As a person affected, I'm sick of running around not knowing my next step. As a person affected, I'm marginalised and upset. As a person affected, I'm up all night in Somnia, getting no rest. But they excluded my protest. If you tell a young person so many times over and over again that you're aggressive, you're aggressive, you're aggressive, they will become aggressive. They didn't really understand where I was coming from. And the thing that bothered me was they didn't try to understand. I literally just felt voiceless at the time. I felt a little bit depressed. You can see myself voicing around with me. Every year there will be a couple of people excluded permanently. Some are dead, some are in prison and some I haven't heard from in years. There isn't enough funding, there isn't enough support. If we take away a young person's right to education, which is what exclusion does, then we also impact on the rest of their human rights as well. I think our call for compassion education matters now more than ever because we can't afford to keep the news of people. I think exclusions are wrong because they're trying to keep you in school and they're actually giving you time off school. I know a lot of people, more people than anybody should know, that are now in prison and that is after they've been excluded. When you've been excluded you're kind of just written off and no one really sees you as having any potential anymore. Schools excluding kids is harmful because safeguarding measures aren't properly put in place for a long-term plan. My personal experience is a lived example of that. Young people have a right to education. We also have a right to be heard. It was crucial then that these two rights formed the principles of what we were making and the process in how we made it because we wanted to make a different type of film in a different type of way. Our film focuses exclusively on the voices and stories of young people whose experiences and views on school exclusions are wide-ranging. You'll hear from young people who have been temporarily, permanently and indirectly excluded. And those have never been excluded, often referred to as the other 29 in a class. But young people's voices are at the heart of making this film too. Most of the young people in this film are involved in workshops where we talked about what we wanted to happen in this shape to the direction of the film. When filming was unable to happen because of COVID, recording equipment was sent out so those young people could still tell their stories. We used illustration to help with that and it also helped where students wanted to stay anonymous. Young people were employed as consultants and researchers and will continue to be consulted even after the film is finished. Because it's time to pick young people's experiences at the centre of their story. I've been excluded like 30 times, easily. The first time I got excluded, I was 7. I took a pencil off the teacher's desk. See, I was writing and the lead of my pencil was snapped. So the teacher was on the other side of the room dealing with another student. So I got up and I took a pencil from the teacher's desk to carry on my work. But it was seen as an issue, maybe because I was doing it. But I didn't quite understand. See, I got sent out of class and I felt like I had a meltdown. I found school to be quite oppressive, even as a young person. Because I was often excluded from school. So I think it was because of my special educational needs and my learning disability. I think it got to a point where I preferred being at home. So I just asked for, on occasion, 6 weeks worth of work just to do while I was excluded. And I would do it well before 6 weeks. So I just ended up having to watch Mageshiro all the time. That wasn't that fun. The classroom environment in itself was very hostile towards me. Which is why I felt like the exclusion was highly unfair. Because I think I got punished on my reaction to the hostility. Rather than them trying to come to an understanding as to why I was acting where I was acting. I was internally excluded once, externally excluded for a day in high school. And then I had a four day exclusion in sixth form. Internal is more isolation, so you don't do school and you're not in your classes.  I did that for a day. And then external exclusion is when you're literally removed out of the school and you don't go to school until they say you can come back. I'd been fixed time excluded about 13 times before I'd got permanently excluded. But all the exclusions were quite repetitive. It was either defiance or readiness to staff. At 12, I couldn't articulate myself the way I articulate myself now. So if there was a problem, I would feel like I'm explaining it. Since I'm saying something, I'm getting shut down. I was on everybody's radar. I had the most behavioural points in my year group. But I had some of the best grades as well. So at this point, I didn't know I was going to be permanently excluded. No one said anything to me. Then they just confirmed that Jordan's permanent. The pill didn't go through or whatever. It just feels like everything has just gone completely wrong. There's not much you can do to redeem or save what is left of your educational years. I'm deaf and money also. It was frustrating.  Sometimes I was even in dog school just because I didn't know how to go in. I didn't know how to sit in that class. The most of the problems were obviously I was dyslexic and I wouldn't do that until I was in second year. So when I was saying that's moving or that's shaking, they would always say, haha, he's on drugs and then I would get in the middle of the hassle and stuff like that. It was hard. It was always hard because I would come home and it would always be, oh, he's just been bad again. You're grounded and whatever. And sometimes it was in my fault. Sometimes I would be just asking the teacher, can you say that question again? And I would say it again and again and again. The teacher I think I would take the mickey. I felt quite angry, quite frustrated, but at the same time I felt quite down, like I felt a bit depressed. I could say to myself, what's wrong with me? I felt school, my experience of it was they didn't really understand where I was coming from. And the thing that bothered me was they didn't try to understand ever. If I was dealing with mental health issues, when I was dealing with mental health issues, they didn't do anything to help. They didn't offer me support, counsellor, therapist, nothing. I remember there was a time when they even bought my dad in and they said, we can tell that he's got problems, but they never did anything about it. They never helped. Like they said, we just want to let you know that he has problems and then left it. The first time I was excluded from school, well, the only time I was excluded from school was in year nine. And basically what happened was there was an altercation, someone said something rude to me, I didn't like it. So we got into a fight. Some of them automatically thought that you was the person in the wrong. And then that just leads to that like self-fulfilling prophecy of feeling like you're the bad one and then it just made me more like anti-school. But I was never anti-school. I wasn't a bad kid. It was just that period of time where I could see a deterioration in like my education. My parents were drug abusers. So I'll be out on the streets till 11, 12 at night when I was six, seven, eight years old. Because of my home situation, I never had like a stable school. My only stable school, I was probably there for like three years. From the ages of six to eight, that's when it was really bad. But then I went into foster care for a year and a half. And then after that in year seven, I moved in with my nans. Year seven, year eight, year nine, it was pretty much perfectly fine. Now looking back on it, in year nine, I lost contact with my dad. And I think that might have had a part to play because he would come to watch majority of like all my rugby matches. And it was like a good bonding time with me, me and him. And it just kept me focused. I was grieving a lot.  It was like everybody knew about it because it was in the papers, it was everywhere. So when I went back, I knew that everybody would be looking at me like, oh, that's that last year or whatever. And most of the teachers would like, they would know, do you know what I mean? I remember about a year, I think it was like once I got into a fight. And then after that, like my head a year just didn't go with me. And I don't know, it was always pure targeted. So I got counselling, but then I think it helped. People have got like stuff going on in their lives. And then teachers don't really take that into consideration. There are many ways that exclusions can indirectly affect people. Sometimes not giving you the support you need can mean attending school is difficult. Like Ada, who is deaf, found that not having the help she needed in class meant that she'd rather be at home instead of feeling anxious and alone. I started off when I was going home at break time. I would just start to go home at break time. And then they explained to the teachers, they would catch me and explain I have to stay in school. And I was explaining to them at that point that it started to refuse because I felt that I wasn't getting enough support. I felt like I was kind of being ignored. So I just refused to go. They said, OK, we'll have a look at the support, but it would just never really come for me. So sometimes it'd be a half day and other times I was just alone as well. So I refused and then I just preferred to stay at home because it was easier. I just felt stressed as well and I just felt like I had no confidence when I was there. There are also other ways that students become excluded unofficially from school, like off-rolling. OK, so off-rolling is like when a student is removed from school and there's no official data about them. So like their results, their attendance is just, you can't find it.  So at least when you're excluded they still have records of your results and your achievements but off-roading just completely disappeared basically.  So they're just on the streets, no school, no proper motivation for life which is terrible because your kids, you don't know what's going on and your school has literally just abandoned you. They're just not looked after or cared about from the government or schools and sometimes their parents are not really educated on the subject so they don't even know the rights they have to help their children. If your parents don't know what to do, you don't know what to do. The government doesn't care, the school doesn't care, like where do they go from there. I got put in all kind of provision, special provisions, I was going to prove for kids that deal with, I mean staff that deal with kids with special educational needs and emotional behaviour disorders. So I didn't suffer as much as I would have maybe in mainstream school with teachers that wouldn't have understood me but obviously going to alternative provision, my education was marginalised as well. So for my brother and his experience in school one of the teachers actually called him a waste man since then he never really liked the teachers and stuff so then when he got excluded he went on to a prude and then that's when things got even worse because for me I feel like they're just a breeding ground for gangs. I went to like a pupil referral unit for about maybe six months before I went back to mainstream. It's hard because there's such a stigma around pupil referral units and the type of people that end up there, you go in there expecting the absolute worse essentially. There was a lot of people that were obviously involved in like gangs and knife crime and there was just like a lot of people doing drugs. It was different. The wider issues of school exclusion is what we call the school's prison pipeline so the end point is prison and exclusions is basically it starts you on this process. So once you've been excluded there's not many options to get back into former education. There are prudes, so PRUs but I think it's like 1% of students actually attain an A to C grade GCSEs which means that if you don't have good GCSEs you can't really get into good employment and opportunities are limited because people have seen that you've been excluded from school so not for every child who's been excluded but for a lot of particularly boys, the only other option for them really that they do is they're just hanging around on the road, they get in with the wrong crowds they do the wrong things and they end up in jail. What really bothers me and I'm really passionate about and fires me off is like my friends and the people I've seen and every year there'll be a couple of people excluded permanently and now hearing back from them they're like do you hear what happened to so and so yeah he's gone or he did this or he did that and it's like a normal occurrence even seeing them, well some are dead, some are in prison and some I haven't heard from in years even though like we were close friends and it's normal to hear that, it's not shocking isn't it, if you ask anyone it's going to be the same thing and it just happens again and again it's a systematic problem and it's going to continue to occur. By the time I left school I just wasn't that bothered with education or engaging with my local authorities. My aspirations were supposed to be raised along the process I wasn't supposed to be stuck in alternate provision for five years and I'm post-16, I didn't leave with any work experience I didn't have ID until I was like 21 and I'm still having issues accessing my benefits and my entitlements now and I don't remember ever having a social support worker So that's how people start going down different roads because if you're in the school, where are you, out in the streets or if you're in the house doing nothing, no getting any education which means you're no getting qualifications and it just ruins it It's a waste, doesn't it? Change, doesn't it? It's not going to make you change person, it's not going to make you a better person it's just going to make you want to go on the 10 times worse than what you've already done By the time I got to 14, like all the students that were obviously when you're 14 you're in year 9, all the students that were in year 10 they just started going to jail, everyone started going to jail I don't know why they were in jail but it was a theme that was evident My brother's exclusion affected me more than my own exclusion He had troubles, the troubles came to our door It affected my education because instead of going to college I was staying home to make sure that when these people knocked nothing bad was going to happen and stuff like that but then that also led down to him being more involved with like police and stuff which meant I had to be more involved which then in the end resulted in there being an argument which meant I became homeless The thing is I've always felt like a bit of a black sheep in my family because my family's like generations down have always been involved with like crime and you know poverty and stuff and from a very young age I didn't want that at all It's like in school, it's genuinely like it's like Pablo Escobar, like police always after him because they're always trying to get something on him so they can get him gone, so he's in jail for life That's what it's like with school because they try to constantly put something on you just so they can get you either suspended, kicked out that's what some of the teachers are like they constantly just want you gone to the school so they'll just put it on you that they can just go send him every day for a year I just think I've got to send him so much so I'm just going to come back I know talking from my uncle's experience like he was excluded in year seven he came out, he was homeschooled for like I think it was three months and then the homeschool stopped and once that finished like he was literally just on the road doing whatever he went into the young offenders then he went into the main prison he came back out and he like tried to go into sixth form but it's so hard when you've been out of form with education for so long and there's not enough support My uncle was excluded in year seven so he was 11 years old and he never re-entered the schooling system he was kind of just left his own devices mixed with the wrong crowd and you know the rest is history he ended up in prison and for as long as I can remember that is where he has been he would write letters to me and I would write letters back I wanted to read a little bit of one of the letters that he sent back to me What did you do for Easter? I bet you had a lot to tell me I hope you had fun How many Easter eggs did you get? Anyway Easter holidays should be over by the time you get this letter How school? What year are you in now? What's your favourite lesson? I used to like every lesson except maths when I was your age Anyways Nat, thank you for writing to Uncle to see how I am your letter put a big smile on my face and made me happy I'm even happier with your writing skills trust me it's emotional just keep up the good work in school and continue to make Uncle proud and write a quick letter when you can love you loads PS I miss you When the January school census went live in 2019 16,134 pupils were being educated in state supported alternative provisions Only 1% of students who complete their GCSEs in alternative provision pass 5 GCSEs compared to the national average of 64.5% But maybe there are things to be learnt from some of the attitudes of teachers and they are set up in these spaces that classroom sizes are smaller which helps students focus and some students found they were listened to in certain PRUs more than they had been in school When I first started at uni I made it very clear that if there's an opportunity for me to go back to mainstream school I want to go back to mainstream because that's when I had the stigma of people referral and I didn't really want to be there that long but classroom sizes were a lot smaller so like there was only like maybe five or six of us in a class it was easy for the teachers to gear towards abilities because they didn't have to cater to a class of 30 and then when I started getting used to uni and stuff like that I didn't really want to go back to mainstream because I realised I could get like nine or ten GCSEs in a place that listens to me and caters to me The school that I was at sent me here so I got excluded three times I was quite different because less people in the class no school uniform I've been more happy because I don't have to worry about when I was going to get excluded next I think it's quite helpful actually they're just nicer more supportive I've been more polite in all that more nicer I used to be angry 24-7 then I'm more relaxed don't really shower teachers The head teacher that uni had said to me oh yeah we found you a school that you can go and I was like oh I don't really want to go What made me like the school's good first impression was the fact that it wasn't just one teacher that came to see me it was three teachers so I felt a bit special and I felt like they really wanted me and they listened as well which was important because every single problem I had they went through it in detail they didn't brush over any problem so yeah I started at that school they could have easily removed me from mainstream and just sent me back to uni and it wouldn't have impacted me so much but they were very persistent in keeping me in that school and really tried to do everything they could to keep me in the school so once I started to realise that they weren't trying to get rid of me so easily is when I started to relax a bit and started to settle and that's when things started to get better I felt a lot more comfortable with these teachers to say I need help or I need more work I feel like there was more of that the ability to have those kind of conversations with your teachers and be able to get that help or be pushed in that way I studied law at the University of Warwick The grade requirements for work were very very high Year 12 and Year 13 I dedicated my life to my A levels and they went well people like me don't go to Warwick a lot of people assume that if you're black and a female you're asking questions you're not conforming to what they believe femininity to be you're supposed to be passive and not ask questions and be just in a box so I think because I didn't conform to that ideology it was taken as me being defiant or aggressive yeah that's what I mean by like people like me don't go to Warwick even now when I tell any of my friends or speak to any of my friends at work that oh yeah like I've been permanently excluded at Warwick it's just not the norm Jordan is not the norm only 46% of students who spend time in alternative provision return to a mainstream setting what happens if schools take the time to take a breath to listen to their students to find out what's going on to give them room what happens if there's a more compassionate approach to education in 2021 the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child will be incorporated into Scottish law which has far reaching implications for the rights of young people we met representatives of the Scottish Youth Parliament in Edinburgh to hear more SYP has quite a strong relationship with the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government so a lot of MSPs regularly meet with our MSYPs to discuss issues that are concerning young people the Scottish Government are always up for listening to what young people have to say which is amazing the Scottish Government is one of the only Governments in the world that we know of anyway that will annually hold a joint Cabinet meeting with the Scottish Government, Cabinet Ministers and young people sit side by side around the Cabinet table and discuss issues that affect young people and that's a change in society in a way people are thinking purely through the work young people do and how fierce they are and through the Scottish Youth Parliament's advocacy and things like that SYP focuses on UNCRC and it's underpinned by Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and we campaigned on that and indeed the Scottish Government listened and they are incorporating that in Scottish law the bill was going through Parliament just now and it's really quite exciting I think by incorporating the UNCRC we'll prove to young people that their human rights do matter and we'll make them more aware of their human rights and empower them to reclaim them when maybe they hadn't done before and that was removed from their educational setting and that takes an impact on them life long and we know now during the COVID-19 pandemic one of the main focuses of the governments of the UK is getting kids back in school and quite rightly too because the long-term effects of taking a young person at school are more damaging than you can know that young person might not think it because the school doesn't care about me etc and I can understand how they feel like that because it's an awful thing to go through but it's a sign of an education system that doesn't work to be quite simple about it it's a sign that if you have to get to the point where a young person feels it gets to the point where the only acceptable thing to do is remove them from school that's a failure there's no two ways around that and something needs to be addressed about it All our human rights are completely interdependent without the right to education then you might not have other rights so for example your right to good mental health education is absolutely fundamental in that so if we take away a young person's right to education which is what we believe exclusion does then we also impact on the rest of their human rights as well and we also believe that it's fundamental to include young people who might have disabilities additional support needs mental health problems in that as well and make sure that they are getting the equal support that their peers would be getting as well In Glasgow, school exclusions have dropped by nearly 87% since the 2005-6 academic year thanks to a groundbreaking programme of change called the Nurture programme Scent Rocks School is in Glasgow in one of the most deprived postcodes in Scotland but Scent Rocks breaks the cycle of exclusion by adopting an inclusive and supportive approach it's all about finding the right level of support for each student I feel like without equal in this school so maybe they get treated differently it doesn't matter who you are, what age you are whatever, you all get treated the same way it doesn't really matter teachers are amazing they're there for you no matter what even if you're not their biggest fan or they're not your biggest fan they'll still be there for you so for instance, my maths teacher I go to her on Thursdays and I just go to her and we just talk about if I'm what I eat and how I'm feeling and outside the school and inside the school she's something I can trust I feel like if it wasn't for her probably wouldn't really like school but she's kind of advised me like go and get through it university and you're going to have an amazing life and she's amazing it was really difficult for me my mum forced me to come out first to try to kind of get things going again the next year I kind of understood that this school was better people were nice and they were trying to teach me lots and give me a lot of support so I understood that and when I knew it was better then I came we've got a lot of different deaf support workers here as well we've got a lot of different deaf students too by the difference it's more easy for communication it's easy to be involved in a group SIP wholeheartedly welcomes the natural program in Glasgow it's an amazing approach I personally think it puts compassion at the heart of schooling and that's exactly what it should be I think we can pride ourselves on a compassionate education system but there's always more that can be done we fundamentally believe that young people should be consulted on anything that's going to affect them the natural program is a shining beacon in the education system that could be not copied and pasted it's different but definitely replicated in other local authorities Glasgow doesn't just have a nurture program they have an ambition to be a nurturing city a nurturing city has schools in which children and young people feel they belong they are listened to and they and their families are valued these values are exactly the kind of thing that Nalos Courses are placing at the heart of their campaign Nalos Courses is a campaign fighting for a more compassionate approach to education we started in August in 2018 we applied to the Advocacy Academy which is a program that teaches youth about social justice issues and how we can fight them so we've been lobbying with people in Parliament and then from there we had a meeting with the whole of the Education Select Committee which was interesting because it showed that older people do care about issues we are in the process of making packs for schools, parents and students around in education our parent packs is around school now, teaches them what school is like now and the help they can get so we want to do workshops in schools targeted for teachers and students as well about the education system the issues in it, how we can face it and how students and teachers can work together because it doesn't have to be a fight all the time we want to succeed, you want to help us succeed so we all came together and we essentially presented to the head of OFSTED why our campaigns were so necessary so for those causes we were saying how what we have is we have like schools are not understanding students and they're not understanding the kind of things that happen outside the school gates and that's what our campaign is trying to do so when we have things like exclusions and like pastoral support OFSTED doesn't measure that effectively right now we're trying to work on like youth engagement so we really want to get more involved with people our age because previously like the campaign has been going since 2018 but a lot of the work we've been doing is like lobbying in parliament so with like policy makers with a lot of adults and while it's really important to have adults involved we need to empower young people to empower themselves we spoke to education not exclusion campaigners and compiled their interviews to preserve their anonymity the education not exclusion campaign was very relevant to all of us because we all have either been excluded or we know people that have been excluded it was easy to feel passionate about it because everybody has a story about exclusion everyone we designed the school to prison pipeline in the style of a tube map you'll see there's an image of the pipeline and who we are and that we're asking for compassionate education funding we used this piece of design to replace the tube map on northern line trains the night before GCSE results we went for the northern line because it has the most stops which meant we could get more information onto the map there's a small piece of writing saying that today there's going to be a lot of articles on the kids that did really well in their GCSEs and have gotten into their dream college but we were asking for some column time to be given to people that have been failed by the education system who didn't receive GCSEs because 1% of people who are excluded get 5 A star to see that's what like intrigued people on this day of celebration we asked them to think about the people who were outside of those celebrations we went out the night before GCSE results around the time of the last tube in the hour between 11 and 12 when they're the quietest there must have been like 20 of us and we had a mass briefing outside the station we were told that we could be arrested but we all cared more about this than any altercation with the police we were in groups of three and all used ways to look discreet and unattached to the action we'd all have random conversations really loud like oh have you seen the Guardian article but the conclusion is disgusting what they're doing to these kids disgusting and all the while everyone else is trying to glue the posters in the right spaces on a moving tube afterwards we couldn't tweet about it personally to say we did this amazing campaign as we usually do because it's illegal instead we sent pictures to big twitter accounts and we said please please please can you tweet this photo saying that you saw it this morning and then it really blew up it was trending we even got the poster into the Transport for London Museum and then Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee tweeted saying who are these kids I want to meet them we introduced him to another campaign group No Lost Causes who led the conversation with the Education Select Committee which has since then gotten to Ofsted as well it's been an amazing journey from a simple ad hack to meetings and parliament I feel like our biggest achievement as a campaign was actually our parliament speech because that's what we fully established we are No Lost Causes we can actually make change so that was my proudest moment anyway we never thought as working class kids from South London would we go to parliament and having a meeting with the head of the Education Select Committee we didn't even know what that was before we had the meeting so that's why I feel like as a campaign we have gone a long way and we are fighting for people who may not have these opportunities so that was really cool for us and it was strange because we thought people who have power don't really care but he actually cared about the issue as well so from that meeting we had another meeting with the whole committee and that was cool as well because we saw their viewpoints on the education system and we thought these people are like they're like white or middle class people he might not know our experiences within the education system but they did and that really shocked us and they actually cared so it made us more open to sharing our experiences knowing that we wouldn't be caught off for sidetracks they're actually willing to listen to our stories which doesn't normally happen I think our call for compassion education matters now more than ever because we can't afford to keep on using people too suicide, too prison so unhealthy living standards we can't afford for the cycle to keep on going one thing that I'd be really happy with as a win from all the work that we've done is a funding from the government for support in schools for mental health support that sort of thing but also like I'd love there to be a cultural change that teachers are trained to deal with bad behaviour we asked all the young people in this film about what they thought should happen differently we hear so often about what should happen about school exclusions from politicians, the media and educators but so rarely from the people that they affect the most we wanted to hear their ideas about what needs to change I think a compassionate education system it would look a bit like a kid can go into a school and you can feel safe in talking about his problems to whoever you can talk to you can feel safe in knowing that he's not going to be judged he's not going to be labelled it's going to be the last thing I would do I would find out the whole story I would have them in the classroom take them at that period let them calm down, let them do the work in the school and then if they're settled down and the problems resolved then send them back to class I'd be like, for instance because my parents got counsellors and the counsellor helps them a lot they tell me I'm at a counsellor at the next period I'm excited to see her I talk to her about this and that and counsellors are good, they'll help 100% I'd take the teachers out and ring young people teachers, they're like 19 year olds in it because they've just left school so they've felt like they're not other years of school and then they want to know what to do and they want to teach other people the education that people think that age and solutions go hand in hand when that's not really the case because as you can see we're not really going anywhere education should be more inclusive for everyone and students that need more support should be given more support before alternative provision schools are forgetting that we're not just there academically this is where we spend the majority of our time and we should be able to grow as a person if you tell a young person over and over again that you're aggressive, you're aggressive, you're aggressive they will become aggressive if you tell them over and over again that you're a leader or you can do this or you can do that they will start to believe it in themselves you have to be very careful with the words you use with young people because it's so impressionable that they will become what you say I think that schools need to be more of a community and it's almost like the old saying it takes a village to raise a child and schools need to be a part of that village they can't just exist as separate institutions on their own where you just go study for exams they need to take into consideration what happens beyond the school gates as much as what happens in the school gates in my dream world, schools in urban inner city areas they would be taught by people who are from these areas if you are going to allow teachers from upper middle class backgrounds to come teaching these schools then there needs to be a load of training I think that a lot of teachers come from these backgrounds with really low expectations of the schools that they are working in and I really struggle with that because if you are going to have no expectations of people we are only going to want to live up to that if somebody is bad behaved they don't look at it enough and see what the actual problem is they just think they are just doing it for the sake of it sometimes that's another case every pupil instead is just the ones that are doing well giving both parents and students the right support is so crucial because the one being excluded if the parent can't understand that process then you can't support your child to be the best version of themselves sometimes some children are not comfortable to tell the situation doesn't mean that they are not going through stuff they just don't want to tell you a way that they can handle that in a more compassionate way basically when people say that what about the other kids are they disruptive what about their learning that is a kid too I'm not going to lie you can remove them from the lesson but it's not just about that it's about what do you do after you remove them from the lesson there just needs to be a massive cultural change in the training around teachers there needs to be more funding in SCN departments mental health support support for like pastoral rule care support in the classroom for teachers because I get that a teacher's job is not easy I get it school exclusions are just treating a symptom of a problem if we exclude young people from school why young people are getting excluded we're not addressing maybe mental health problems they might have problems at home a lot of young people who are excluded from school do have problems at home and what do we do, we just send them back there and it's kind of like putting a plaster on an open wound we're not really addressing how they got that wound in the first place there isn't the compassion needed for kids who like who have done those behaviors which aren't seen as like palatable in the classroom keep in mind the life of a student what they go through outside and inside so we don't replicate the same patterns that we see the same students getting excluded or not getting the help they need not getting the support they need teachers not recognising students who are going through difficult times that needs to change and that may sound a bit vague but it's going to be a complex a very complex issue and we have to look at pastoral support and we have to look at teacher training and we do have to look at resources but I think the main thing that's easy to do is talk to a kid see where they're coming from because these teachers, a lot of them can't really see our struggle and it's not their fault but I think they should try and make a conscious effort to see where we're from and see what problems we have to deal with and it can start from there part of moving towards the creation of inclusive school cultures has to be through listening to the experiences of young people we want this film to be the start this film was co-produced by each other and the 20 young people who feature in and worked on it each other is a UK focus charity which uses independent journalism, storytelling and filmmaking to put the human into human rights the film has taken 18 months to make and has always had young people's voices at the heart reflecting each other's commitment to giving a platform to those whose rights are at risk the young people in this film are speaking up for our right to education each other is standing up for our right to be heard together we can build a movement uphold everyone's rights to find out more go to www.eachother.org.uk


Alrighty. Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the Rainforest X-Prize introduction webinar. My name is David Locke and I'm the Executive Director of the competition here at X-Prize. Myself and the rest of the Rainforest X-Prize team are attending from our respective home offices and we want to thank you all for joining us today. I'll be moderating today's webinar and we'll be joined by other members of the Rainforest X-Prize team to walk you through some of the exciting competition updates and information we have to share with you all today. Today we've reached interest from teams across the globe who are interested in participating in or supporting the competition in some manner and we felt it was important to begin engaging directly with this growing community. So expect this to be the first of several informational webinars that we plan to host as the competition progresses. Ultimately it will be the efforts of our competing teams and partners in this community that will make this competition a success. So once again, thank you for joining and let's go ahead and get started. Okay, just a few ground rules for today's webinar. You'll notice that your phone line has been muted so you'll just be hearing the voices today of the X-Prize team. However, if you do have questions during our presentations, please go ahead and use the question and answer tool that's built here into Zoom. So you should all be able to see that Q&A tab. You can go ahead and submit a question and we're going to conduct a Q&A session at the conclusion of today's webinar. So I think we're expecting today's webinar to last for about an hour and 15 minutes of that will be dedicated to a Q&A at the end. So please go ahead and submit your questions. We might not be able to get to or be able to answer all those questions today, but we will follow up with a Q&A doc afterwards. So please look out for that as well. Okay here, please note that this webinar is also being recorded, which is great. We can share and distribute it after the fact. So either if you have to jump off or you want to review it later or you want to share it, we'll go ahead and make this public so that you can go ahead and do so. Also, of course, if you have any questions at the end of today's webinar that we weren't able to get to, you can always email us at rainforest at xprize.org. Again, that's rainforest at xprize.org. Okay here, and just another note here on using this Q&A tool you'll notice here in the screenshot it's pointing directly at where that Q&A button is. So you should see that the bottom of your Zoom window. And again, we're going to try to get to as many questions as we can today, but please be patient with us. We've packed as much information as we could into the front end of today's webinar. So, you know, there's a good chance we're going to get to your question at some point, but certainly in the Q&A. Okay, and with that, and now it's my pleasure to introduce you to the full Rainforest XPrize team. As mentioned earlier, my name is David Locke, and I'm excited to be here with you all today. Also joining me is the competition prize manager, John Greysverter, and our project relations specialist, Allison Clower. Welcome, John and Allison, happy to have you here with us. And running out our team, we have our technical lead, Peter Hulahan, as well as our technical consultant, Shelby. Many of you might be familiar with Peter and Shaw, they've been in the industry for years, and I know that they were able to invite many of their colleagues, etc. So we welcome you all. It's important to note that these are just some of the many faces contributing from XPrize and that there are many others behind the scenes in various departments and various capacities, helping us make this competition a success. And you'll definitely have the opportunity to meet many of those amazing individuals during future webinars. Also, and you'll hear here a few times today, it's important to note that we are also in the process of recruiting an impartial competition advisory and judging panel to help guide our operations team and ensure our competition objectives and goals are met. So expect some very exciting announcements on this in the coming weeks, we've been talking to some incredible individuals that are going to join in those capacities and I think everybody's going to be really excited about that. Alrighty, so let's go ahead and move forward to today's agenda. I'm going to go ahead and introduce XPrize, both our history and our mission before turning things over to our technical lead Peter Hulan, who's going to go into more detail about the competition details, and then we'll be turning things over to John to discuss the competition timeline. We're also going to delve into the guidelines this morning. Allison's going to walk us through the team registration process. We're also going to touch on the qualifying submission, as well as semifinals and finals testing, and then I'll recap with just a quick looking ahead sort of what our roadmap looks like for the next few months, followed by a Q&A for approximately 15 minutes. So again, we're looking at about an hour today. We're going to do our best to stay on schedule, but I think a lot of that's going to depend on how many questions are submitted. So with that, I think that covers everything. Let's go ahead and get started. So some of you may be wondering what exactly is XPrize. I'm sure there are individuals on here that are very familiar with some of the work that we've done, and some of you are completely new and that's totally okay. So XPrize's mission is to inspire and empower problem solvers from around the world to positively impact our world. In order to accomplish that, we devote ourselves to defining the problems, setting the targets, and then leveraging large scale incentive prize competitions to generate solutions to the world's biggest challenges. We believe that solutions to the world's problems can come from anyone, anywhere, and that includes everyone joining us today. It's important to note that the idea of behind XPrize and the incentivized competition is not unique to us. As a matter of fact, the incentive prize competition has existed for centuries, starting with the Longitude Prize in 1714, as well as the 1919 $25,000 or T-Prize that compelled Charles Lindberg, seen here in this photo, to fly across the Atlantic. Thereby giving birth to the commercial aviation industry as we know it today. So it's important to note that prizes have ignited passions for centuries, and it's really an outlet to challenge innovators to take those risks, to try to go and tackle those problems that government and other entities haven't been able to do so far. So it's a format that works, and we've seen that with Charles Lindberg's incredible achievement in mind in a lifelong dream to go into space. Our CEO and founder, XPrize founder, Peter Diamandis, created the Ansari XPrize in 1996. The goal here was to make space more affordable and accessible, you know, for somebody like Peter who wanted to go to space but maybe couldn't just due to physical limitations or time restrictions, etc. So he created this prize and offered $10 million to the first team that could create a reliable, privately financed manned spaceship that could fly into space twice within a two week period of time. Much like the Lindbergh Prize and the Longitude Prize when he launched it, people thought he was crazy. Didn't think it would be possible. And sure enough, just like the other two prizes in 2004, this dream became a reality and spaceship won pictured here was the winning vehicle to accomplish that goal. Some of you may be familiar, but Sir Richard Branson actually went on to go ahead and purchase this technology and it's what we know of today as Virgin Galactic. So some of you might be familiar with Virgin Galactic. If you're not, I suggest checking it out. It's a really cool technology and it gave birth out of this Ansari XPrize. Okay, fast forward 2025 years since launching the first XPrize and we have gone on to launch 14 prizes and counting in the fields of space, oceans, education, environment, robotics, AI, safety, automotive and the list goes on and on. We've put about $165 million worth of prizes out on the market. We've awarded 14 prizes to date and we currently have five active competitions that we're promoting for a total prize purse of $75 million. So, you know, we're highly active over here and you can also see this and the fact that we're currently developing prizes with in the range of about $300 million. So after 25 years, we think we've got this formula down and we're really, really excited to apply it here to our rainforest XPrize competition. Okay, so moving forward now that we've covered our past I'd like to move into the present and talk about our latest XPrize competition, the $10 million rainforest XPrize and I'm going to go ahead and invite my colleague Peter to step in and help help walk you through these through this phase of competition. So Peter, please go ahead. Thanks, David and welcome to everybody out there. We're all aware that rainforests are important. In fact, they're critical to our planet and to the survival of our species. Yet, while we're familiar with rainforests teaming biodiversity, we've also seen the news of their decline over the decades and many of us have experienced that firsthand. Having worked in the field of rainforest conservation. It's often so doom and gloom. And that's certainly for good reason. But what can we do, how can we move towards novel solutions, how can we motivate diverse interdisciplinary teams and approaches that shift this field forward. Personally, specializing in assembling and leading teams of local experts on expeditions in the tropical rainforest around the world for conservation. There are often several underlying factors that have always inhibited the collection and analysis of data to inform environmental preservation policy and action. And that comes as no surprise time and money, as with anything. And so if we could incentivize innovators to devise novel technologies that revolutionize the assessment and analysis of data condensing the months or years of field work and years of analysis into real time. We could urgently address more of the conservation issues of today. That's what the rainforest XPRIZE is all about, and why you should be involved. Max could be advanced, just a little bit. And just to reiterate, that's all because rainforest are the most diverse, complex and imperiled terrestrial ecosystems on earth. Alright Max, let's advance that one more. Through embarking on this five year competition, we envision a number of core goals and objectives that will advance the field of rainforest conservation in the process. Solutions to the rainforest XPRIZE will revolutionize the field of rainforest conservation through innovating novel technologies that can rapidly and remotely survey rainforest biodiversity. Technologies created will improve survey speed, autonomous operations, documentation of multiple stories of the rainforest, innovative detection methodologies, and rapid data integration. Empowering local communities, including their immense knowledge and voices and valued informed and credited approaches towards solutions that ultimately benefit those who are most closely connected to these forests and suffer greatly with their loss. Insights will be developed from the rainforest XPRIZE that interpret data in real time, and in unprecedented detail, towards action that promotes the health and conservation of this vital ecosystem. Understanding will support the sustainable use and well-being of standing forests, leading to new advancements in science, technology, innovation, and to just and sustainable bio economies. Inspiring a movement, shifting from short term economic driven perspectives to a balanced conservation oriented perspective, driven by the fair and sustainable use of forest based products. And ultimately scaling this impact beyond the competition and into the future to ensure that your novel solutions and insights are effectively implemented and applied across local, regional, and global levels. With all of this in mind about what we aim to accomplish towards addressing certain challenges that the rainforest face, you probably want to know how you can actually win this competition. Teams will be integrating sophisticated technologies such as robotics, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to develop tools to survey rainforest biodiversity in very demanding environmental conditions. So the winning team will develop novel technologies that rapidly and comprehensively survey rainforest biodiversity and use those data to deliver new insights that promote the health and conservation of rainforest globally. Teams will have a limited period of time to explore an area of rainforest and produce a biodiversity assessment of the rainforest and insights from integrating multiple sources of data to document the value of standing rainforest. These insights, as we'll describe throughout the competition, can take many different forms, ultimately with the objective of translating biodiversity data into action. So teams can come from anywhere, startups, universities, conservation organizations and NGOs, small to mid sized companies, high school students, local communities, families, or even individuals. You're all welcome to join. You can all form teams with various scientific and technological backgrounds and disciplines including robotics, VR, AI, biodiversity, ecology, remote sensing, or big data. In fact, teams will likely incorporate many of these interdisciplinary components and members with these expertise. And we hope to encourage teams from local communities to join as well, and we are excited about those who have already done so. Teams will be required to involve local constituents, including members from indigenous or local communities, or individuals, organizations, or academic institutions from areas that contain tropical rainforests. So whatever your background or discipline, we want you to develop novel technologies to rapidly catalog diverse forms of life in the rainforest and enhance the knowledge of these complex ecosystems for conservation. And with all of that, we'll now hear from John, our prize manager with a detailed timeline of the competition. Hello everyone. I'm now going to touch upon key dates and milestones that will take place over the course of the competition. We'll be going over some of these items in greater detail later in the presentation. So for now, it will just be a high level overview. And as Peter mentioned previously, the rainforest XPRIZE is a five year competition and it launched in November of last year. And after receiving some great feedback from the public on the first version of the guidelines, the team made some important adjustments and released version two in April of this year. And this document provides an important overview of the competition as well as outlines general requirements, and you can all find this document on the XPRIZE Rainforest website. Another key document pertaining to the competition are the rules and regulations. And this is an important document for registered teams as it details testing protocols for the competition lays out specific rules, dates and times and other key pieces of information that will govern the competition. This document is created in consultation with our independent judging panel of experts and may be updated over the course of the competition. Max, could you go back to the timeline slide please. The next important milestone on our prize timeline is March 15 of 2021. And this is when registration for the competition closes. In the second quarter of 2021, we hope to be in a place where we can travel and have an in person team summit. And this event is an important opportunity to meet your fellow competing teams to meet the rainforest XPRIZE team, as well as our judging panel. Shortly after the team summit, the next important milestone is the qualifying submission deadline. The deadline for teams to submit is May 13 2021. And here teams will submit documentation on XPRIZE's prize operation platform that outlines their approach to the competition. Up to 50 teams will be selected by our judging panel to move on to the semi final phase. In Q2 of 2022 teams will submit verification of their progress, which will likely include a video demonstration, along with written documentation. The judging panel will then convene and select up to 25 teams to move on to semi final testing. In early 2023 XPRIZE will undertake semi final testing and a yet to be determined location. Early teams will be required to travel with their technologies to the testing location, where they will be put to the test in real world conditions. Following testing, the judges will deliberate and select up to 10 teams to move on to finals. Final testing will take place in the second half of 2024. The top teams will travel with their technology to a tropical rainforest in a new geographic location. And meet and exceed the judging criteria in the final round of the competition. Shortly after finals testing, the judging panel will announce the first, second and third place winners, as well as the winner of the bonus prize at an award ceremony. Next slide please. Some of you may already be aware, but you are excited to let you know that the early registration fee has been reduced from $1,000 to $500. The benefits of early registration include access to team-only webinars with the rainforest team, as well as access to additional resources that will support you in developing and creating your technology. In the coming weeks, we'll also be announcing some exciting partnerships that we are in the process of formalizing. The fee for regular registration has been reduced as well. It is now $1,000 and regular registration closes on March 15th of next year. As you can see, there are many benefits to competing in an X-Prize competition and I'll highlight a few of them. An important component of every X-Prize competition is a verification of technology. Each prize works with a judging panel of experts to review, test and verify technology. Investing in the competition and having your technology verified and validated by an independent group of experts can help teams take the necessary steps to get their technology to market. Another benefit to providing to participating in an X-Prize competition is access to state-of-the-art testing facilities and field trials that teams might not have access to otherwise. As an example, two state-of-the-art testing facilities valued at $2 million, $20 million each were created in the U.S. and Canada for the Carbon X-Prize. And field trials including more than 3,000 children and rural Tanzania were made available so that teams could test their software using tablets in the Global Learning X-Prize competition. X-Prize competitions are also known to create new industries and expand existing ones, providing opportunities to more than just the grand prize winners. X-Prize has been widely credited with catalyzing the multi-billion dollar commercial space industry through the $10 million and sorry X-Prize and other space-related competitions. The last benefit I'll highlight is media exposure. At X-Prize, we maximize media opportunities to highlight bold new ventures and the incredible accomplishments of our competing teams. This gives teams an opportunity to raise their profiles of new sponsors to new sponsors and communities alike. Our competitions are regularly covered in leading publications like the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, Fortune, and TechCrunch, among many others. I'll now kick it over to Peter who will highlight some of the key aspects of the competition guidelines for you. Thank you John. So as we move forward throughout this webinar and throughout the prize, all of these know that all of the information that you're seeing today and later on can be found on the Rainforest X-Prize website Rainforest.XPrize.org. Specifically here you can find our most up-to-date competition guidelines of which we will be providing an overview. You'll also notice that this is where you can start a team as well. So a very important landing page. As we progress through the competition, this is also where you'll see continued updates including our rules and regulations later on. And for those of you who have been following the Rainforest X-Prize since the launch in November of last year, you'll also find these are our updated guidelines that were released on Earth Day of 2020. As David mentioned earlier in the webinar, in introducing our team, we will be relying pretty heavily on a deep and valued expertise of our advisory board and judging panel in shaping, guiding, and also judging this competition. And I wanted to just reiterate and mention this important component of our larger team. Again, now to provide more context for you as we move forward through the guidelines. X-Prize will appoint a panel of topical experts and big-picture thought leaders to serve as the advisory board for the competition. The advisory board will remain in place throughout the competition to advise X-Prize regarding the scientific and other elements of the competition. We will also be selecting a judging panel. That's in the works and we'll be working on that throughout the summer. Who are subject matter and technical experts who serve as impartial and independent evaluation team for all the aspects of the prize. Judges score the team submissions and make the final award determinations in both the semifinals and the final competitions. And with that all in mind, the competition guidelines on our website and what we'll go through a bit here in the webinar provide an overview of the Rainforest X-Prize and detail how the various rounds will be tested and evaluated. These general testing criteria are what you want to have in mind and plan for in developing your submissions and solutions. The testing will take place in the field in Rainforest around the world. For the semifinal and final rounds, we will announce these testing locations at a later date but with enough advance notice for teams to be able to prepare accordingly. In the first of these field tests, the semifinals teams will have six hours to deploy their solutions documenting the understory in an additional layer of the rainforest. And then teams will have 24 hours beyond this to process and analyze their data. In the final round teams will compete at a possibly different location but in a rainforest and this will be for a period of eight hours surveying more than three stories of the rainforest to document more biodiversity with increased accuracy and to be processed in 48 hours following the data collection. This time teams will be required to identify and develop new insights based on data collected. As we've mentioned and alluded to these insights earlier, they can come in many different forms and will provide as an operations team will provide some guidance and general direction in order to translate the data and species richness into effective conservation action for rainforest. The total prize purse for the rainforest XPrize is $10 million and how that breaks down is there will be a grand prize of $5 million, followed by a second place at $2 million and third place at half a million. Throughout the competition there will also be milestone prizes to inject some funds in the teams as they continue to make it through successfully. A milestone prize of $250,000 will be shared equally between up to 25 semifinalists and semifinals prize of $2 million will be shared equally between up to 10 finalists. Ultimately, in addition to the top three places in the finals of the competition, an additional bonus prize may be awarded at the discretion of the judges to one or more teams making additional advancements to the field that go above and beyond. And with that, we have the makeup for our $10 million rainforest XPrize. And I'm going to hand it over to Allison, our specialist on team registration process. Great. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, so I just want to spend a little bit of time going over our team registration process with you guys. So there are three steps in order to make you eligible to compete in the competition. And these are the three steps for finalizing your team registration. So the first step is to create or join a team at pop dot XPrize dot org and I'll talk about what pop is in just a little bit. Step two is going to be to complete the registration submission form through pop. And then the third step is going to be to sign the competitors agreement and pay the registration fee and I'll talk about how to do that in just a moment as well. All right, so what is pop that's our prize operations platform. So to register for the competition that is the platform we use. So if you go to rainforest dot XPrize dot org, you'll see on our main page there there's a little pink button that says start a team. Once you click on that it's going to scroll a little bit farther and talk about how to register. You'll want to click on that pink button that says register. Once you do that that'll take you to the pop platform and if you'll go to the next page map. So once you click on that you'll see this pop up, it'll ask for your email and password. If you've never used the pop platform you just want to make sure you go and click register there. It'll ask you to create a user login which can be your email as well as a password, then you'll get a pop up that shows that the registration email has been sent. Yeah, you want to check your email you'll get an email from XPrize and you'll see right here I have highlighted a circle in purple confirm your account. You want to click on that to create your profile and that's step two of the process to completing team registration. So once you complete your profile. Once you're on pop and you have a profile to pay the registration fee you're going to go to the activities tab. And you'll see right now as we mentioned we are in early registration until October 15 of this year, and it's a $500 fee that is per team to pay the registration fee you're going to go over to the column that says action and click start. And you'll go through that process to submit your registration. So I just wanted to show you guys how many interested teams we have thus far in the competition. As you can see from the map here we have teams from all over the world, and I just wanted to show this because I think there's a lot of people that are passionate about rainforest. Maybe you're an individual that is interested in competing in the competition, but you don't have a team. As you can see here we have people interested from all over the world. So you can use the pop platform to go in there and see if there's someone close to you and if you're interested in joining their team. And if we go to the next slide this will just give a further breakdown of the team so as you guys can see all the countries here. We have several people interested in from Brazil, also India, the United States but as you can see we have many other countries where teams are already interested. And as of right now we're up to 151 teams that are interested in the competition. Alright so forming a team so this is really important. When you're forming your team this is your time to get the word out about your team and it's really instrumental in expanding your reach to potential new members as well as supporters. You want to make sure that you emphasize your team's goals for competing and what has inspired you as well as any organizations or affiliations that you're associated with. This will help say someone is associated with the same organization or affiliation is you can go in and you can find them that way and join their team if you're interested. It's also really important when you're filling out your profile there's a section that's called about that's where you want to put the most information.  That's where you're going to put the information and present yourself. Also at this step you want to make sure that you identify what type of support you need, whether it's additional team members or other resources. Once you've created a team there's a function in pop called skills needed. So this is really great say you're a team that has a background in engineering or robotics AI, but you're really looking for team members to join you that are in the field of biology conservation ecology. You can put in there that you're looking for people with that background that way when someone who say is an individual who is a biologist and they're looking to join a team. For those people that have the technology background they can actually go in there search by their expertise and see what kind of teams are looking for that. And just one more thing is this data question so there's actually a question when you go to register and pop asking you what type of data do you expect to need to be successful in this competition. So that's going to be really important for us here at XPRIZE if we see a lot of trends of people needing the same type of data that they think would help them be more successful in the competition. Then we as XPRIZE can do our best to get that data to you. So just a couple things coming up we do have our team pitch webinar right now it is scheduled for August of this year. During the team pitch webinar this is when you have the opportunity to introduce yourself and present your approaches to the competition. We really intended to encourage collaboration between competitors with complementary skill sets.  This is a way to do that. And we'll have more information on that to come as well. The next thing is going to be our team summit. So we do hope to have this event in person right now it's scheduled for April of next year. Teams are uncertain in the world right now so we'll definitely take that into consideration and might have to move this event to virtual if needed but we'll definitely have more information on that to come. So it is open to registered teams only. This is where you will receive the latest prize updates as well as next steps in the competition. It'll also give you the opportunity once again to network with other teams and you'll also be able to meet competition organizers as well as competition partners one on one. We'll have more information on this as a later date but it is scheduled for April so it's right after registration closes in March but before your qualified submission is due. So just another chance to get a little bit more information before that. All right so the competitor agreement I touched on this this is step three of the team registration process making you eligible to compete in the competition. So this is an agreement between the X Prize Foundation and the teams and you must continuously meet the requirements of this agreement through the life of the prize to be eligible to win the prize purse. We do have a preliminary version available of the competitors agreement right now it is on pop under the resources tab. You can also find it on the rainforest X Prize website under the guidelines tab as well so that you guys have that available now to take a look, get an idea of what it requires and then we will have a final version that one member from each team must sign in order to compete in the competition and we hope to have that available for you guys on pop as well. Very shortly. So this agreement must be signed by March 15 of 2021 that's the date of the end of registration and I just want to stress this point that we cannot review any teams qualifying submission without a sign competitor agreement. All right, thank you guys and with that I want to pass it on to Peter are tech lead to talk about that qualifying submission. So moving forward in terms of what happens after you register teams will compete in a have to complete a qualifying submission that outlines their design concepts and plans for the competition, including an executive summary outlining the teams approach to the competition and information on how the team will use biodiversity data collected the judging panel will review the qualifying submissions to select up to 50 qualified teams to advance in the competition. These are some key dates to keep in mind here of May 13 2021. Just to recap these first few steps in the timeline over the upcoming year rate registration will be open until March, followed by the qualifying submission from which up to 50 qualified teams will be announced to advance in the competition. Following that, we will move into the semi finals and the finals teams will complete a semi final submission that outlines their design concepts and plans for the competition. This will also include a demo verification aspect to be conducted virtually most likely in the form of a video. The semi final submission deadline will be in quarter two of 2022 based on this semi final submission up to 25 semi finalist teams will be selected and announced quarter three 2022 semi finalist teams will split a prize purse of $250,000. And after that semi final testing will take place teams will have until quarter one 2023 to refine their solutions ahead of the semi finals and an in person testing event with XPRIZE and the judging panel will take place after semi finals testing finalist teams will split a prize purse of $2 million. Just to revisit our prize timeline, you can see the teams will have nearly one year to refine their solutions following the semi final submissions in preparation for the semi finals testing in the field in an actual rainforest. The first round of testing that will be done in this in these conditions. And that will truly put everything to the test. Moving on to the finals. After the completion of the semi finals the judging panel will select up to 10 teams to compete in an in person testing event with XPRIZE and the judging panel for the final round of the competition. The winning team will have to survey the most biodiversity and at least three stories of the rainforest, whether that's the emergent layer the canopy understory and forest floor. And in eight hours instead of the six hours previously and use those data to produce the greatest number of new insights after 48 hours that will reveal the true potential of the standing forest because of its biodiversity. Following the finals testing XPRIZE will host an award ceremony to announce the top three places for the rainforest XPRIZE as well as the potential for a bonus prize at the discretion of a judging panel. And here you can see the breakdown of those grand prizes. Once again, one important thing for all of us is that after the after awarding the winners, this will only be the beginning of yet another exciting stage for the rainforest XPRIZE. The rainforest XPRIZE is the first XPRIZE competition to incorporate a scaling impact phase into the prize timeline. In conjunction with our operations team that you see here today, we have an XPRIZE impact team on board to work with teams on this critical element. Together, we will be working with you our teams and partnering with conservation organizations, agencies, NGOs, local communities, universities and partners throughout the world to maximize the impact from the competition to ensure that successful solutions and insights are effectively implemented and applied across local, regional and global levels, leading to increased preservation of rainforests worldwide. And on that note of scaling impact beyond the competition, I'm going to hand it back to David about looking ahead. Awesome. Okay. All right, thank you, Peter. And thank you to the full team for this presentation. Wow, we're exactly 1045 so so we're right on time. Who knows for that. Yeah, I just want to highlight quickly and we've touched on a lot of this today but just some of the some of the near term priorities that that we're looking at as an operations team and then we'll go ahead and to jump into the Q&A and I want to thank everybody for their submissions in the Q&A so far. There's just some really great questions in there. Some of them might not be prepared to answer today but we're going to get to as many as we can in case you haven't already and you do have a burning question, please feel free to go ahead and throw it into the Q&A. We're prepping it prepping the questions on on a shared document behind the scenes here that we're going to dive to dive into shortly so real quick just some of the near term priorities as we mentioned we are currently recruiting our advisory and judging board of course for open to any recommendations that that any of you have on this but this is a critical component of the competition. This is an impartial group they're not tied to XPRIZE they all come from different organizations and backgrounds to help us pull this competition together so we've made a lot of headway on this at least in the advisory informing our advisory board and again we're going to have some really exciting announcements about this in the very near future. So conferences and workshops so many of you have probably seen we've been pretty active and competition excuse me conferences and webinars that have been taking place over the last several weeks weeks since since covid pandemic has hit us all. And you know obviously we want to be out there as much as we can but just can't be during this time so we are participating in these in these webinars we're going to continue to do so and hope to return to conferences as soon as the world reopens for regular business whenever that might be but we are looking forward to it and we want to conduct workshops where we can engage the community and helping draft and think about this work that we're going to be doing in order to achieve the goals of the competition so it's not just us it's our advisors it's our judges it's the community helping us think about are we doing things the right way and how are we going to reach our goals. The qualifying submission template that Peter talked about we are going to be drafting that and sharing the template of it just so the teams are going to know what to do from them in May of 2021. This really isn't an overly complicated process it's going to be you know a series of questions just for us to understand what your approach to the competition is going to be who your team is comprised of who's on your teams what are your what are your specialties etc and then of course and this is going to be a really heavy load for the team we're going to be creating our rules and regulations so this is the detail rule set that align the testing protocols of specification and the judging criteria for both semi finals and finals testing so we know teams are definitely going to want to see that I've seen a lot of really great technical questions come in today to the Q&A session and be perfectly honest. A lot of us might wait and we're going to wait to answer some of those questions until we're ready to put the rules and regulations out in the world I think that you know that rule set is really going to help answer some of these questions but we need time to define it on our end so just senior questions come through are going to help us think that think about you know try to find try to implement those concerns and those questions into our rule set so look out for that and lastly and this is critical we are researching and recruiting teams from around the world to tackle this challenge so please please please if you are part of or you know of a potential team please let us know you know we know that we can't look under every rock or every nook and cranny to find the competitors that are going to take this challenge on so if you have anybody that you'd like to recommend please let us know we'll reach out to them and you know really we're going to come up with as many you know we're going to have more solutions based on the number of teams that we have in the competition so it's always our priority to try to get as many qualified teams involved and help us try to tackle this competition with with unique approaches okay so with that let's go ahead and move into the webinar Q&A once again thank you everybody for submitting the questions that you have so far I'm going to go ahead and take a shot at some of the early questions that came in here and then I'll turn things over to other members of the team that can that can help us out so one of the questions that I see here is will there be additional support apart from video resources available to folks who register so yes absolutely what I think XPRIZE does really well as we look at and we find different organizations or companies that we can partner with and the idea behind that is that they can offer some sort of support our collaboration with our teams and with our operations team behind the scenes so we have already begun talks with some really exciting organizations and I think we're going to have some really cool technologies that we're going to be able to offer the teams to try to help tackle this challenge so we'll definitely be making some announcements on that in the very very near future I don't want to leak any of those names now just because things aren't finalized but they will be shortly and teams who register early will have the earliest crack at beginning to work with those those organizations so please be on the lookout for that good question here about the judges so the question is will there be different judges for different rounds of testing for the competition what will the time commitment be from judges do they have to on board do they have until the end of the competition so look at the judging panel comes together in many different ways and I suspect that it will grow and evolve over the four to five years of this competition you know it's it's completely conceivable that will bring on an initial round to help us on the operation side help devise the rules and regulations that will govern the competition and there'll be others who specifically excuse me just want to come on for the testing parts of the competition and actually be out there in the field with us so you know the time commitment really varies just based on what part you come in what your schedule dictates and what stage of the competition, you know, is that weren't at that time so it'll definitely be a an evolving group of individuals but you know we're really excited about that and you know for this competition, you know we're looking for her judges to come with a wide range of specialties and that could include ecology, data science, biology, mapping, physics, engineering, AI, drones and robotics there's so many emerging technologies that I think we're looking at for this competition that need to come together to either be integrated, or reviewed by someone who understands those individual technologies well, and so we'll be making sure that we that we gather the right experts from the field to go ahead and help support us with that so stay tuned for that. Let's see here. I have a good question here for you. How does the XPRIZE define a rainforest for purposes of this competition? What characteristics can we expect it to have? Yeah, this question has popped up quite a few times. It's focused on tropical rainforests and so and the other thing that's important to note is that to reiterate will be selecting the actual locations for teams to do the testing. So, I know at different points a few people have asked if they can do the testing in some of their own locations, there'll be one location most likely for the testing to take place. Yeah. Great. Thank you, Peter. My question is XPRIZE partnering within you organizations to fund this prize, which is a great question and I just like to say that, you know, we have several partners who we are and will be working with on the competition to support our work and we are extremely to the support of the Alana Foundation who came with us from the onset of this prize to conceive of it and develop it and launch it into the world. So thank you to the Alana Foundation. And just to note that we are open to and encouraging other partners who want to get involved to step in and we can have those have those discussions. Okay, another question here on the technical side that I'll punt over to Peter. Peter, will the rules and regulations document contain a breakdown of how the different aspects of the competition are graded and weighed. I see your biodiversity assessment versus insights versus local and indigenous involvement, etc. Yes. That's the short answer that question. All of these more detailed aspects. And I know there were a few questions about insights as well. The biodiversity aspect to many seems pretty straightforward and objective and to, we're still working on this insights and we're also leaving it. We're open in terms of direction to allow teams the creativity to come up with their own insights, perhaps with their own connections or however you might see those data being most utilized or impactful on different levels. So that will all be made much more clear in those rules and regulations for sure. Thank you for that. I also see another question here. Will there be an outline of types of insights and how impact will be determined the biodiversity assessment is very well defined, but the insights are still quite ambiguous and can be subjective based on the judges background. Same same as previous answer. The rules and regulations will definitely cover this and yeah just as I said that we're cognizant of the difference in terms of how these testing and judging criteria are and and as we also establish our judging panel will be working with them on establishing how these will be assessed. Great. Okay, I've got two operational questions here that I'm going to share with with Allison. The first is, does the pop platform offer a way to communicate with prospective team members who request to join a given team before except accepting them. Yeah, great question. So we are using the pop platform is kind of this matchmaking tool, and this is one of the features that we're working on updating right now. So I expect to have that updated hopefully within the next week or so whenever you're creating your team profile you want to make sure you click on the option that says accepting new team members. And then the new feature as an individual if I go in, and I see a team that's accepting new team members and I'm able to request, I'll have that option to give a little bit more information about myself, as well as a link to my profile on pop. That way the individual or the team that I'm applying to can see a little bit more information and then respond to me whether they'd like to have on the team or not. Thank you. And to that end we had received another question that I think I just answered sort of in here within the Q&A doc but I'll go ahead and just talk about it now while we talk about registration. That question was, may I register my team now but still add additional team members after the close of registration. And my response to that was absolutely additional team members can be added to a team at any time. You know, we do ask that you inform us and let us know and keep us up to date as you build and grow your team, but absolutely. And one other thing that's important to note that I don't think I saw come up but it does come up in a lot of competitions as whether or not teams can merge together. And yes, absolutely. We encourage it. We recommend it. Again, you know, this prize is really going to require the convergence of a number of different technologies and may very well push you and require you to merge and to collaborate with other teams that are in the competition. So, you know, the team pitch webinar, the team summit that we'll be holding later down the line, these things are all being done to help you understand who your fellow competitors are and who you might have the opportunity to engage with as we move forward. So please keep that in mind. And speaking about the team summit, we did receive a question about whether the team summit would be physical or virtual and that's a great question. Personally, I would love to say it's going to be physical. I just don't think we're ready to answer that yet. You know, of course, if it can't be then yes, we will hold a virtual team summit. It's not the first time that we've done it. In fact, we've had to do a few for other competitions during these uncertain times, but I would really love to be able to get, you know, this community together. One other thing that I'll say is that we, of course, we don't have a location set for that yet, but something that I would like to do and something that we always try to do is attach that team summit, maybe to a relevant event that's taking place within the industry. One other question there is that many of you will already be attending that event. So it just makes it makes sense first to get together for a day or two, and really give the teams an opportunity to meet us on the operation side but again to meet one another and see if we can find those those avenues for collaboration so stay tuned for that. Team any other questions in here that we feel comfortable going in and jumping in and providing answers to please please feel free to chime in here. There are a ton of questions this is great. Trying to scroll in through the whole list. There have been a few questions or comments pointing about the value of local indigenous knowledge and certainly that was core and critical to our part about team composition and how teams are expected to operate in terms of having local knowledge in many different forms being cognizant of as the question that I read this knowledge might be defined differently from how the tech approaches that we're discussing here, but certainly we want to make sure that that local knowledge is incorporated into the development of solutions, so that ultimately those successful solutions come back and actually do benefit on a local and regional scale directly to support those individuals. So, yes, that that's a key element of this and something that we actually made a requirement for teams. Thank you, Peter. Okay, just going through these guys and tight. A lot of these questions about sampling methods, taking samples out. I'll be in those rules and regulations and it's going to vary based on taxa quite a bit, or based on general groups, because, because there are, as we know different methods to sample and survey. So there's definitely not a one size fits all answer on that one, but we'll be going into quite a bit of detail on that for the rules and regulations. I have a question here from Aaron does X prize provides support and resources to address some of the legal aspects of competing seems like competing is somewhat like running a small business and that's a great point, you know, and it's really set up that way.  We'll set it up. And that's sort of way, we do have a legal team that we work with here internally at X prize and at some point in the competition, closer to the close of registration at the close of registration. Well, it's very likely that we'll host a webinar with our legal team to to get up and talk a little bit more about the competition agreement that we had mentioned earlier and just, you know, point out some of the basic stuff that team should be thinking about as well and we'll also do that with our marketing team. One of the things that I, you know, over my 12 years plus here at X fries, you know, one of the strongest tools that I think teams have access to is is one sort of our marketing power, what we'll put behind the teams and the competition, but also your ability to get out in the world and market yourselves and market your product and market your solution. And that's a really great way to get to get up and running. And again, to support this, this, this team which is run like a small business so I will definitely be looking to do some webinars there. But I can't promise any specific, you know, items or things that will be able to offer the teams in that regard. Okay. Guys any questions anyone feel comfortable jumping in at any of these. Yep. Oh, gosh, I just lost that one. Okay, I am getting them on many different fronts. Oh, there was a question about teams being rewarded in an extra way or discretionary points given for going like above and beyond and that's where we do actually have a bonus prize and so there's the breakdown of the specific for a second third place and then they'll be a bonus prize that's at the judges discretion. Okay. Awesome Peter thank you. Well listen I actually just noticed that we're at 1104 so we are we are beyond our time here and you know I just want to say that, you know, although we weren't able to get to all this questions today. Some of it is timing and some of it is simply because we don't know yet. And I think we're going to have a much better idea once we get the rules and regulations process going so we're going to take a lot of this feedback that we received today and we're going to think that we begin to put that that document together. And I also want to have other opportunities and webinar to discuss some of this stuff with with this community so as I mentioned at the beginning of today's webinar. This is just the first of what we hope to be a series. This is really just an opportunity to introduce the prize and where we intend to go. So at this point, I would like to just recommend that people head to the website that they consider registering a team.  And just know that we are going to be working behind the scenes to get this rules and regulations together to get you more specific details on the competition. And as always, if you have additional questions, you can reach us at Rainforest at XPrize.org so Rainforest at XPrize.org reminder that we recorded today's webinar we're going to share after the fact and we'll also do our best to put together a an FAQ or an answer a Q&A document that has answers to a lot of these questions today. And once again, I just want to thank everybody for showing up. I know we have individuals from all over the world, different time zones, people in their mornings, afternoons and evenings. And I want to thank you all for showing up, supporting this prize and getting being a part of it early on it's going to be a really exciting competition and an exciting road and I want to thank you all and we hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.