Understanding the process of transformative social change and how young people can become a part of the movement
I facilitated my first social innovation-related workshop on Thursday evening this past week and the response from the participants seemed positive.
To recap, I started out by playing the Playing for Change music video, Stand by Me, as people were filing into the workshop. I primarily used this to set the right tone for the evening, showcasing how this one particular song could unite musicians and inspire people around the world through music.
After introductions, I played the Yes We Can video from the Obama campaign, and as it played in the background, I talked about how Obama is easily the most visible transformational leader in recent times, and why many people, especially young people, were drawn to him and his inspirational message of hope in record numbers throughout his presidential campaign last year.
To further illustrate my point of young people being engaged in social issues more than ever, I also showed the Greenpeace “Angry Kid” video, going to the other extreme of young people being ‘angry’ at adults for not doing nearly enough to combat climate change.
I related it to what I know many young people are searching for in their lives right now:
The capacity to pursue their passions, and find meaning and fulfillment in the work that they are doing.
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I come across many examples of this everyday, including a number of friends who are currently overseas doing international development work right now after having recently graduated from university: Kristina Lugo in Malawi, Ruby Ku in Botswana, and Majid Mirza in Pakistan.
I also shared my own story of literally stumbling into the field of social change back in September 2007, and this happened when my friend Andrew Dilts asked me if I was interested in helping him run a conference on ’social entrepreneurship’ at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. I said sure, not knowing what I was really getting myself into.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
In any case, the point that I was trying to make was that as soon as my interest was sparked in social entrepreneurship and social innovation, I did my homework and began to realize that there were many organizations and people out there involved in the process of transformational social change, adopting innovative solutions and sustainable business models to tackle complex and intractable social problems, in order to have a positive impact in peoples lives around the world.
People such as Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank and Bill Drayton of Ashoka have been engaged in this process of transformational social change for over thirty years now. And I know for many young people, including Dev Aujla of DreamNow, who spends his time between Toronto and New York City; Melissa Richer of the Ayllu Initiative currently living and working in Brazil; or Brooke Estin, who works for Kiva, ChangeFusion and All Day Buffet and is based in Thailand; they are involved in this process in a leadership capacity and I know that they are loving every minute of it.
What is inspiring to me is that there are certainly many more young people out there just like Kristina, Ruby, Majid, Dev, Melissa and Brooke who are passionate about having a positive impact in the world today.
But what is transformational social change?
In order to address this question, I felt that it was necessary to provide some context on the nature of problems: simple (similar to following a recipe), complicated (sending a rocket to the moon) or complex (raising a child); and why for intractable social problems such as poverty or homelessness for instance, that have many underlying factors that contribute towards them, the simple and conventional approach of allocating more funding towards homeless shelters and food banks, hoping that more of these will simply solve the problem in the long-run, does not seem to work.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that homeless shelters and food banks are essential and do provide a great service for those in need in the short run. However, if the goal is to really get at the root of the problem of homelessness and poverty, i.e. for a developed country like Canada, why are there even homeless shelters and food banks in the first place? - then perhaps a different approach needs to be taken.
And this is exactly what the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction is doing with their approach to reducing poverty in Hamilton. Rather than taking the conventional approach, they are working in a multi-sectoral, collaborative manner to make the city of Hamilton the best place to raise a child. I think this approach is brilliant and have also blogged about why I think it is so, here. I am also glad to see that the Government of Ontario is using the same approach and way of thinking with their province-wide poverty reduction strategy Breaking the Cycle, as well.
This is where Social Innovation Generation’s definition of transformative social change, or social innovation comes in:
An initiative, product or process that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. These social innovations have broad impact, durability and scale; and also have recognizable stages and phases linked to the dynamics of resilient systems.
In other words, social innovation or transformational social change, should have the capacity to impact a broad number of people on an ongoing basis, scaled across multiple sectors and communities spread apart by large geographical distances, and can adapt and respond to massive change while still maintaining the integrity of the original. It is important to note that I use the word resilience instead of sustainability in this case, as resilience is about having the capacity to adapt to change, whereas sustainability, focuses on maintaining a stable state at any scale.
I also went through the Adaptive Cycle, using the birth, growth, destruction and renewal of a forest, to demonstrate how patterns found in ecological systems, can also be applied to social and political systems as well. Social Innovation Generation has a great primer on resilience and the adaptability cycle on their website, for those of you who would like to gain a deeper understanding on this topic.
And with that, I rounded off the workshop with an exercise and a facilitated discussion that I hope helped to illuminate further understanding of the concepts that were presented in a short amount of time.
I hope it was a great learning experience for everyone who attended. It was certainly a great learning experience for me as well, helping to solidify my understanding of the theory behind the work that has sparked my passion and interests for close to two years now. I am certainly excited for the road ahead.
Posted via email from Renjie Butalid
