community of students and alumni. Our alumni from across the world are very active in supporting new MiYork students, acting as career advisors for students and project advisors for a wide range of sponsored projects.

I believe the close-knit and proactive community is the strength that MiYork has, reflecting a Vietnamese culture that values social entrepreneurship and social impact missions.

Khoa Tran: On the other hand, we do not see our shortcomings as disadvantages'. We are a very young team – and most of our members are undergraduate and high school students, while some fellow YSE participants are full-time professionals with multiple years of experience.

Because of this, our team has learned a lot from the more experienced teams, and we value these exchange opportunities during the YSE sessions. We are also amazed by other teams who have strong tech-based backgrounds, which is an aspect MiYork still needs to improve.

MiYork Education has a strong community of alumni, who are actively engaging as career and project advisor for current students

How do you think participating in the YSE Global 2022 will benefit the development and growth of your business?

Khoa Tran: Balancing the social and financial objectives has always been a challenge faced by the MiYork team. The storytelling and impact measurement sessions equipped us with skills to better communicate our practices and mission with our stakeholders to receive more support.

For example, during the different lessons, we learnt that we had concentrated too much on financial output in our pitch while instead should also highlight our social outcomes and impact.

Hoai Luu: Our mentors from McKinsey & Company also guided us to build business models to calculate our operational effectiveness and identify the inefficiencies in our sales and marketing process. We are still constructing this digital model, hoping to generate practical insights and data soon.

What will be your next steps after the YSE Global 2022, and where do you see your business in five years?

Tuyet Nguyen: We look forward to building alumni connecting programmes and leveraging our strong ties within MiYork communities. We also hope to provide better quality research mentorships and career opportunities for our MiYork students. As a result, MiYork communities can create more meaningful social projects and produce high-value research, aiming at SDGs in Vietnam.

Additionally, thanks to YSE's support, we have built new connections with startups and NGOs in Singapore and Indonesia to promote more international research and studying opportunities for our students.

We have already established partnerships with some Singapore organisations and will have the first meeting with a YSE alumni from Indonesia soon. We are hoping for more international outreach after this wonderful experience with the YSE Global programme.

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