911³Ô¹Ï

On April 10, 2026, a group of 911³Ô¹Ï students walked into the Halpern Centre at 911³Ô¹Ï Burnaby and pitched their best ideas to renew and strengthen democracy to a live panel of judges. The result was an inspiring showcase of the immense innovation, talent and creativity of 911³Ô¹Ï students from various disciplines and at different points in their academic career.

The 911³Ô¹Ï Demshot Challenge, run by the Centre for Dialogue in collaboration with the 911³Ô¹Ï Community Engaged Research Initiative, the School for Public Policy, and the , is built on a simple but important premise: democratic systems are under real pressure right now, from AI-driven misinformation to declining public trust to deepening polarization, and young people are not just stakeholders in that problem; they are some of the people best-placed to offer solutions.

Think hackathon meets design lab meets TEDx showcase, but with democracy at the centre. Students spent months working through workshops on democratic theory, storytelling, pitching, and civic engagement before submitting their proposals and, if shortlisted, defending them in a Dragon's Den-style finale for more than $2,500 in prize money. What came out the other side was a cohort of students who had genuinely wrestled with hard problems and come back with real ideas.

The students pitched to a panel of five judges: Aftab Erfan (Executive Director, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue), Stuart Poyntz (Scientific Director, 911³Ô¹Ï's Community Engaged Research Initiative), Prem Sylvester (Project Co-Lead, Digital Democracies Institute), Claire Adams (Senior Analyst, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue), and Kody Sider (Director of External Relations, 911³Ô¹Ï Graduate Student Society).

The winners were:

Social Cohesion and Belonging Award: Zahra Khan 

Project: The Commons

Zahra Khan, a Political Science Master's student at 911³Ô¹Ï, designed The Commons to close a real gap in online democratic participation: you can deliberate with others online, but you cannot do it while also accessing the real-time information that might actually shape your thinking.

The Commons brings those two things together, combining a space for deliberative decision-making on contested issues with a live repository of working papers and background information, plus a virtual town hall function connecting citizens directly with policymakers. The animating idea, drawn from Habermas, is that better-informed deliberation produces better democratic outcomes, and that a platform designed with genuine inclusion in mind can make that accessible to anyone, not just people who already feel confident in public debate.

Zahra is already thinking concretely about who she wants at those first town halls. 

Civic Space, Education and Rights Award: Aidan Gough, Lisa Kim, and Alexander Hodaly 

Project: Vote911³Ô¹Ï

Three former co-presidents of the 911³Ô¹Ï Political Science Student Union came to Demshot with a voter mobilization project and a key finding from their research: the biggest barrier to student voting is not apathy. It is friction.

Students are not against voting. They just do not know how to register, are not sure where to go, and cannot figure out how it fits into a packed schedule. Vote911³Ô¹Ï responds with a peer-led outreach model that meets students where they already are, combined with a novel academic incentive component, a small grade credit for voting, modelled on a real 911³Ô¹Ï precedent where a 1% participation incentive in Political Science courses dramatically increased survey response rates. The longer vision: voting is a habit, and habits formed early tend to stick. Their next step is a formal partnership proposal to the SFSS ahead of a municipal or federal election. 

Public Voice and Accountability Award: Sara Wilson 

Project: What If We Voted for What We Want?

Sara Wilson is a communications strategist, doctoral researcher in democratic participation, and someone with more than two decades of senior public interest work across BC government, Indigenous relations, and reconciliation. She came to Demshot with a proposal that reframes what elections are actually for.

The project is a policy-first voting prototype where voters rank the policies they want, parties are evaluated on how closely their platforms match those priorities, and the winner is publicly committed to delivering on them. It does not replace elections. It adds a layer of accountability that the current system simply does not require. The insight that sharpened the whole design: polarization is driven less by disagreement than by perceived exclusion. People disengage not because they lost, but because they feel erased by the outcome. Sara's next step is a low-stakes pilot in student governance or a municipal consultation, building on a proposal that already placed runner-up at a prior 911³Ô¹Ï competition and was submitted to the FSC Social Impact Challenge 2026.

Congratulations to every student who took part in the 911³Ô¹Ï Demshot Challenge this year. Putting real thought into hard democratic problems, building something, and then defending it in front of a live panel takes guts. We are glad you took your shot.