The ORT lyceum near Ukraine’s western border and the ORT school in Brazil sit nearly 10,000 kilometers apart, on opposite sides of the equator, where students and teachers speak different languages, live in different climates, and manage different sets of political struggles.
For one week this summer, none of that mattered.
Teenagers who had spent months competing for the same prize sat down together at the World ORT hub in the United Kingdom, opened their laptops, and started building something new. These were the winners of the northern and southern hemisphere Young Entrepreneurship Program (YEP), and winning was supposed to be the hard part. Instead, it was the beginning of a harder and more interesting one.
Two Winners, One Room
Students from Chernivtsi Lyceum “ORT” #15 were the champions of YEP northern hemisphere 2025-2026 and students from Escola ORT Brazil had won YEP southern hemisphere 2025.
The week was not a celebration lap. Mixed Brazil-Ukraine teams built new business ideas from the ground up, learned AI-assisted “vibe coding” to turn those ideas into working websites, and sat across the table from founders, venture capital experts, and pitching specialists, professionals who do for a living what these teenagers were attempting for the first time. There was no script for how two national delegations who had never met, and were working in a second or third language, would divide up the work, argue through disagreements, and land on ideas worth presenting. They had a week to figure it out.
Beyond the London Office
The office was only the first stop. On Wednesday, the group visited JCoSS, one of the UK’s top-performing Jewish high schools, and spoke to students in grades 9 and 11 about the YEP experience and about daily life in Jewish schools in Ukraine and Brazil. Then the visiting students and their London hosts worked together to consider environmental ways they could improve sustainability in big stadiums, for example at the World Cup or at music events.
On Friday, students from Hasmonean Girls’ School in London joined the YEP students for a collaborative session, and the group later visited a professional workspace to watch entrepreneurs at work.
For Gabriel, 17, of Escola ORT Brazil, the trip was his first visit to London and his first sustained experience working under pressure with people he had just met. “There’s different interests, different difficulties and you have to deal with it,” he said. “YEP showed me that we have to be patient and work it out together.” He summed up the lesson he expects to carry furthest: “One piece of advice I learnt here, which will help us in our future, is that we have to feel comfortable in not being comfortable. I think I’m more capable of doing that now thanks to World ORT.”
What YEP Requires
YEP is a six-month, school-based international program for students aged 14 to 17, covering entrepreneurship, innovative thinking, technology, design, and problem-solving. Students write detailed business reports and defend them before expert judges, presenting multiple times as they refine their thinking and build confidence under scrutiny. Teachers complete specialized World ORT training to deliver the program and mentor students through it.
In the final event, each team is given five minutes to present a business idea built over months, anticipating the judges’ questions and closing any gap in the argument before it is tested live.
The Winning Ideas
Chernivtsi Lyceum #15 ORT’s winning project, VitraTherm, solves a real engineering problem: converting existing windows into energy-efficient units within an hour, without a full replacement. The technology fills the space between panes with carbon dioxide through dry ice sublimation, creating a dense thermal barrier that cuts heat loss.
“The most valuable thing I took away from YEP was learning how to transform an innovative idea into a structured, viable business model,” said Kate, a member of the winning Chernivtsi team. “I learned how to analyze real market needs, calculate the target audience and validate a product.”
Runners-up Colegio Hatikva of Barcelona built Savory, an app that uses AI to turn social media cooking videos into clear, step-by-step recipes, addressing the common frustration of losing a recipe seen once and never found again.
For the southern hemisphere, Escola ORT Brazil’s winning concept, Solar Access, is a social enterprise built to expand energy access for people on low incomes. Runners-up King David School Linksfield of South Africa designed a smart safety wristband to help combat gender-based violence.
Competing Through War
Some of this year’s participants worked under circumstances most students will never face. Kfar Silver Youth Village sits just eight miles from Gaza, and its students continued through YEP despite a year of war. Two Ukrainian teams did the same: one presented from a bunker, and at least one student pitched to the judges while on holiday rather than miss her turn. All of them kept going.
Naomi, from Instituto Dr. Jaim Weizman in Costa Rica, described what she took from the program: “The most valuable thing I learned while participating in YEP was how to take an idea and make it happen. I learned how important teamwork, communication, and creativity are, and how to adapt when things don’t go as planned. YEP also helped me become more confident in sharing my ideas.”
A 146-Year-Old Idea, Applied New
Lev Perlman, Co-Founder & CTO of Metamindz and an advisor at Google For Startups, ran a vibe-coding workshop for the students.
He said: “In three hours, the students went from an idea to a fully-featured prototype, and a fully-functioning, well-designed landing page. And that’s despite the fact they’re touching these vibe-coding tools for the first time. Massive kudos and credit to the ORT family for running this. The world desperately needs more cohorts and programs like this.”
World ORT CEO Dov Ben-Shimon connected the week to the organization’s history. “ORT was founded 146 years ago in very different circumstances from today. At that time, it was about giving people practical skills so they could build a future for themselves and for their families, and that idea still stands at the heart of what we do today,” he said.
“Programs like YEP bring that to life in a very modern way. Over the past few months, you have taken ideas and turned them into something real. You’ve worked in teams, you’ve made decisions, you’ve solved problems and you kept going when maybe things didn’t work out right the first time.
“These are skills that are going to stay with you whatever you go on to do. Entrepreneurship isn’t only about building a business; it’s about creating something meaningful. It’s about something that can have a positive effect on your lives and on the lives of people around you.”
YEP is generously sponsored by ORT Switzerland. To support programs for students across the World ORT network like YEP, contact Allison Baumwald, Chief Development Officer, at [email protected].
Connecting across borders. Learning without boundaries. That’s the Power of World ORT.