by John Pint

Six students from the Monterrey Tec university in Guadalajara, Mexico have created an ingenious way of tapping into the wealth of knowledge that senior citizens have accrued throughout their lives.
 
Their brainchild is Sabius, an internet-based project in which seniors can share their wisdom and experiences with the younger generation either at their homes or other locations.

The idea came from a Tec program in which finance, marketing and business students gathered over a long weekend to try and develop new entrepreneurial projects.

“We had Friday to Sunday to come up with something, but Saturday night arrived and we still hadn’t found anything,” said Alonso Vargas, who heads the student team.

The team then had a conversation with Dr. Carlos Marquinez, a senior who runs Telemedicina, a service offering low-cost health assistance to people in remote corners of San Luis Potosi via mobile units connected to the internet. For a payment of only 25 pesos, campesinos can receive an instantaneous diagnosis by specialists in Houston, Texas and then learn about local herbs which might cure their illness.

“We were greatly impressed by his business savvy and knowledge of technology. He completely turned around our concept of senior citizens,” Vargas said.

Vargas and his team came to the realization that seniors are a significant resource and that many are interested in sharing their knowledge. They concluded that young people want to learn about the many of same things that seniors have spent their entire lives doing.

“We thought why not create a platform that did this,” said Vargas. “We simply decided to connect the dots.”

The students began by looking for seniors who had abilities, hobbies or life experience they wanted to share, and then used their knowledge of smartphone apps and social media to find young people interested in the same subjects. 

They set up experimental classes to see what would happen, offering courses given by seniors in cooking, auto repair, pastry making and home gardening. 

“It worked,” Vargas said. “The gardening, for example, was taught by a gentleman named Gualo at Terra Nostra Vivero (nursery) in Colonia Seattle. He charged 50 pesos per person per class. We held three very successful sessions and then paused for our fund-raising campaign.”

Convinced their concept was sound, the six entrepreneurs decided to help finance Sabius through the crowd-funding website Fondeadora, where they hope to raise 45,000 pesos.  If you would like to give them a hand financially, visit  the Sabius Fundraising page.

The word Sabius suggests the Spanish “sabios,” which means sages. Vargas is confident Sabius will someday make it possible for people living anywhere to sign up for classes with “sages” on any subject, via nothing more than a few taps on their smartphone screen. “We want it to be as easy as finding a room on Airbnb,” he said. (Airbnb is an app and website for people to list, find and rent lodging with more than 1.5 million listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries.)