ANIS is a platform for social innovators in Asia to exchange their ideas, experiences, skills and best practices of social innovation. The theme of this year’s ANIS was ‘collaboration across different sectors’ and true to its theme, the event was organised by organisations representing the three sectors: The Hope Institute coming from the social sector, Intel from the private sector and Seoul Development Institute, representing the public sector.

At ANIS, we were all inspired by the remarkable stories of social innovation and the people behind the social change. We were struck by the sense of optimism, entrepreneurialism and energy emanating from Asia with the emergence of new opportunities and types of agency, as well as the overwhelming scale and pace of change, and the urgency of new social, economic and environmental challenges and needs.

Festeza performing at ANIS *
© The Hope Institute

Here are some reflections from the Young Foundation delegation.

So Jung Rim, Researcher on the What Works? Project:

“What fascinated me was the language of social innovation in Asia. There’s something very poetic and exciting about the language that people use. Perhaps the language of technological innovation did not suffice to bring inspiration for social innovation and people had to look for alternative words to describe new ways of engaging. Unlike the language of advocacy campaigns and democracy struggles of the 80s, social innovation language is much more hopeful, energetic and self-reflective. Shifting away from the language of criticism and struggle, the new language of social innovation lets people imagine and create a positive collaborative future.

The Thought Collective plays with the word “thought” to brand their multiple social organisations –  School of Thought, Food for Thought, Think Tank, Thinkscape… Embedded in the word “thought” is their method of looking inward for change, and their passion for building the social and emotional capital of the youth in Singapore.

The language Gawad Kalinga uses is also deeply self-reflective and poetic. The uses of phrases like “social justice”, “land for the landless, homes for the homeless”,  “social artistry”, “enchanted farm” and ideas like “big brother”, “middle brother”, and “small brother” have helped the Gawad Kalinga brand become accessible and dynamic.

Sunit Shrestha from the Change Fusion talked of “The Light of Darkness” during his presentation at ANIS, focussing on the extraordinary collective action of citizens following the Tsunami disaster last year. He emphasised that social innovation lies in the ordinary lives of people, in their own narratives of constructing identities, movements and solutions in the face of deep social challenges.

The Hope Institute uses the theme of hope. The Hope Institute was founded by Wonsoon Park, a former civil society leader now turned mayor of Seoul, at a point when the Korean society was ready for active citizen participation and empowerment. Mr. Park would always emphasise that hope is not something illusive or imaginary. It lies within all of us. ‘Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.’ – Lin Yutang”

Lauren Kahn, lead on the What Works? Project, says:

“For me, the key message from ANIS was that social innovation does not happen in isolation; we need all sectors involved. Some compelling ideas that surfaced:

• People power! It’s not all about formal organisations and institutions. I was overwhelmed by stories demonstrating the important role that citizen agency is playing in driving social innovation in Asia. As Anjan Ghosh of Intel emphasised “Beautiful people, beautiful cooperation is at the heart of social innovation movement in Asia”. And, how IT is creating a new model of cooperation: in the words of Mayor Park (who raised 3.9 billion won, equivalent of 3.3 million USD within 52 hours through crowdfunding) “we can change our world with Twitter.”
• While technologies are important in building bridges and connections, a key step for advancing cross sector collaboration in social innovation is building trust. Governments worry people don’t trust them. But they need to first start trusting people – and shift from governing ‘to’, to governing ‘with’ people.
• Next, a message for the private sector – to tackle the growing social challenges of our time, today and in future, corporates will need to show strategic leadership – move beyond Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to Corporate Social Innovation (CSI).
• Finally – we need reflection time and space for social innovation. Creativity can stagnate if it’s all ‘go go go’ and we don’t take time out.

ANIS provided just the space for dialogue and reflection, and creativity to permeate– and left us all charged up to get down to the work of making social innovation happen!”

Louise Pulford, Head of the Social Innovation Exchange, says:

“I spend a lot of my time thinking about networks. How do you start to create a community of people from different countries who share similar challenges and who can work together effectively and What is the best way to transfer ideas across borders? And ANIS conference made me think about this even more. As well as being an extremely well organised, engaging and interesting event, ANIS demonstrated the richness of examples of fantastic people and projects across the Asia –  from the dozens of examples that the What works team introduced, to the Community Museum Project in Hong Kong, to the fantastic work of Change Fusion in Thailand.

But how do these people keep in contact and keep learning and sharing between ANIS conferences? This was one of the concluding questions from our wonderful hosts, the Hope Institute. For me the only reason I go to events is to meet people, people who I can keep in contact with after the event. Many of the other participants at ANIS were clearly thinking this too. The week before ANIS, we launched the first regional cluster of SIX – SIX  Asia – in Hong Kong. This cluster will remain part of the global SIX network, but provide an identity and platform for SIX members in the region.

It seems the perfect time for SIX Asia and existing communities to link to the ANIS community so we can really accelerate the process of learning and sharing of social innovations all over the world. We are looking forward to working together and keeping these discussions going.”

Ginny Lee, Associate on the What Works? project, says:

“In Asia, it was great to see that people were innovating out of necessity, but also learning and replicating best practice and projects from the West and adapting it to the local contexts. Countries like Korea, Thailand, India, Singapore, Australia and so many others look up to and look towards the UK and the West for inspiration. The Office of the Third Sector (now Office for Civil society), UnLtd, Big Society Bank, the cooperative model in the UK and so many organisations and ideas that we take for granted in the UK are being replicated and adapted to take the different Asian contexts into consideration.

The West is viewed as the thought-leader many aspects including social innovation. The West has been espousing ’social innovation’ for some time, and a lot of money has gone in to develop incubators, hubs, social innovation spaces, social enterprise challenges, and so much more. Yet, the question that people within the social innovation space in the West is asking is – so, after all this hype, what has social innovation actually achieved? Where is the proof and impact?

We need to realise that in the West, our ideas are good, our projects and organisations are doing well but as pioneers it is difficult to know and understand impact until you remove yourself from the context and see the work that we’re doing from a different perspective. Maybe we should all take a trip out to Asia and how we’ve been inspiring others to make a positive change.”

Vicki Sellick, Programme Lead at the Young Foundation, says:

“I am always struck by the reviving power of a good conversation. You can be wondering how to solve a problem back at base, in need of a little inspiration or a bit of perspective, and an unexpected conversation at a conference can be just the remedy. ANIS was full of such conversations for me. I pondered how best to train NGOs in innovation skills with the Lien Centre for Social Innovation in Singapore, re-imagined education with the Thought Collective and was inspired by the Thai authorities free healthcare system funded by duty on cigarettes and alcohol. I came back with plenty more contacts and a whole host of ideas to implement here in the UK or through our Global Innovation Academy.”

Carmel O’Sullivan, Research Associate at the Young Foundation, says:

“There were many very informative and interesting sessions but the poster session was really stand out. It was a fantastic platform for social innovators themselves. It was so interesting for me to hear social innovation stories from Asia and to give those who are working on the ground to share their insight and ideas with everyone. This session was so full of energy and inspiration.

I think there was a good cross section of participants. It was great that there were so many social innovators. It was also interesting that an organisation like Intel and government sector represented through Seoul city government.  There were so many interesting conversations!

Going forward with ANIS I think it will be important to keep our finger on the pulse by inviting interesting social innovators working on the ground. It is important to create this kind of networking opportunities.”

* We had the privilege of seeing Festeza (a youth percussion group) perform on the first day of ANIS. Festeza is a cultural/social project led by young people which emerged from the alternative learning programmes of Haja Centre.

Thought Collective, Singapore

In Singapore, the Thought Collective aims to change the educational paradigm through a multi-pronged approach, running four social enterprises, including School of Thought, Food for Thought, Think Tank and Thinkscape.

In 2001, its founders wanted to change the status quo of traditional education by setting up a tuition school that had an ulterior motive – to support the development of young people in Singapore who were more socially aware, creative and innovative. They set out to tackle the problem of widespread apathy amongst young people in the face of long-term social problems:

“As teachers, we had seen too many young Singaporeans emerge out of the school system jaded, knowing and caring only as much as the exams required them to know and care about. We were troubled to see the indifference many Singaporeans showed not only towards Singapore itself but to the world and life in general. It was not too hard to imagine how these youths would grow up to be unhappy and disenchanted adults, pessimistic about their ability to change their circumstances.”[i]

Since its founding days, School of Thought has moved from strength to strength with increased number of pupils in their tuition schools, now based in a number of locations, and influencing school boards and teachers to adopt a more creative and innovative approach to teaching through an alternative curriculum.

The Thought Collective has a portfolio of various ventures within it: through the School of Thought, it has gone into printing; through Think Tank, created to disseminate School of Thought’s teaching pedagogies in a more innovative medium than textbook format, and to ensure that young people heard about and were inspired by the creative work of the Thought Collective, it now prints periodicals which are circulated to over ten thousand young people in Singapore; from Think Tank, the founders then went into the restaurant business to create a place where Singaporians could feed both their bodies and minds – eat delicious food and share their ideas and talk about social issues. Most recently, the Thought Collective has branched into Thinkscape – providing young people with learning experiences and placements working with government and private sector as a way to learn about work and life. They are in the midst of developing a consultancy where they provide insight into the Thought Collective Model to charities and other organisations trying to create social change in a sustainable way.

This group of young social entrepreneurs in Singapore identified a market gap and social problem – and merged the two to come up with innovative solutions. At their heart, however, explains co-founder Shiao-Yin Kuik, the Thought Collective aims “to build up the social emotional capital of Singapore.”[ii]

Haja Centre, South Korea

Similar to the School of Thought in Singapore, the Haja Centre in South Korea was created out of the need for an alternative education model that fosters creativity and empathy amongst young people in Korea. Haja Centre creates a safe space that embodies diversity, relationship building, and autonomy for young people to help unleash their inner creativity and potential.

© Haja Centre / The Hope Institute

At the Haja Centre, young people are given the autonomy to work on the projects that stimulate their creativity– from making films, creating art, websites, social enterprises. Self-directed learning and self-reflection is encouraged, and the space allows for young people to experiment and be creative. There is also a strong importance placed on relationships – especially peer-to-peer relationships. The Haja Centre has created a platform called ‘Show Haja’ where young people are invited to share and present their journeys of success and failure. The platform enables the young people to work collaboratively and to understand different perspectives with an open mind.

Typically, young people at the Haja Centre join short cultural programmes that include one day or one month work experience in cultural occupations of people such as film directors, singers, DJs, photographers, models, and make-up artists. Then they can start other cultural programmes, lasting several months at the Production Studios, or even register for courses at the alternative schools including the Production School. Through these programmes and schools, young people produce their own cultural work such as films, plays, musical shows, rock concerts, and parties. Participants of the Haja Centre choose diverse careers in their twenties after completing the projects of the Haja Centre. Some go back to formal schools and universities, some become freelancers working in culture industry, some become NGO activists and others become social entrepreneurs.

For preliminary social entrepreneurs, the Haja Centre provides mentoring and specific consulting on business planning, marketing, financing, sales required to turn preliminary social enterprise into governmental authorised social enterprise. Currently, eight social enterprises that were incubated by the Haja Centre have been verified as social enterprises by the Ministry of Employment and Labour, and three preliminary social enterprises are supported by the Haja Centre. Noridan, the first social enterprise incubated by the Haja Centre, is a performance company that makes percussion instruments from recycled materials. It started as a cultural programme group in 2004 at the Haja Centre and now has since become a social enterprise which employs 86 full-time people, performs around two hundred shows and a thousand workshops per year.

Make a Difference (MaD), Hong Kong

In Hong Kong there is a similar movement towards learning through creativity, innovation and empathy. Make a Difference (MaD) organised by Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture in Hong Kong, MaD is a Hong Kong-based platform devoted to inspiring and empowering young people aged 19-30 across Asia to create positive personal, economic, social and environmental change. The Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture believes that young people have a power to make a difference and focuses on creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation and discovery.

© MaD / Global Innovation Academy

These are three examples among many in which the traditional education systems are being challenged by social innovators around the world. Similar examples can be found in other parts of the world. For example, Educate!, based in Uganda, starts from the idea that, despite critical challenges facing young people, the current education system is leaving the next generation unprepared to create and lead solutions. They advocate the need to “re-imagine the purpose of education” in order to develop a “new generations of leaders and entrepreneurs to solve poverty, disease, violence, and environmental degradation.”[iii] Another example is Ashoka’s new global empathy initiative,[iv] recently started in North America.

Key Resources

Tong Yee, Elizabeth Kon & Shiao-Yin Kuik, Directors, School of Thought. Interviewed 29 February 2012.

The Hope Institute (2012) Fostering youth creativity through self-directed learning and learning by doing at Haja Center (a report prepared for the Young Foundation)

http://www.mad.asia/

Think Café started at a period of rapid change in Korea. The vibrant social movement in the 1980s had lost its cohesive force and the ‘old ways’ of political rallies were no longer attracting the critical mass. The rise of ‘new’ social movements in the 2000s is related to the emergence of new modes of collective action in the era of information and communication revolution. It gave rise to new social actors, a new generation of people expressing their view on various social issues (ranging from youth unemployment to economic inequality) through new digital and social media. Sociologist Eric Hoffer offers insight into the changing times: “We are usually told that revolutions are set in motion to realize radical changes. Actually, it is drastic change which sets the stage for revolution.”[i]

Mr Seung Chang Ha, the co-founder of The Change (the coordinating organisation of Think Café), was inspired by two significant social phenomena in the year 2002: a public protest in response to the acquittal of two US soldiers for the road deaths of two teenage girls and the mobilisation of 8 million people during the 2002 World Cup. These two social events, which brought thousands of people on to the streets, were sparked by ‘netizens’ (‘internet citizens’) and spread rapidly through online communication and text messages.  New technology was enabling new kinds of groups to form in the Korean society. Technology had empowered individuals to directly express their voices and concerns, and connect with people who share similar views. Mr Ha was acutely aware of the notion that, “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.”[ii] And this insight helped shape the Think Café model.

The defining feature of the Think Café model is that it is able to capture the essence of new technology and changes in the way people communicate within a social platform where they can propose and develop shared social agendas. And, further, it translates online ‘virtual’ forms of engagement and self-assembly into ‘real world’, offline engagement, while maintaining the informal, open-minded, less hierarchical, loose structure that people enjoy on the internet.

© Think Cafe / The Hope Institute

The power of Think Café meetings comes from its openness and its flexibility. Anyone can organise a Think Café anytime at any location. It brings together large, diverse and distributed groups by making it easier for people to self-organise for meaningful and purposeful meet-ups. The underlying vision of Think Cafe is to make everyone an active and engaged citizen by giving ownership and power to set their own social agenda. For instance, Mr Seung Su Kim, a social worker, experimented with the Think Café model near his home, at his own apartment building. In South Korea, urban development is characterised by the replacement of older neighbourhoods with acres of nameless new apartment blocks. Mr Kim embarked on a seemingly impossible task of building a sense of community in this concrete jungle. He wanted to create a sense of community and a space where people can share and discuss the local challenges of the neighbourhood and, further, co-create solutions to those identified problems. Natural leaders for this Think Café emerged from unexpected and previously excluded groups, such as a women’s group in the apartment, shifting the existing power dynamics of the community.

The strength of Think Café lies in the purposeful act of sharing knowledge and insight. Think Café meetings do not remain as small, disjointed, simply ‘interesting’ conversations. The participants and coordinators document the information of each meeting so that it can be shared openly with the public on the official Think Café webpage. Refined and synthesised versions are published as a book. Sharing the content with the wider public under the Think Café brand gives collective power to the important social agenda and keeps the debate alive.

The Think Café meetings pop up ‘here and there’, without a specific subject of focus. In order to harness the meetings and network of people into themes, the coordinators of Think Café organise Think Cafe Conferences regularly where keywords and themes (such as Justice, Happiness, Fairness, Change) are provided to the participants for the event. It uses ‘unconference’ format to engage a large audience in discussions and consensus-building on selected subjects. The coordinators also experimented with an Open Conference format at the end of 2011, where the participants were able to set their own themes, space and time, and the spontaneous diverse voices and meetings during the Open Conference week were then aggregated. These large scale, multi-participant conferences can serve as a constructive interaction channel between the people, civic organisations and democratic institutions.  The aim of these conferences is to produce a shared vision of how ordinary people can claim a stronger influence on the future of our society, sharing the social responsibility that goes with it.

Key Resources

The Hope Institute (2012) Think Café: the on/off-line platform where people gather, chat, share, and collectively present their suggestions to society (a report prepared for the Young Foundation)

They sent us the following link to a talk that Warren gave at University of Cape Town last month that summarizes experiential/expressive approach to social innovation.  

Few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if we took our organizational practices more seriously as leverage points for social innovation?

For more information, go to: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/social-innovation-from-the-inside-out/

The e’Thekwini Municipality enables 956,000 households around Durban in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province to recycle a total of 71,000 tonnes of paper and plastic every month!

Not just households are targeted, but businesses too. Increasing the lifespan of Durban’s landfills and saving 8,500 trees, while creating additional jobs are some of the benefits enjoyed by this smart, city-wide, domestic waste recycling project.

E’Thekwini’s Orange Bag Domestic Recycling Project started in 2007 and was underpinned by an education and media campaign to ensure community buy-in – and it paid off. They recovered 45 tonnes of paper and plastic in just the first month. Trained e’Thekwini representatives visited homes, a helpline was created, informational material distributed, and the orange bags (15 delivered each week) were printed with the necessary instructions.

Bags are provided to families free of charge for paper and plastic only. But if households fail to use them for their intended purpose, their non-compliance will result in them receiving warning letters to advise them that they no longer will receive orange bags.

Keeping orange bags separate from black bags filled with general waste is essential. To avoid any contamination of recyclables normal compacting trucks are inappropriate for collection.

© e’Thekwini Municipality

Instead of buying new vehicles, e’Thekwini gave this opportunity to small entrepreneurs like Ravesh Ramgobin. An already emerging local businessman when the project started, Ravesh established an enterprise to collect the orange bags from Pinetown to Cato Ridge, employing 12 people only. Today, he owns six four-tonne trucks, employs 24 people and services more than 130,000 households from Amanzimtoti to Umkomaas, including Chatsworth. Ravesh and the six other contractors who work on the project are supplied with clothing and trained by e’Thekwini to adhere to certain regulations and effectively monitor proper use of the orange bags.

Contractors like Ravesh are not paid by the municipality. An agreement signed with Mondi, one of the largest paper manufacturing companies in South Africa, ensures they pay contractors’ salaries and receive both paper and plastic at their facility. This landmark partnership influenced the e’Thekwini City Council to allocate the R4 million needed to start the project. In addition to taking responsibility for the waste after it is sorted and collected, Mondi contributes 50% of the manufacturing and packaging costs of the recyclable orange bags. Other companies like Izaka Plastics also are involved as they produce the orange bags from recyclable material.

A remarkable aspect of this project is its partnership with Durban Mental Coastal Health, a stalwart organisation in the province. Their project, Challenge Unlimited, ran workshops to equip the intellectually disabled to earn an income and they proved an ideal choice to do the packaging of the bags.

Co-ordinator, Carmel Murugen, explains that 230 persons with psychiatric illness and intellectual disabilities, aged between 18 and 60 years old, packaged 620,000 bags between May and July this year. Carmel reminds us that not only are such repetitive tasks ideal for those with mental illness but it teaches teamwork while providing a safe and constructive routine.

© e’Thekwini Municipality

This project allows businesses to save money by using contractors to collect their waste and sort it into recyclable and non-recyclable perishables. Small traders in township areas collect recyclables from the Mondi facility at a reliable price – and this is growing. The project is set to target these communities and enable poorer areas to sort their waste. Based on the success of this recycling project, e’Thekwini is initiating a similar venture for glass and tins.

Clearly, this is a public-private partnership that works. It harnesses the desire to recycle by making it convenient for citizens, profitable for businesses, beneficial for civil society and local government. The cherry on the cake is the creation of jobs for the most marginalised group in SA – those with intellectual disabilities!

By sustaining such an eco-system, hopefully it will become part of the ethos and culture of South African society.

Read about the creative ways South Africans solve public problems from the Impumelelo Social Innovations Centre, the country’s repository for solutions that improve quality of life for the poor. 

There are a multitude issues that social innovators and social entrepreneurs are trying to tackle in meaningful ways around the world. However, throughout the course of our conversations and travels, there has been one issue in particular that has crossed boundaries and continents. This issue is that of sanitation.

Sanitation plays an important role in ending poverty, creating gender equality, and keeping children in school. Sustained progress on the Millennium Development Goals depends on the international community paying more attention to the sanitation gap: right now, nearly 40% of the world’s population (over 2.6 billion) are without sanitation.

However, water, rather than toilets, tends to receive more attention and resources under the common subject of sanitation. Responding to this, many people and organisations are turning their attention to toilets and sanitation, and how to deal with this issue in sustainable ways and at a global scale. The World Toilet Organisation, based in Singapore, was established as a global network and service platform wherein all toilet and sanitation organizations can learn from one another, and leverage media and global support to influence governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies. Its founder, Jack Sim, who is campaigning for toilets around the world, has been working tirelessly to break the taboo of toilet and sanitation and legitimize it for mainstream culture.  In another powerful example, the ‘Community-led Total Sanitation’ approach focuses on the behavioural change needed to ensure real and sustainable improvements – investing in community mobilisation instead of hardware, and shifting the focus from toilet construction for individual households to the creation of “open defecation-free” villages. Today, CLTS is in 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

Sanergy, based in Nairobi, Kenya, is a social enterprise focused on making sanitation profitable in urban slums by making it affordable, accessible and clean. The name has come from the amalgamation of two words: sanitation and energy. Sanergy is tackling the issue of sanitation like many of its peers do by building toilets, but its innovation is really in its business model – creating value out of waste by really examining the value chain. The theory is that if you can create waste as a valuable product that people will buy or buy into, then everyone on the value chain will gain something.

Its business model is novel and unique – ensuring that it is a win-win-win scenario for residents of slums, for the entrepreneur, and for Sanergy. The business model and the system that Sanergy has created relies on local entrepreneurs who buy toilets from Sanergy and then charge a nominal fee (4-6c per use) to its fellow slum dwellers. The incentive for the entrepreneur is to provide good and clean facilities to ensure there is maximum usage from residents. The entrepreneur who buys the toilet to install in his or her community is a local resident, not only ensuring community buy-in but also enabling people to become entrepreneurial. The system is also dependent upon those who collect the waste for a fee; and for Sanergy, they get revenue ultimately by using the by-product of waste to use as fertilizer and/or biofuel. Everyone on the value chain becomes incentivised to see and do things differently.

The surprisingly low-tech solution to the toilet conundrum is part of Sanergy’s success. Toilets (plus the installation, marketing, branding, business support and daily waste collection service) cost approximately $500 US for the first year. Each of the toilets are made from local materials, using local labour, and is all prefabricated to ensure ease and efficiency. Added to this is special branding which David Auerbach likens to Coca-Cola – bright colours, and generally positive messaging on all its toilets.

Sanergy is breaking away from traditional ways that sanitation projects have been conceived and implemented in the past. Sanergy is looking in a truly holistic way at the issue of sanitation – from the hesitant and skeptical users, to those local community entrepreneurs who own and operate the toilets in the slums; to using waste as a bi-product to produce revenue; to branding and messaging; and to ensuring that there is usage of toilets through community buy-in. In so doing, the initiative also counters the the erroneous (western) assumption that simply by putting a toilet into a village or a slum, it will be used. Sanergy is thinking creatively and looking at the problem of sanitation in the sum of all its parts – it is looking at the value chain of human waste and ensuring positive outcomes for all.

© The Hope Institute

The origin of Seongmisan community traces back to a joint childcare cooperative set up by a group of young dual-income families in 1994. The young couples were discontent with the education philosophy and the quality of childcare programmes provided by the market and the state, and together they considered an alternative future of their children. The birth of this community reflected the residents’ desire to fundamentally challenge the Korean society’s obsession for economic growth, industrialisation and technological progress (Seongmisan community’s thinking is also in line with the arguments made by Thai Buddhist economists and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.)

“The obsession for growth, as a result, has made capitalism and communism alike… Both have pursued only economic growth and technological progress, consequently strengthening centralised monitoring and control by technical bureaucrats and intensifying economic conflicts. This also led to social imbalance, bringing about the degeneration of environment and the exhaustion of natural resources.” (Hansalim, 1990: 15)[i]

Disillusioned by the heavily materialistic trend in Korea, Seongmisan community sought to form a cooperative, mutually-beneficial society based on value of peaceful and harmonious co-existence of human and nature. The community emphasises ecological way of living and a genuine personal and face-to-face social relationships in an urban neighbourhoods (that are often filled with faceless strangers and apathy).

The creation and growth of Seongmisan community was an organic process. There were no carefully designed plans, structures or hierarchies. Personal needs widened into social needs. People recognised the needs, came together and found collaborative ways to solve community challenges. Various community activities were ideated, proposed, experimented by the residents and these activities naturally evolved into cooperative childcare, schools, social care, co-housing models, carsharing model, collaborative model of consuming and producing food, community theatre, radio channels, festivals and art projects.

Here we explore some of Seongmisan community’s key features:

Reinterpretation of “traditional/indigenous” knowledge Dure (a traditional form of collaboration and shared workload during labour-intensive agricultural seasons) and daedongye (gye is a traditional form of micro-financing where small amount of money or grain was collectively saved) are both traditional/indigenous form of collaboration in agricultural villages in Korea, which have disappeared or forgotten after the rapid industrialisation period. Seongmisan community revived and reinterpreted the “traditional/indigenous” knowledge in the urban and modern context of Seoul.

Locality: placed-based solutions to intractable social problems Another significant feature of Seongmisan community is its placemaking element. By capitalising on the community’s assets and potential, Seongmisan community creates “good” spaces that promote people’s well-being and happiness. Public spaces (restaurants, cafes, open theatre, streets etc) are utilised as space for engagement and communication – to explore the needs of individuals and the wider community. This happens not only through community activities but also as a daily part of living.

Democratic decision-making within the community Democratic decision-making structure is key element of building solidarity and trust in Seongmisan community. Seongmisan community generally uses unanimous consent rather than majority votes during decision making process. The unanimous consent rule forces people to listen and empathise with other people’s thoughts.

Unanimous consent rule was used from the very first collaborative project, childcare cooperative. The parents realised that when the “majority” decision was made, the wishes of small “minority” group always had to be sacrificed. As the decisions were regarding the well-being of children, it was crucial to for the parents to unanimously agree on a decision.

Mixing formal and informal The Seongmisan community also combines informal and formal dialogues and meetings to make decisions. Board member role rotates around the group and democratic, open environment is encouraged. In order to maintain the informality and flat relationships, calling nicknames (regardless of titles, age) is a common feature in Seongmisan.

© The Hope Institute

The essence of Seongmisan community is its social capital. Social capital refers to “the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions”[ii]. According to Putnam, there are two types of social capital: “Bridging social capital refers to social networks that bring together people of different sorts, and bonding social capital brings together people of a similar sort.”

The social capital of Seongmisan community has great potential to create a sustainable future for the city, and provide fertile environment for social innovation. But to what extent is its impact? Will Seongmisan community serve as a needle point intervention (like Jaime Lerner’s idea of urban acupuncture in Brazil) that can transform urban life of Seoul? Will Seongmisan community go further than bonding social capital and bridge the social networks existing outside its physical space?

[Thank you to the Hope Institute for their contribution to this blog post.]

“Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website set up by a collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis in Kenya, after the post-election fall-out at the beginning of 2008, to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phones.

The traction of the website – which gathered 45,000 users in Kenya – catalysed the realisation amongst its developers that the platform had potential beyond Kenya’s borders and have relevance and use for others around the world. Since then, Ushahidi has grown from an ad hoc group of volunteers to a focussed organisation, comprising of individuals with a diverse span of experience ranging from human rights work to software development.

The goal is to create a platform that allows any person or organisation around the world to set up their own way to collect and visualise information, which can be customised for different locales and needs, and used to bring awareness to crises in their own region. The approach is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time.

At its core, Ushahidi is geared at disrupting and changing the traditional way that information flows, through building tools for democratising information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to share their stories. Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi’s Executive Director[i], observes that:

 “Ushahidi enables people to change how information flows. To enable regular people to be part of something, to be part of that narrative that is emerging. Things are in flux all the time, be it politically, be it socially, and technology allows [people] to participate and to connect with others.”

Openness, sharing and collaboration are key principles underpinning the approach. Communities form around each deployment, who are able to help each other map out problem areas and, in some more recent developments, also map out support i.e. where people are who are willing to assist. Feedback loops between deployers and their community provide an important incentive to engage is: those who report get alerts via SMS or Twitter which gives them a situational awareness of an area or an issue they care about.

Despite being described as “a child of collaboration on the internet”, Ushahidi is at its heart about stimulating and coordinating high impact, real-world action: in this sense, Ushahidi software can be seen as an “online complement to offline engagement.” Partnerships are critical in this regard: having a “concerted strategy of partners” that have a mandate to respond to the information that is crowdsourced is key to translating online activity and information into real-world action. For example, in the case of the Uchaguzi deployment (an outlet for participation for citizens and civil society to report on electoral offenses during the 2010 Kenya’s 2010 Constitutional Reform) it was through an important web of partnerships that reports were sent to mobilise response actors on ground including the electoral authorities, security personnel and community-based peace organisations.

Since its inception in 2008, the platforms has grown to over 20,000 deployments globally, and has been used around the world to coordinate responses to a wide range of events – in Mexican elections to report problems at polling stations to the electoral commission, to gathering information about harassment in Egypt, to flooding in Australia and fires in Russia. The Ushahidi Haiti Project (UHP), a volunteer effort to produce a crisis map after the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, represents an important proof of concept for the application of crisis mapping and crowdsourcing to large scale catastrophes. An independent evaluation[ii] underscored the power of Ushahidi software in coordinating human aid, particularly in early response to emergencies. This found that the UHP addressed key information gaps in the very early period of responses before the UN and other large organisations were operational by providing situational awareness and critical early information with a relatively high level of geographical precision, and by helping mobilise smaller NGOs, private funders and citizen actors to engage and appropriately target needs. The relevance of the response was aided by directly engaging affected Haitians in articulating their own needs and organising local capacity.

So, what challenges have been encountered, and what lessons have been learned in overcoming these? Improved internet access and connectivity speeds have played an important role in aiding uptake of the software, which had initially posed technological barriers in the Kenyan context. However, an arguably larger obstacle with greater traction than technology stems from organisational cultures which have resisted the call to ‘open up’ information – or “data hugging disorder.” In Kenya, developments at the level of state are aiding this situation, as government has made a concerted effort to open data in formats that developers can use – marking a “good step … a first in Africa.” Rotich observes that Kenya has its own ICT board and a minister of ICT who “acknowledges this tide of technology, and how it’s changing people’s lives. The great thing is they’re trying to see how they can use it to engage.”

Another challenge concerns how to incentivise engagement and sustained participation. Participation is less of a challenge for those whose deployments centre around a crisis, where there is usually a lot of media attention around a story. However, for “slow burn” issues – for example, keeping account of government’s provision of services – it can be harder to keep participation up. Here, Rotich notes, there is a real need for organisations to have a dedicated community director to build community and maintain engagement.

Rotich feels that one of the factors that stimulates innovation within their team is that they are “distributed and diverse” and “fundamentally virtual” – this allows them to bring in experience from many different parts of the world, and allows them to prototype and test their approach on a global scale. As testimony to their innovation capabilities, Ushahidi were recently recognised within the Future Quotient Report of the 50 Stars of Seriously Long-Term Innovation.

And where will the long-term lead? One idea involves widening the current focus – on data sharing and collaboration – to what Rotich calls “collaborative context-making.” In the future, they would like to be able to provide more tools for people to contextualise and curate information, and then stimulate collaborative problem-solving in a way that generates solutions that are relevant and tailored to the local context. With Crowdmap and SwiftRiver, Ushahidi hopes to assist anyone to collaborate on all phases of information flow.

Ushahidi: http://ushahidi.com/

“Well Told Story combines the power of good stories with strategy, creativity, deep analysis and hard science, to design and produce communications that spur positive social changes that can be proved and measured.”

The opening chapter

There’s a good story behind Well Told Story. It begins in Kenya, when the makers of a documentary TV series realised that the people they were trying to reach were those who were unlikely to have televisions, as well as the limitations of TV as a medium to convey complicated social issues and information in an engaging way that could lead to sustained behaviour change.  They started making comic strips out of still photographs from the TV programmes to send to people who expressed an interest after the TV show. These leaflets became so successful in their own right, as a means of information and behaviour change, that they decided to discard the TV show completely – and cut straight to the comic. They did this through the creation of a new business called Well Told Story.

They soon turned their attention to Kenyan youth: a group who make up a majority of the population (more than half of Kenyans are under 18, and nearly three quarters are under 30) and who display great innovativeness and entrepreneurial flair, yet who were rarely being served by the media in a productive, intelligent way. This meant a large proportion of the Kenyan population was left with a vast need – and hunger – for information.

They focussed on how they might use media to activate this population, and channel their energies towards innovation and enterprise. The solution was to engage Kenyan youth in a story via a multi-media approach, embodied by a monthly comic, a facebook page, downloads for mobile phones, and a daily syndicated radio show. The multi-media approach engages different segments of their young audience, and helps drive people towards more engaged forms of media participation, and real world action.

The story unfolds

The comic and parallel radio show, ShujaazFM, revolve around four characters: Boyie (DJ B), Maria Kim, Charlie Pele and Malkia. The main character 19-year-old Boyie, left school in 2009 but could not afford to go to college and remains job-less. He has the option to join a neighbourhood gang, who earn money through extortion, but he wants nothing to do with them. Instead he wants to help the members make something of their lives. So he sets up a secret pirate radio station in his bedroom and hacks into the airwaves of other radio stations and broadcasts a daily show Shujaaz FM (Heroes FM in Sheng, the Kenyan youth slang).

The show reaches out to Kenyan youth with practical ideas they can use to improve their lives. Boyie calls himself DJ B – his secret identity. He communicates to his listeners in Sheng and asks them to send him text messages with ideas on making money and better living. He in turn shares those ideas with youth around the country through his radio programme. The other characters are all fans of DJ B’s show and call in with stories and ideas of their own for him to share. These ideas then form the content of the daily Shujaaz FM radios show and are the stories in the monthly comic books, and the topics discussed on DJB’s Facebook page. The characters are an essential part of the approach, becoming trusted confidants to their audience. DJ B, for example, receives 100 calls a week.

 “With power and authority monopolized by an older generation that’s proven to be devoid of ideas, the underlying message of Shujaaz is it’s time for young Kenyans to take charge of their own futures.”[i]

The subjects that have been the focal point have ranged from seed soaking, to helping street children, to national cohesion, to hate speech.

The comic is distributed nationwide inside the Daily Nation newspaper and via thousands of Mpasa money kiosks in the Safari-com mobile phone network. Over half a million are in circulation every month, more than double the biggest national newspaper, with an estimated readership of 5 million reads a month, and 12.5 million have been distributed in the last two years. Their comics are “truly unique” in the media space: “it’s the right language, the right story about the world that our audience inhabits. We’re the only people to have drawn the slum … who validate these ordinary lives that young Kenyans are living.”[ii]

Alongside the comic book, Well Told Story produces DJB’s daily radio show which they syndicate to 23 FM stations every day – the only syndicated radio programme  in the country. The story also plays out on Facebook in a powerful way: with 50, 000 views per month to their Facebook page, and 650,000 conversations. This is helping Well Told Story to shift things from a relatively unmediated conversation, to a “crowdsourcing conversation that everybody can correspond to.”[iii]

A success story

Well Told Story is going from strength to strength, starting a new chapter for Kenya by winning an International Emmy Award, the country’s first, in Cannes in April 2012. The success of their model goes beyond an engaging multi-media approach – and can also be attributed to a sustainable and transferable business model, a young staff, and a focus on learning and improvement.

Well Told Story operates as a socially oriented business, not a charity. Around 40% of their costs are met by commercial partners, for example via product placement. The other 60% comes from work with likeminded development organisations who want to drive behaviour change. Each of the four characters bring a story with them each month, with each story representing the interests of one of their partners. They usually work with four partners a month, and have clear conditions for these partnerships: they don’t allow any partner to take more than a quarter of the content, and won’t work with partners whose messages are not felt to be in the best of interest of the audience, or whose messages they don’t believe in. Their young employees – a staff of 26, with an average age of 23, who research, write and draw the comics and produce the radio show and social media – ensure that the messages ‘speak’ to their audience.

A new character, an amateur detective, has joined the cast to help carry out a longitudinal research panel, to gather formative and baseline information as well as standing as a “a way of instantly taking the temperature of Kenyan youth.” Well Told Story are also conducting a randomised control trial with Georgetown University to do a controlled study to isolate the impact that Shujaaz is having on particular behaviours within a given timeframe. Previous tests about self-efficacy amongst young people who regularly read the comic have found a statistically relevant spike in the efficacy of regular readers. However, the challenge lies in moving people beyond inspiration and into action. At present, they’re spending time tweaking the design of the stories, and experimenting with ways to sustain a gentle pressure, and push people from self-belief into real world activity.

The approach has great potential for transferability, both in terms of its business model, medium and content (around 75% of their stories are considered applicable beyond the boundaries of Kenya – for example, those centring on entrepreneurialism or citizen agency and human rights) and the hope is to expand into other parts of east Africa, including Tanzania and Uganda.

Well Told Story: http://welltoldstory.co.ke/

- People are important –getting the right people around the table greatly enhances the ‘innovation’; the more cross-sector work that is done, the more ideas are shared and expertise mixed, the better the outcomes. The SIX Network, the Euclid Network, all these networks are a testament to the fact that people want to learn from each other

- Information needs to be accessible to everyone; open and shared – social innovation is about ideas that are shared amongst people; learning from others what works and what doesn’t work; it’s important for knowledge to be shared and disseminated as widely as possible, especially failures as it helps people really learn and understand – Infrastructure to help replicate and expand – we’re not only talking about the hard infrastructure such as internet connections, roads, etc, but finance and other types of ‘soft infrastructure’/platforms that create an environment that is ripe for social innovation is important. The support that Ashoka gives to its Fellows for example is a great example of this

- The environment created within a society and culture – this is very difficult to express in words, but people/organisations/cultures need to be willing to test out new ideas, be willing to fail, and be more creative in the way they work. The government/political context, the universities, civil society, private sector – all work in collaboration to create an ethos that is needed for social innovation to flourish. In Thailand, for example, there is a big push towards supporting innovation with the creation of the Thailand Social Enterprise Office (TSEO) and the Thai Health Promotion Foundation which is doing some really interesting work. The Thai government is keen to create and promote a culture of innovation, which looks really promising

- Locality is becoming a strong way for people to connect with each other in an increasingly globalised world. People are wanting to reconnect with their local communities and neighbourhoods; focus on building communities and increasing capacity in the place they reside. Look at the Slow Food movement around the world or community architecture initiatives like CODI in Thailand

- Individuals as decision makers in their own lives – increasingly there is a move towards individuals are being in charge of their own lives and destinies; empowering people to make their own decisions about their health, their life choices

- The media is a large player in promoting, supporting, and fostering social innovation. Social media is of course one of the best tools, but so is courting local/national media to one’s own advantage. People and organisations who are making a difference understand the importance of having the media on one’s side