• Green Talent is an initiative that seeks to transfer methodologies and develop skills in sustainability, cooperative work, entrepreneurship and digital talent in teachers, students and innovation leaders in companies.

• The program starts in the Coquimbo region, an area declared by the authorities to be at low sanitary risk.

The problems arising from climate change require rethinking teaching methodologies by focusing on the environment and proposing solutions that are sustainable for the productive sector.

This is precisely what the project Green Talent aims to achieve, an initiative led by Fundación Chile and supported by Google.org and in collaboration with the Corporación Regional de Desarrollo Productivo (CRDP) and the Red de Vinculación de Instituciones de Educación Superior de la Región de Coquimbo (Red Viesco).

The program starts with the beginning of the academic year and has its starting point in the Coquimbo region, one of the areas of the country where the most dramatic effects of the climate crisis are being experienced.

The prolonged drought, the state of the reservoirs and the unfavorable weather forecasts have forced health authorities to declare the area under sanitary risk, which seeks to prevent the water intended for human consumption from running out completely.

The purpose of Green Talent is, through a training plan, to develop skills and transfer methodologies to teachers, students and business innovation leaders so that they are able to deal with environmental and productive concerns in the provinces of Elqui, Limarí and Choapa.

To do so, Google.org google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, made a $400,000 donation.

“Google.org’s goal is to support initiatives, leaders and agencies that can seek and find solutions to real problems and crises that impact communities, such as the climate crisis. In this sense, Green Talent is an initiative that seeks to reflect on the challenges presented by the current water scenario in the Coquimbo region and how to deliver methodologies that promote improvements in the impacted territories,” explained Nicolás Schubert, manager of Public Policy and Government Affairs for Google Chile.

The expected results seek to generate a common framework to train green talent in universities, institutes and technical vocational training centers in the area. For this purpose, 300 students, 30 team coaches and 30 innovation leaders from local companies will be trained and certified under four axes: sustainability, cooperative work, entrepreneurship and digital talent.

“Green Talent is a pioneering initiative in Chile, which aims to address current challenges and trends, developing skills to manage in the workplace in a scenario of climate change, energy transition, among others. These skills will be needed for different types of employment in the future. This initiative is relevant and very pertinent for the country, and we hope that in the future it can be replicated in other regions and have a larger scale,” said Hernán Araneda, general manager of Fundación Chile.

The objectives, then, are to enable multidisciplinary and innovative work teams to generate solutions of high environmental and productive value on business problems and their impact on the territory. It also seeks to introduce cutting-edge entrepreneurship and innovation methodologies and trends, generate a common framework of reference for training in green talent in the region’s higher education system, and transform the careers of young professionals to take on the challenges of sustainability through green employment and ecological transition.

About Google

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Through products and platforms such as Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, Chrome and YouTube, Google plays an important role in the daily lives of billions of people and has become one of the best-known companies in the world. Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

About Google.org

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, supports nonprofits that address humanitarian problems and apply scalable, data-driven innovation to solve the world’s biggest challenges. We accelerate their progress by connecting them with a unique combination of support including funding, products and technical expertise from Google volunteers. We engage with these people who have gone from believing to doing, who have a significant impact on the communities they represent and which work has the potential to bring about meaningful change. We want a world that works for everyone and believe that technology and innovation can move the needle.

About Fundación Chile:

Fundación Chile is a public-private organization aimed at driving Chile’s transformation towards sustainable development. For more than 45 years, it has collaboratively created innovative, high-impact solutions for the country, addressing local challenges with global reach. One of its areas of action is inclusive human development, through the promotion of new solutions that contribute to the challenges of education.