CREATE: Your Side Hustle. Overview selected.
The five pathways
Find the challenge that speaks to you.
Each pathway uses the same learning rhythm—explore, investigate, act, and reflect—while focusing on a different way culture can create value and opportunity.
Pathway 01 · CREATE
Your Side Hustle
Create a side hustle that adds value. Design a side hustle that transforms your culture, creativity, talents, or lived experiences into something that creates value for others. Your side hustle should respond to a real opportunity or need, strengthen your community, and demonstrate how innovation can create economic, cultural, or social impact.
Overview
Create a side hustle that adds value.
Design a side hustle that transforms your culture, creativity, talents, or lived experiences into something that creates value for others. Your side hustle should respond to a real opportunity or need, strengthen your community, and demonstrate how innovation can create economic, cultural, or social impact.
Innovation Insight
Your greatest side hustle idea may already exist within your creativity, your lived experiences, or your culture. Innovation happens when we recognize the value we already possess and transform it into opportunities that strengthen ourselves and our communities.
Essential Question
How can I transform my cultural value into opportunity for myself and my community?
Your pathway at a glance
- 01Discover opportunities and unmet needs in your campus, workplace, neighborhood, or community.
- 02Recognize the culture, creativity, talents, lived experiences, family or community knowledge, and professional knowledge you already possess.
- 03Develop a side hustle that creates meaningful value for others.
- 04Test your thinking through feedback, experimentation, and technology.
- 05Show how your idea can create economic, social, cultural, or community impact.
A National Challenge
Culture is Currency
Your Currency is Culture
Your experiences, traditions, language, creativity, relationships, and community knowledge all hold value. Currency is more than money—it is anything that creates value. Culture Is Currency challenges you to turn what you know, create, and experience into assets for innovation, opportunity, and community wealth. In partnership with SUMA Wealth, participants can also build financial knowledge and explore how ideas can create economic opportunity through the Side Hustle Bootcamp.
Challenge-Based Learning
Start with a question that matters to you. Investigate it through research, conversations, and exploration. Then use what you learn to create and share an idea, story, or solution.
Free & Online
Recognize your value. Build your idea. Create what comes next. Explore Challenge resources, choose a pathway that fits your interests, and use the tools available to take your idea from exploration to creation.