Prokope Akademy has run over 46 workshops, worked with 50+ remote professional volunteers, and put digital tools into the hands of more than 1100 students across Southeast Asia. Most of them are teenagers in SMA and SMK high schools in Bali and Java who, until that workshop, had never been told that the people designing apps in Singapore or running ad campaigns in London, were people they could actually talk to. In October 2022, Alessandro Pedrini walked into his first ever classroom in Bali with a laptop, slide deck, and no real plan for what came after the day. He’d been running Prokope as a small digital branding agency out of Hong Kong since 2021, mostly working with founders who wanted to fail fast and grow faster.  The workshop was meant to be a one off. A way of paying back during a long stay in Indonesia.

It didn’t stay a one off.

This is the story of how that happened, and the people who keep it going.

❓Why a Marketing Agency Started Teaching High Schoolers

If you've read Alessandro's founder page, you'll know Prokope isn't a school. It's a digital branding and growth marketing agency. Most of our clients are small and medium businesses trying to figure out who they are online.

So why the sudden show in classrooms?

The short answer is that Alessandro kept noticing the same gap. Every time he sat down with a high school student in Ubud or a young entrepreneur in Canggu, the questions were the same: How do I learn this? Where do I start? Is there someone who can show me? The longer answer is that he'd grown up watching his own career change shape around him. From a data analyst, to freelance marketing consultant in Italy, to digital marketing in Hong Kong. He knew what it cost to learn those skills without a guide. He also knew what a single afternoon with the right person could unlock.

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|"We're not trying to replace school. We're trying to give students one honest conversation with someone who actually does the work."

- Alessandro Pedrini (Digital Entrepreneur, Click Image for Further Information)

That's the whole model in one sentence. Find a remote professional who's already in Indonesia, for example a designer in Canggu, a growth lead in Jakarta, a founder passing through Ubud, and put them in a room with thirty teenagers for two classes. Not a lecture. A conversation, with a real project at the end of it.

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‍💡 The First Time It Worked, We Knew

Tia is one of those students.

When she joined her first Prokope Akademy workshop, she didn't have a background in content creation. She wasn't sure she had a background in anything. What she had was a phone, a quiet curiosity, and three hours in a classroom with a volunteer who walked her through how a brand actually decides what to post and why.

A few months later she was making content. A few months after that, she was doing it for a real client through our internship programme.

We wrote her full story up here. it's worth a read on its own. But the part that matters for this post is what didn't happen. Tia didn't move to Jakarta. She didn't have to leave her family to find a creative job. She didn't have to compete with bootcamp graduates from cities ten times bigger than hers. The skill came to where she already lived. That's the entire point.

💕 The Volunteers Are the Surprise

When we started, we thought the hard part would be finding professionals willing to give up a Saturday morning in paradise.

We were wrong.

The hard part has always been finding the right ones, people who can teach, not just talk. Over the last three years, the volunteers who have stuck around tend to share a few things: they live in Indonesia (or visit often), they work in Design, Coding, Growth, or AI, and they're allergic to the kind of "motivational" speech that wastes a teenager's afternoon.

Each of these mentors come from a different corner of the digital economy, bringing highly specific skills that a standard school curriculum simply doesn't cover. Here are a few names from the last twelve months.

Tessa Wijaya, Co-Founder of Xendit and recently featured in Forbes, stepped into a classroom at SMK Negeri 1 Ubud to teach students how to use AI as a business tool and entrepreneurship principles, guiding them through building a recycling app and a tourist marketplace from scratch. Ayu Rénin, founder of Bali Anecdotes, ran a storytelling and brand session at SMK 1 Ubud. Rena Sanilia, lead of business growth at Choys, took over a classroom at SMAN 1 Ubud to walk students through turning a passion into a real product. Andrea Cayuela spent a morning at SMAN 1 Ubud teaching teenagers how to use AI as a business tool, and more importantly, when not to.

None of them were paid. Not one asked for anything in return.

➰ The Loop Closes When a Mentor Comes Back as a Volunteer

The moment we knew the model worked wasn't the first workshop, or the hundredth student, or the first sponsor email.

It was the day Putri, a former volunteer at our Ubud workshops joined the team to lead the internship program.

Putri saw what happens in a classroom when a student realises a digital skill isn't a luxury, it's a doorway. She knew the schools, she knew the students, and she knew which ones were ready to go further. Now she runs the bridge between the two: matching standout students with the kinds of small companies, like Catalyze, that hired one of our talents earlier last year.

That's the loop. Volunteer teaches student. Student becomes intern. Intern becomes the next volunteer, or the next teammate, or the next person paying it forward in their own school.

It's slow. It's not glamorous. And it's the only version of "impact" we know how to actually measure.

If any part of that loop sounds like somewhere you belong, there's a place in it for you.