2012
June - Founder, Kris Hsu, visited rural schools in Fujian, China and taught 110 students the primitive version of the ICI curriculum. He came to realize that students had confined views to their village, unqualified teachers, and scarce educational resources. Simply put, students could not display their creative potential due to the environment they were in. This trip was the catalyst to Inspire Creativity Inc.
August - The documentary about the FuJian trip is posted on YouTube and ICI’s first website is launched.
September - Kris’s English teacher, Mrs. Jisun Gale, learns about ICI and becomes our first mentor. Her connections allowed us to start the donation project. The goal of this project is to fill a shipping container with learning materials to ship to Xiamen, China. She helped initiate a donation drive at school and urged members to do more with the team.
November - ICI becomes a school club in Carson, California and accumulates 10 devoted members.
December - Members cold called companies for school supply or fitness equipment donations, but failed due to the lack of 501c3 tax-exempt status.
2013
January - Students in local schools help conduct donation drives for our donation project. They gained 5 boxes of donations.
February - Nathan Choe, future CFO, starts applying ICI as a government organization.
March - Members start refining the ICI presentations to create the ‘Inspire Creativity Curriculum’. They also began outreaching to local elementary and middle schools for us to teach in.
May - Other local middle and high schools help out with our Donation project and add 10 boxes of donations!
June - ICI finalizes and practices the new ‘Inspire Creativity’ curriculum that is then taught to 5 local elementary and middle schools.
In comparison to rural Chinese students from 2012, American students created inventions that incorporated more technology and robots. In addition, American students had better presenting skills than those of Chinese students. This shows how a contrasting education system creates different types of students.
* President Kris Hsu traveled to Xian, China to join a rural education project conducted with REAP/Stanford team.
July - 501c3 documents are finalized and officially sent to the IRS for reviewal. ICI is one step closer to receiving funding!
September - ICI accrues 22 active members that are split into different committees: Donations - manage the financial and donation drives of the organization , Teach
- Improve the ‘Inspire Creativity Curriculum’ and contacts local schools to teach at , Publicity - Manages the social media of the organization and brainstorms on ways to make ICI known in the community
November - Members propose to create a trip to China in which they’ll teach rural students the ‘Inspire Creativity Curriculum’ while also establishing a cultural exchange. This project is accepted and planning begins.
December - ICI gains 6 more donation boxes from local schools. Members also start writing grant proposals for the donation project stating with 100% of the monetary donations going towards school supplies and fitness equipment.
2014
January - We conducted a meeting where we evaluated the positives and negatives of the previous year. There were several things that we needed to improve including issues in funding and how the organization’s run.
February - To increase publicity, the ICI visual designer created t-shirts that were printed and sold. All profits went towards buying school supplies. We sold a total of 42 shirts to family and friends.
March - Fellow ICI volunteers go to the storage center where the all the donation boxes are stored and unpack and organize them. Volunteers take inventory of all the donated supplies.
April - The logistics of the China trip were solidified. We will be traveling to a high school in Dujiangyan, China to teach the entire 9th grade class our ‘to-be-improved’ Inspire Creativity Curriculum. 7 dedicated ICI members were selected to attend the first ICI outreach in another country, China.
May - We started re-designed the entire Inspire Creativity Curriculum by dividing it into 4 PowerPoints that would still address our three key-points: American school life, creativity/design, and application of learned concepts. The ICI China team practiced the presentations, created videos to show students, and got in contact with translators from Beijing, China to join us on the trip. Meanwhile, other members were searching for funding for the trip.
* 501c3 (tax-exempt) status is achieved! ICI is now a legitimate non-profit organization.
June 11 - The ICI China team departs from LAX to Beijing to Chengdu, China. We taught over and conducted the design contest to over 1,000 students from JuYuan High School at DuJiangYan and HongLanQing migrant school at Beijing. We also took 2 large boxes of the donated school supplies to donate to the students.
June 28 to July 26 - Founder, Kris Hsu, traveled to Xian and Beijing, China to join a rural education project conducted with REAP/Stanford team. After the field study at China, Kris traveled back to Stanford campus to continue the research project.
August - We completed the application for the grant from IEEE, working on applying other grants as well.
September - ICI's club at California Academy of Math and Science has started up a new semester! Several interested underclassmen have joined putting us at 30 student volunteers!
October - Founder, Kris Hsu, goes to represent ICI at the 106th National Rural Education Association (NREA) Convention and Symposium. His talk, "How to Inspire Rural Students", introduced his story and impacts of our non-profit organization.