Digital Moment: The charity inspiring young people to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals

Montreal-based charity Digital Moment doesn’t shy away from asking kids to explore complicated questions. As CEO Indra Kubicek explained: “We want youth to consider how they want to use technology to solve some of the big social and environmental issues that exist in society.”

To facilitate these conversations and inspire action, Digital Moment – committed to advancing digital literacy and access to skills for all Canadian youth – picks a different topic that’s related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) each year. Through its programming, the charity invites youth to reflect on how they can take action and build a more sustainable future using technology.

Becoming global citizens

Digital Moment was founded 11 years ago under the name Kids Code Jeunesse. Its original mission was to help more Canadian schoolchildren learn coding and boost job opportunities in the technology industry. The organization achieved its goals primarily through teacher professional development and K-12 teacher education at universities, making sure educators had resources, capacity, and opportunities to teach digital skills and coding in their classrooms.

Under its new name, Digital Moment has expanded beyond coding to teach new and emerging digital competencies, including AI, data literacy, and cybersecurity. It now also works with older youth in their teen years. What sets the charity apart is its emphasis on:

• Helping young people understand how technology works.
• Encouraging young people to imagine new ways society can use technology to improve the world.

“Countries are not on track to reach the 2030 United Nations sustainable development goals,” explained Kubicek. “We think it’s important to support youth action because they are the ones who will live with the consequences.”

Digital Moment encourages youth action in multiple ways through its Digital2030 program. Every year, the organization creates a challenge that relates to specific UN SGDs. Digital Moment then helps to raise awareness by teaching young people how technology is or can be used to achieve the SGD.

This year, the organizers challenged kids and youth from more than 150 countries to rethink how society produces and consumes goods. Participants learned the concept of the circular economy – a more sustainable closed-loop system that minimizes waste – and examples of how technology can promote it.

In addition, the Digital2030 Digital Leaders program hosts virtual roundtables for young people aged 13-22 to discuss issues that matter to them, such as injustice, ethical use of technology, and activism.

Solving real-world issues

Another popular initiative is Digital Moment’s Social Innovation Lab, a week-long immersive program for teenagers. They not only learn digital skills but how to use them to solve big social issues related to UN SDGs in an entrepreneurial environment. The students work closely with mentors from socially conscious businesses and civil society, and the week is closed with a day of pitch presentations to tech industry experts and community leaders.

“We invite different experts from technology fields who come from groups and communities like these young people because we know role modeling is really important, and to feel that you can see yourself in a career or a pathway,” Kubicek explained.

Helping youth navigate AI

Digital Moment is aware that AI applications, such as ChatGPT-style chatbots and text-to-image generators, are rapidly becoming part of our daily lives.

“Young people are going to use AI tools,” said Kubicek. “We want them to be curious, but we also want to prepare and educate them. That way, they understand how and what data drives the technology products we build and the services we deliver. Young people will be the ones to decide how the world is going to make use of AI and how we live with it.”

Digital Moment launched Experience AI in Canada, a new program in AI literacy built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind. The program is designed to encourage the next generation to explore common concerns and risks, like how companies create, collect, and clean training data. Digital Moment also tasks students with considering the opportunities – for example, how data can solve societal problems in an ethical way.

The Experience AI program includes teacher training, lesson plans, and a challenge for individuals, schools, or coding clubs to learn skills like training and testing machine-learning models and creating AI projects.

Digital Moment was one of the first international partners to join the program. It’s now working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Google DeepMind, and other educational partners to reach people in countries beyond Canada, including Nepal, Kenya, Romania, Malaysia, Ukraine, and Portugal.

Making an impact

Since 2013, Digital Moment has reached more than 944,000 kids and youth in grades K-12 and 32,000 educators across Canada. More than 50% of participants are girls, and more than 70% in Digital Moment’s Social Innovation Lab are from underrepresented communities, including Black youth and newcomers to Canada.

Big numbers are impressive, but the impact at an individual level on young people’s lives – especially those who don’t have access to professional networks for tech internships and jobs – is also important.

“To give just one example, the transformation I saw of a young boy who was a new arrival to Canada was incredible,” said Kubicek. “After participating in our Social Innovation Lab, he went from being shy and intimidated in a group setting – he was still learning English and French – to presenting a project and his ideas in front of a panel of judges from the startup community in Montreal with everyone cheering him on.”

Another Social Innovation Lab alumnus traveled from Canada to Paris with Digital Moment staff to participate in a panel of youth speakers at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Digital Learning Week.

Planning for the future

1Password is proud to help Digital Moment carry on its essential work. To reach its goals of educating more than 1 million young people and 50,000 educators by 2030, Digital Moment plans to develop an online training platform that educators can use to access vetted content, connect with peers and industry experts in cutting-edge jobs, and share and even co-create content.

In addition, Digital Moment is focusing more resources on a topic near and dear to 1Password’s heart: cybersecurity. 1Password is thrilled its donation to Digital Moment will help scale up its cybersecurity curriculum – which is taught in an age-appropriate and fun way – and support the development of a cybersecurity awareness event planned for 2025.

“Many adults think young people are tech-savvy digital natives,” said Kubicek. “The reality is that they’re very good at being passive consumers of technology like social media. But we want them to be critical thinkers about how they interact with technology and creators of the technology they want to see in the world.”

Jenn Marshall

Contributing Writer