The 2025 University of Evansville (UE) Changemaker Challenge event starts Friday.

Individuals, or teams of high school students from Evansville and beyond were charged with coming up with business ideas that can make a positive impact in the world.

Initially, 50 teams shared their pitches. The UE Center for Innovation and Change chose the top 20 ideas to compete in this weekend’s competition.

On Friday they’ll pitch their ideas to a panel of judges. These 20 will be whittled down to the top six teams to compete Saturday. Three will win.

The top team wins full UE tuition. Second place is $27,000 in tuition and third place is $24,000.

Past winning ideas include Hannah Jaramillo’s CommuniTree, the 25-foot tall, wifi-enabled metal tree at Mickey’s Kingdom.

Hydration Stations provide clean drinking water year-round, and are the brainchild of Jack Deig for the 2022 Changemaker Challenge.

These projects are completed and visible. Others are still in progress such as the greenspace for the Toyota Trinity Stormwater park by Robert Lopez.

This is the 11th year of the program.

Andrew Carter, UE associate director for Innovation and Change said it’s exciting to see high schoolers want to make the world a better place.

“They want to increase access to educational opportunities,” he said. “They want to make environmentally sustainable decisions and sort of empower the community around them to participate in that. I think it’s really inspiring for us to see young people have a platform to share ideas like that.”

2025 ideas include a learning app for struggling students, a way to recycle plastic shopping bags and clothing drives for homeless shelters.

Winning students that attend UE get help making their idea a reality though the UE ChangeLab, which is part of Carter’s department.

“That’s really a real world experience type of thing, where students can dive very deep into the fundraising aspect of things, the project management aspect of things, networking with, you know, community and business leaders to see these projects through.”

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