[plam]

what student would get is a tech mentor and a chance to solve real problem with a good cause. wouldn't that be a competitive selling point vs. a paid internship with perhaps a few thousand dollars? Perhaps I'm being naive / optimistic?

[bcaine]

It depends what kind of students you want to get. A lot of start ups can make that same argument and pay for the top quality talent (with more than a few thousand dollars).

What I would look at is teaming up with universities and professors and see if you can get students to work in teams on a non-profit project for school credit (possibly as capstone projects?). It allows you to side-step the whole salary and competing with internships thing, and gives students a chance to get real world experience during the school year. Of course that creates the new problem of finding a progressive enough university to sponsor that kind of program, but it's an interesting avenue to explore.

[draker]

I think this is a great idea and is exactly how capstone projects were generated for my entrepreneurship major.

A form was available for local businesses to request help for strategic planning. The owner would submit their proposed project and expected outcome. The professor gave students a survey to get a general idea of sectors and topics the students were interested in. He would take the survey results into account and select enough companies for every team to have 3-5 people.

A brief of each company was written with the general project scope and distributed to students. Students would rank the top 3 projects they wished to work on and were then assigned teams.

Mentors with experience in each businesses particular industry would be assigned to teams to provide expert opinion.

I think the problem would be the need to have projects that were "capstone level" if you intended to have computer science majors doing this. Apps, scheduling widgets and other technical projects may satisfy this but website creation or redesign would not.

A better avenue might be to work with coding bootcamps; as they would have mentors in place and are focused on more entry level websites and applications.

[plam]

lots of great suggestions here! I'll reach out to local schools, bootcamps, etc. to get some feedback