User talk:Fahim.morshed

Sabhanaz rashid diya is a writer, journalist, mother and social entrepreneur based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a One Young World Ambassador, Asia 21 Fellow and Laureate Global Fellow, and has worked extensively to advance opportunities for young people and women through her organization, the One Degree Initiative Foundation. She founded the organization when she was 15 years old and since then, has mentored over 10,000 activists, change makers and social entrepreneurs to transform their ideas to actions. Her teaching interests are in leadership and design thinking.

She has written extensively for several national and international magazines, and has worked and written columns for the leading English daily in Bangladesh, The Daily Star for 14 years. She has authored two books and contributed to numerous anthologies.

She thinks money is both a foe and a friend. It enables us and at times, it misguides us. We spend most of our lives working, thinking, spending and worrying about money. Even then, it remains as one of the biggest taboos to talk about.

People often blame having money or lack of it for not being able to start something or make a difference. For young people with passion to start a business or initiative money often becomes a barrier and for grownups with money it often becomes a source of undue pride. At times, we put unjust importance on money and claim opposite as well.On the eve of global money week, this is our attempt to understand money better and therefore how people think about it.

Entrepreneurs, young people and kids talking openly and a little philosophically about money and having it and therefore lack of it. Let us start this mini-series with: Sabhanaz Rashid Diya.

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya is a Social Entrepreneur and the Founder of One Degree Initiative Foundation-a non-profit focuses on mentoring young people to become active change makers. She is also an author of two books and a relentless proponent of youth empowerment as a means to national progress. She came from a financially stable background but it does not help once you become responsible for your own life. She spends her days working for an organization that is not profit driven, yet she lives a good life. She also run a one degree initiative which is a registered nonprofit youth organization based in Bangladesh with chapters in Canada, USA and Nepal. They provide mentorship (between 6 to 18 months) to young people aged 15-25 years to engage them in active citizenship and social entrepreneurship. They saw that 65 percent of 170 million people in Bangladesh are below the age of 40. The global population stands at 7 billion with a predominant youth presence. It is essential to equip today’s youth with tools to effectively manage their lives and communities, thereby creating today’s visionaries and tomorrow’s leaders. We believe in the power of youth, of young people investing in young people and youth changing the world for the better. We believe in the now and the importance of youth representation in decision making. Their unique mentorship program is a ‘real life classroom’. We challenge youth to take charge of their problems and those of people around them, and use innovative yet frugal approaches to tackling them. Our model tests and prepares through theory and practice, placing young people in initiatives where they work with locals to make a sustainable positive difference. Through either community projects or social enterprises, the power of taking charge and giving back, sustainable solutions and grassroots empowerment are imbued into the work we do, thereby creating a generation of leaders who are more informed, more influential, more prepared and more committed to change the world. One superhero at a time.