Orientation: What’s In Your Backyard?
An Innovations Scavenger Hunt Course · Powered by Build For Your Future
Every invention started with someone looking at their own backyard and asking: what’s broken here, and who’s going to fix it?
That’s exactly where you’re starting too.
What You’ll Discover
This Orientation is your first round with taking a question like Omari’s (“What if there were no Black folks?”) and turning it into real answers, real inventions, and real solutions.
By the end of this Orientation, you won’t just know about the inventors in the book — you’ll have started asking the same exact questions about your own street, your own block, and your own home.
With self-understanding in place, learning turns outward as learners explore what service-learning really means.
Course Curriculum
The five-step SIP Roadmap — the process behind every invention you’ll study this season
How to turn what you notice in your own neighborhood into something you can actually measure
Your first look at the four questions every Hunt is built on: Where can you find it? What problem did it solve? What happens if it’s gone? How could it be better?
A starting point for your own Skills Self-Assessment — before you build anything, know what you’re building with.
Why it matters:
The BFYF Dashboard is built on a simple idea: real leadership development has to move up the same ladder as human need itself. Each level of BFYF meets learners where they are and builds toward the next, so that by the time they reach Community Creation, they’re not just learning about leadership — they’re living it, with a completed project and a certificate to show for it.
Prerequisites
None. This is where everyone starts
