How Black Creek Youth Initiative brought student innovation into community work
Experience Ventures and York University students helped the organization implement AI
For Destin Bujang, the value of Experience Ventures was clear from the start: it gave his organization resources to explore how it could do more with limited staff capacity.
Bujang is the co-founder and executive director of the Black Creek Youth Initiative (BCYI), a youth-led organization that provides a safe and inclusive space for young people in Toronto’s Black Creek neighbourhood.
Experience Ventures is a program powered by the Hunter Hub of Entrepreneurial Thinking at the University of Calgary and funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative (I-WIL). The program’s goal is to enable college and university students to practice entrepreneurial thinking alongside real-world innovators.
Through Experience Ventures, Bujang was connected with two multidisciplinary teams of York University students who could help BCYI address a capacity issue.
“We’re a small organization, and we spend so much time doing the work that we don’t always have the time or resources to report on it properly,” he says.
The challenge was finding a more efficient way to communicate the organization’s impact to funders, families, and the wider community. With his core team focused on frontline work, Bujang asked the student teams to explore how AI could streamline communications without adding significant staffing costs.
One team worked on building an AI-supported system that could draw from approved materials and metadata to generate communications such as newsletters. The second team focused on the frameworks and design needed to make that system practical and usable.
“It’s not just about newsletters,” Bujang says. “The goal is broader communications.”
What stood out most to him throughout the experience was the multidisciplinary nature of the teams. Students from different academic backgrounds brought different ways of thinking to the same problem. That diversity became one of the project’s greatest strengths.
“At a certain point, everyone’s strength becomes shared across the group,” he says. “The ideas become more thorough and more critical because people are approaching the same issue from different angles.”
That kind of collaboration, he says, mirrors the real world more closely than many classroom settings do. Students had to learn how to work across disciplines, communicate clearly, and understand an organization and community they may not have encountered otherwise.
Over time, he saw their confidence and commitment grow.
“At the start, there was a real spectrum of involvement,” he says. “Now they’re fully invested.”
That investment came not only from looming deadlines, but from a genuine connection to the work. As the students got to know the organization and the needs it was trying to address, Bujang says they began to see the project as something meaningful — something they wanted to succeed because of the people it could ultimately support.
For BCYI, the partnership offered more than a technical solution. It also created space for new ideas, deeper reflection, and stronger communication around the organization’s mission. Bujang notes that managing a student project requires time, but considers it time well spent.
As someone now mentoring students through the program, Bujang recognizes Experience Ventures as the kind of opportunity he wishes had existed when he was an undergraduate.
“The students have been fantastic to work with,” he adds. “I would do it again.”