Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
For the past couple of months, we’ve been thinking about who we are, what we do and what we want to achieve. Aided by Rachel Botsman and with great input from a number of people in the social innovation community, we’ve been refining the way ASIX should define its identity and purpose.
This blog post sets out the basic story. We’d be keen to hear from anyone with any thoughts and reactions to the way we’ve defined our identity and purpose. And if you haven’t already, sign up at the ASIX website and register as a ‘changemaker’, part of the steadily growing community of people becoming more active and engaged.
ASIX has had a busy start and some early successes. So a process of reflection was timely. Not that you want to do too much of that, of course – navel-gazing is rarely productive. But a little bit of time to think and regroup at this stage of a start-up venture is never a bad thing.
So a few things have become clear…
- The Innovation Exchange (ASIX) is all about the people. Our ambition is to create spaces and places where people with an often unusual mix of skills, resources, ideas and energy can connect and do business. But the emphasis is clear…as the ‘tagline’ suggests, we’re keen to ‘accelerate changemakers’, help people to be more successful faster than they might otherwise be on their own.
- We’ve also confirmed the need to create a platform for social innovation in Australia. What exactly does that mean? Well, it means that, rather than being direct players ourselves, we’re interested in making it easier for other changemakers – innovators, entrepreneurs, investors – to succeed. And we do that by making it easier to find each another. We’re in the business, I guess, of creating those spaces rather than trying to compete with the people who want to invent and create. Maybe “platform” isn’t quite the right word…maybe the analogy is more “town square” or even more basically, “shared space”.
- But whatever you call it, the space you end up creating is only as useful as the other people and the services, information and opportunities that you find when you get there. The space will grow more useful as those services and opportunities grow over time, often created by the very people who come to add their ideas and resources to the mix. ASIX can build or encourage some of those services and resources, and we’re defining some priority areas to concentrate on. We want to be almost a curator of this growing mix of services and assets that the social innovation community in Australia will build and share.
- Finally, as we thought about the best way to help, we confirmed our instinct to focus on people who are at the earliest stage of turning great ideas for social innovation into viable projects. Often the real gap is the inability to make relatively modest investments of time, finance and expertise to nurture the spark of creativity and passion into a sustained ‘burn’ of innovation that will go on and have a real impact. I think we can play a part in making that happen more systematically than it does at the moment.
So, our vision is
TO ENABLE AUSTRALIA’S CHANGEMAKERS TO ACCELERATE PIONEERING EARLY-STAGE IDEAS INTO POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE.
The key elements are all there – concentrate on people, connect to accelerate their success and try and help them as early in the process as possible.
To make that happen, our mission is
TO BUILD NETWORKS THAT CONNECT AUSTRALIA’S SOCIAL CHANGEMAKERS WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE, TOOLS, INVESTMENTS AND KNOWLEDGE.
In other words, our work will be all about filling the ‘shared space’ with a rich and unusual mix of people, services and opportunities to which everyone can contribute.
And our values fell out naturally as we refined out ambition and focus…
…empowering, pioneering, making the process of connecting people more systematic, being as open and collaborative as possible and, crucially, learning and sharing more about what works and why.
The basic ASIX story is simple.
Like a lot of other countries, Australia has a pretty well developed system of innovation in science and industrial R&D. But we have barely started to think about approaching the urgent and often daunting tasks of social innovation with the same level of rigour.
We need to invent a social innovation system that makes it easier for innovators and entrepreneurs in the social space to have the kind of impact in this space that scientists, investors and inventors can have on our economic and science goals. ASIX is both a part of that emerging system and is keen to play a role, with many others, in helping to invent the system itself.
Similarly, we were spurred by the realisation that in Australia our problem often isn’t a dearth of ideas or passion. There are plenty of people and organisations out there who have plenty of both and a fair helping of commitment too.
The gap is knowing how to connect to others who have the skills, assets and energy that can turn an idea into action. ASIX can help to fill that gap and avoid the risk of good ideas going to waste for want of some early connection and modest investment.
And we’re driven too by a sense that innovators and entrepreneurs don’t have enough impact on our national conversations about the big social dilemmas and opportunities we face – climate change, new ways to learn and acquire skills, making our cities sustainable, redesigning our public and social services, for example. Too often they are fringe players in the mainstream debates about better ways to tackle the social dimension of our lives and our communities.
ASIX is part of a rising instinct for new thinking and action around these ideas. Working with a bunch of existing and new players, like , many of Australia’s successful nonprofit organisations and new ones like the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and the School for Social Entrepreneurs, we think we can be part of the process.
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Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
The comment about fashionable geek issues is just silly and unworthy. What are you suggesting, that the technology dimension is unimportant and should be ignored?
For the rest, I see three distinct points in these exchanges.
1 Is ASIX ideologically opposed to, and therefore deliberately excluding, parents and mentors and health consumers and so on? Obviously not. Vern's claim is unsubstantiated. I don't know how many people who are becoming engaged with this conversation, including those who are adding themselves to the 'changemaker' list are in those categories. Maybe a lot, many not. But are they being excluded? Of course not. Do we have enough and are we doing enough to search them out and engage them? Probably not. So Vern's complaint is valid and valuable to that extent. But then again, we've only been going for about two minutes, so let's not write off the entire endeavour on the basis of that sliver of very early experience.
2 Second issue is about the relatively weight an initiative like ASIX puts on individuals versus institutions? It's largely a false dichotomy of course, as we need both. Geoff Mulgan and The Young Foundation talk about the need to nurture the 'bees' (individual entrepreneurs, consumers etc) and the "trees" (larger institutions with assets, resources and influence). The work starts to get interesting when they meet. The relative balance between bees and trees in terms of engagement, funding and the rest is a legitimate concern and Vern is right to stake out the territory from his perspective.
3 The last issue is a the perennial concern that too often, funding and investment, both public and private, tends to flow to institutions and structured interests and not to communities, networks and individuals. Vern has long had a concern that his own entrepreneurial work has failed to secure the kind of support it deserves and needs, often as a function of old-fashioned public funding mechanisms that tend to favour the institutional model. I share the concern and it's something I work on to some extent as part of my 'day job' with Cisco and the contributions we make to policy and public management reform. It's one of those points of contact between social innovation and the policy and governance system that might be a fruitful place to do more work.
But this last issue especially is a much bigger challenge that the more modest ambitions ASIX has set itself, And frankly, ASIX may not necessarily be the best place to confront the larger structural and cultural habits that sustain the situation that Vern is criticising.
Maybe if ASIX survives and starts to work, and if we keep in mind many of the exhortations that Vern is offering, there is a contribution it can make to address the bigger blockages in our funding and innovation systems. But we're only just starting.
The criticisms and questions in Vern's various contributions are all valid and reasonable. This is a contested space and these ideas are not settled or bound to a simple and settled model. I suspect talk of a social innovation 'sector' or even 'community' might be premature and not all that helpful.
But the underlying premise in some of the critique that somehow ASIX has an ideological bias against including, or working with consumers and those with direct 'field' experience of many of the challenge to which social innovation might prove to be a useful response, is just wrong.
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
Martin, you have twisted the meaning of my words to protect your ASIX baby. I've said ASIX is not interested in consumers, users of services, parents, volunteers, residents, carers or anyone else who acts in society in a voluntary capacity and is without taxpayer or philanthropic money.
I stand by that. It is just plain true. Your argument that you do not 'actively exclude' such people, has as much validity as the argument that a minimum wage worker in a fast food outlet is not 'actively excluded' from becoming President of the USA. It is about capacity and resources.
What I said was "If you are a service user or parent or resident, you are not important to ASIX, because you have no capacity or resources."
In both my personal experience, and in my observations from afar, I stand by this conclusion.
Vern Hughes
A question for Lauren
"Well done ASIX on a clear and inspiring vision and mission, and for bringing your changemaker community with you on the journey."
What is the "changemaker community" that has been brought along on the journey?
Which consumers or users in the field of intellectual disability or ageing or school reform have been been brought along?
Which parents and mentors in indigenous communities?
Which health consumers and recipients of Centrelink benefits have been brought along?
Or do you mean young professionals in their career roles as managers and consultants?
This is a vital point, so I'd be grateful for your clarification here.
Vern
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
I beg to differ, Martin. It is NOT all about the people.
It is about capacity and resources. You are interested in organisations which have capacity and resources, read, public funding, read, service provider organisations - or research and management entities for service provider organisations.
You are not interested in individual residents, parents, volunteers, carers, or neighbours - people who are actually the principal generators of social capital and civil society.
Hence your list of partners: Centre for Social Impact ($12.5 million in public funding), Non Profit Australia (x million in public funding for a voice for large provider organisations).
Here's the reality that social innovators must wrestle with ... Governance and funding systems in schools, hospitals, aged care, employment services, disability, mental health, family services and indigenous affairs systematically exclude the very people who have a stake in social innovation - consumers. They are exclusively provider and practitioner-centred systems.
Take, for example, the Commonwealth's new Primary Health Care Organisations, 15 of which are to be set up by July 2011. What do you imagine the governance structure of these entities might be in order to facilitate integrated preventative consumer-centred health care? That's right, the PHCOs will consist entirely of providers and practitioners, who hold blatant conflicts of interest, with no consumers. Just what kind of innovation in health care might we expect from these bodies?
The same pattern is repeated in every field of social policy and social provision. NGOs that operate in these fields are either service delivery instruments for governments, or they are unfunded. Those that are providers have resources. Those that are associations of residents or parents or volunteers or neighbours are without resources.
Which of these organisations is ASIX interested in?
And here's the critical point: the emerging social innovation industry is ideologically and culturally blind to this structural impediment to innovation. ASIX and its partner organisations are provider-centred entities - or research and management entities for provider organisations. User and consumer based ideas and organisations are excluded (in practice if not in rhetoric) from what ASIX calls the social innovation agenda.
If you are a service user or parent or resident, you are not important to ASIX, because you have no capacity or resources.
Vern Hughes
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
As a passionate member of the ASIX Changemaker community, I disagree with Vern's comments. More so than any organisation I have been associated with in the past, it is very clear that ASIX's focus is about the people in its community - as was clearly demonstrated in a successful Social Innovation Camp in March which brought together passionate people to develop ideas they had developed at a 'consumer' level, with the aid of willing mentors from all levels of the business community who there there because of their own passions, not because of obligation to a corporate partnership.
Similarly, during the process of strategic development ASIX has gone through, which Martin describes above, there have been numerous points where ASIX has reached out to its Changemaker community to ensure that the vision of the organisation is one that those people actually identify with and feel passionate about.
It may be true that many social sector organisations are hamstrung by their need to access funding and comply with high levels of governance, but I think the social innovation sector in its truest form aims to reinvent that structure altogether, with new mechanisms of funding such as crowd-sourcing and peer-to-peer lending. And ultimately social innovations strive to maintain their relevance at all levels of society so that those both with and without resources can find an avenue to contribute.
Well done ASIX on a clear and inspiring vision and mission, and for bringing your changemaker community with you on the journey.
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
"Well done ASIX on a clear and inspiring vision and mission, and for bringing your changemaker community with you on the journey."
What is the "changemaker community" that has been brought along on the journey?
Which consumers or users in the field of intellectual disability or ageing or school reform have been been brought along?
Which parents and mentors in indigenous communities?
Which health consumers and recipients of Centrelink benefits have been brought along?
Or do you mean young professionals in their career roles as managers and consultants?
This is a vital point, so I'd be grateful for your clarification here.
Vern
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
I would suggest that all attendees at the SI Camp are the changemaker community, supplemented by all people who are registered as Changemakers on this site - in building this community ASIX is widening the network of people passionate about social innovation and helping them form connections with each other and collaborate.
It seems like you have a very specific idea of what social innovation consists of, which only includes certain things and excludes everything else. For me, social innovation is an innovative new concept or method that contributes to the way our society operates as a whole, by either correcting an imbalance somewhere in the system directly, or creating change in behaviours or attitudes which can in turn support innovations for more marginalised members of our society.
I guess the point is ASIX is an open door and there are no qualities that exclude someone from being a social innovator, least of all their career. It's important to drive 'bottom-up' innovation, but as Ezio Manzini suggests, the mechanism needs to be both top-down and bottom-up to truly take hold. Without awareness at government and industry level, and a groundswell at the grassroots level, it will be difficult to really create impact. I think ASIX is enabling its current changemakers to mobilise so that they can in turn assist in mobilising the groups you speak of above.
Re: Accelerating social changemakers: it’s all about the people
The groups I refer to the ones listed by Martin - 'schools, hospitals, education departments, ageing'.
Or, better still, Charlie Leadbeater's list of key terrains for social innovation - families, the alienated young (who are not young professionals usually), people with disabilities, health consumers, and the ageing.
The reason Charlie lists these as the key groups and issues, is that these are areas where governments cannot solve the problems. They are, by definition, hard to do. That is why social innovators should address them.
But my point is that ASIX does not address these issues, and your comments, Lauren, show they are not your issues either.
Instead, ASIX seems interested in the fashionable geek issues, such as online consultation mechanisms for the IT literate.
And between these two sets of issues - the Charlie Leadbeater list, and the ASIX list - there is huge social, cultual and ideological divide.
Vern