Brock { Abroad }

During the first morning of the Kennisland Social Innovation Safari, Kwela Sabine Hermanns, a personal role model of mine and also an ambassador for Knowmads, asked us all a very valuable question. She asked us:
What does social innovation mean for you?

It was an incredibly valid question. Every day in my very sheltered environment, although a school for the world, words like social innovation, sustainability, co-creation, presencing, and many others fly out of our mouths that would make most people outside the program, or at least outside social change circles, say… “what in the world…?”
Christina Jordan, another personal hero, is collaborating with many others to solve that very question. What (in the world) does social innovation mean? Co-organizer of the Cosi10, Christina is working to connect socially innovative initiatives around the world over a three month time span. In a “simple face-to-face unconference event,” they hope to create a networking and learning process that allows people to collaborate and share impact strategies, skill development resources, and even develop revenue models to build thrivable social innovations.

Still, the question remains. What constitutes a social innovation? From my extensive research on the subject, I like this answer best. Taken from the guys over at Social Velocity, they state that social innovation is…
“…a whole group of big, ambitious, new ideas and models for solving social problems. Social innovation is about changing institutions, organizations, approaches, systems in fundamental ways so that we can fix the many problems facing us. It includes things like:

• Creating new financial vehicles where nonprofit and for profit organizations that are working to solve social problems can have ready access to all kinds of funding (seed funding, growth capital, debt, etc.)
• Removing the hurdles placed in front of organizations working to solve social problems (accounting standards, IRS regulations, etc.)
• Restructuring philanthropy to be more effective at supporting real change
• Revamping government so that it can support, rather than thwart, change leaders
• Reforming nonprofit organizations to break out of the starvation cycle and become more effective at creating social impact

And that’s just the beginning.
Social innovation is big. It’s bold. It is a movement of people and organizations from all three sectors (public, private, nonprofit) who are taking a completely different approach, who are turning the status quo on its head, who are building new systems, who are asking hard questions, who are creating a new way forward.”

Finally, attempting to answer the question I first addressed, in one word, social innovation means for me connecting. It means a better connection to self and in turn a better connection to the world around you. It entails understanding that everything is connected to everything else and searching for the required passion to connect work to play.

The Knowmadic Learning Lab, in collaboration with the Hub Summer School initiative on the Knowmads platform, is my attempt to strengthen the power of connection, to be part of the social innovation movement, and to connect to you, wherever you are. We hope to see you on at the end of this month for a great day of playing with our passions at the Knowmadic Learning Lab!

The Social Innovation Safari in Amsterdam was an absolute hit. As a follow up to a week of imaginative innovations that came out of five local project-based assignments, I’m creating a blog post harvesting all the great things that came out of the Safari. Taken from the Kennisland website, here are the cases:

• Jeugdzorg Amsterdam (Office for Juvenile Care) is a looking for ways to innovate in their complex organisation. What is going wrong? Interview the people involved and design simple intervention for a complex problem.
• IJburg is one of the youngest neighbourhood in Amsterdam and already facing serious challenges: small enterpreneurs are having a hard time surviving, different social groups don’t mix. A group of active residents of IJburg want to make their neighbourhood more livable and need your help!
• Filmmuseum Amsterdam will be moving to a new location (Amsterdam Noord) and wants to involve the neighbourhood. What ways can be found to make this cultural institution part of the neighbourhood and how can the people living there profit from this and add their value?
• Mixacademy: An alternative art academy in the center of Amsterdam. What can they do to stimulate creative entrepreneurschip and offer chances to talented people without focusing on prior education?
• Weekend School: A one-day extra-curricular educational program that is looking for a way to better connect their alumni to each other and also to the school’s network.

I’m especially focusing on the project I took on with the Mix Academy.

The Mix Academy, in simple terms, is an incredibly open alternative school for the arts located in the heart of the city. Recognizing that artists need to be entrepreneurs in order to reach their public, it trains students from all walks of life to discover their true self through their creativity. Whether it is through free painting, graphic design, 3D work, illustration, or photography, Mix Academy allows the individual to build a network around them that can launch them into the world. Combining high and low art through a very mixed curriculum, the Mix academy is a concept I greatly believe in.

Which is why it was so easy to take on this assignment that combined my interest in innovative education with art. Ralph de Lange, the initiator of the Mix, is a lovable character who was an absolute joy to work with. Strongly believing in his message that he wants to spread to the world, my team of six spent three days (and nights) working in parks, cafes, and even my apartment one very long evening. Here is the presentation full of innovative ideas that we gave to a full room of guests, including the local media, on the final evening:

For the full list of presentations that came out of the week-long program, see here.

Here are some other resources I’ve harvested on the final outcomes from the Safari:

An article written by Pieter Hilhorst of De Volkskrant, an Amsterdam newspaper. (Dutch, but can be translated)

The beginning of a great blog series on the Safari by Tage Skotvold, a participant and new friend.

An article by Hannah Aukes

Photos: KL Safari First Days

KL Safari Mix Academy

KL Safari BBQ

KL Safari Closing Event

A blog on the Safari by Patrick Veenhoff

Have I missed any other good sources? If so, let me know!

find what is sacred.

believe in belief.

be inquisitive.

You’re beginning to ask bigger questions of yourself and the world you are encountering along the way. Suddenly, you ask of yourself: What do I really want to get out of this journey?

Up until then, you feel that you were merely stumbling around without actually paying attention to making sure that each foot went after the other. Your feet still stumble, but at least you attempt to be more aware of it. You have faith that those feet will keep taking you forward…

I like to call it {abroad} way of thinking…

I left on my own pilgrimage in search of my passion. I wanted to grow as a writer, but also as a person. I wanted to find my story in the telling.

What you say and do, how you communicate, are merely your forms of expressing yourself. Information gets lost, ‘in translation’. It begins taking on new dimensions from the completely unique perceptions each individual applies to some very universal concepts. In other words, everyone has their own definition of the truth and each individual must define it for themselves. It makes the world go round. It’s how things are created, innovated, imagined, and explored. It’s the art of dreaming and the science of doing. It’s understanding that everyone is in search of their own truth, and no two truths will be the same.

Disappearing from the world and into myself, I was able to begin to express where my heart was. I needed long-term solitude free of everyday distractions that were keeping me from knowing where my path should lead me. I realized I couldn’t possibly “know”, but I could always be experiencing.

After walking over 400 kilometers, I felt an amazing sense of accomplishment. However, The feeling was soon followed by an immediate sense of emptiness. A feeling that the journey was somehow over.

After a little over a week interacting with people as little as possible, I was beginning to feel a lot more comfortable in solitude. I was also beginning to see it in my writing, or rather, my confidence to do so. My confidence to create. Not just create writing, but create whatever and whoever I wanted to be, to live life in a new and exciting way. I was finally aware that there were infinite possibilities and if I was open to creating them, I could really begin to change who I was into who I want to be.

I began feeling happier. I felt a sense of newfound clarity breathing in fresh mountain air and carrying everything I owned on my back. Each step brought me closer to my destination, and one foot couldn’t go before the other. It was a practice in meditation on all levels. It was simple. Time didn’t seem to matter and was broken up by eating, writing, thinking, and not thinking. From one village to the next. From morning to night.

“never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking”

-nietzsche

I had a big question looming on my mind as I embarked on the journey. Where is the path taking me next? I was unsure if moving to a city full of vices was really what I was looking for. Wasn’t I supposed to travel the world? Wasn’t I supposed to spend a spontaneously simple life out of a backpack meeting new faces without any schedule or plan? It almost seemed as if I was just throwing the towel in and letting whatever happened… well, happen. Which, don’t get me wrong, isn’t a bad thing. As a matter of fact, It’s how I found myself here in Amsterdam, actually.

There is a big difference between leading your life and letting your life lead you, and I was beginning to see that I was going wrong because of one major problem. I was letting things just “happen” to me instead of actually making things “happen.” The problem was that I didn’t know how to make my life really be what I pictured it to be. I was staring at a blank canvas and hoping the Mona Lisa would just appear. In a perfect world, maybe. But we don’t live in a perfect world and I hope that’s why you’re reading this right now. Because you actually believe you can do something about it.

It’s by taking one step after the other, one stroke of the paintbrush at a time and being open to changing course when you think you were meant to do something else. It’s being open to yourself that will give you the answers and there is simply no possible way you can know what you’re supposed to do except for this very moment that, in this case, you have dedicated to yourself to in this moment, reading this very blog. It’s a choice that you’ve made. Fortunately, I can not tell you how to make any choice in your life.

It’s fortunate that we have that freedom to make those decisions for ourselves, because nobody knows you better than you do. No matter how much people love you, you understand that no one but yourself can possibly know what is best for you and it is important to take that time in solitude to evaluate yourself as an individual free from any job, person, thing, obstacle, or limit.

It’s about taking the time to take care of your garden instead of thinking someone else will take care of it for you, or furthermore, that it will take care of itself.

I just took  a long bike ride through Rotterdam to say goodbye. I even took some photos of the brute beauty. The train ticket is bought. The bag is packed. I find myself yet again in another moment of movement. Read the rest of this entry »

I felt stuck. Not just in the literal sense, but I hadn’t made a great sequence of movements since I began my work in France. London didn’t really count. It seemed more like a vacation where I arrived by air, drank beer, and spent more money than I’d wanted to. Usually, I’m much more, well, cheap, but perhaps making some extra cash on the road working long hours in the middle of nowhere with sick kids made me go a little stir-crazy, I don’t know. Anyways, I fueled my splurging spree by going to see the musical ‘Wicked’ in the West End, buying new shoes, and spending close to the same amount in cocktails in the up-and-coming and very bohemian Brick Lane neighborhood. The museums were free, of course, and I thoroughly enjoyed my days spent at the Tate Modern Museum of Art finally seeing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and spending the afternoon looking at the Mummies of Ancient Egypt with a Croatian girl who taught me just as much about Ancient Croatia. Mostly, though, London just made me want to buy overpriced things, want to eat overpriced food, and in general, want things I was forgetting I really didn’t need.

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Reykjavik was a long, rainy, fairly cold, and very expensive 24 hour visit. (even though it’s a recession there, I still have the dollar…) I instantly made a friend from my friendly neighboring province of Ontario who I spent the day with wandering around the provincial city that 60% of Iceland’s 300,000 people inhabit.  After warming up in one of the many geothermal pools located in Iceland and getting a shower, we made plans to go to the Reykjavik International Film Festival opening night, still currently taking place. It was difficult to make a connection with the contact I’d made from couch surfing, but by six p.m. I was contacted by his roommate to inform me that Asgeir had fallen in love and was currently touring the ring of Iceland with his new girl. Nonetheless, the invitation still stood and I arrived to their home after the film, Another Planet, based on the hardships of youth in developing countries; instantly I was offered a beer by a fellow couch surfer, a girl from Rome, who had been staying with the four boys for a week. What ensued was a broad conversation around world politics, hypocrisy, mushroom cultivation in Iceland, psychology, and more topics so off-topic that they ended up relevant. I didn’t go to bed until one or two in the morning and had to leave by four to catch an early flight. But, thank you Oskar for the bed and for killing your television to silence the mass media hysteria; it’s what makes my mother think the Middle East is somehow more dangerous than anywhere else in the world.

There’s something very thrilling about arriving in a city; whether it’s a city you know and love, would love to know, or somewhere in between. I knew I loved Amsterdam after a brief visit here back in 2006, but was excited about coming back. My first plan of action was to call Bobby, my Bulgarian host.  I took a moment to listen to a street musician, or “busker”, and even stopped to smell the tulips! I was unsuccessful. There was a coffee shop next door that wafted out the delicious aroma of a plant that may not have been as pretty as those tulips, but definitely had its own charms. I looked down to my watch. I was in complete disbelief! Three hours had passed since I began staring down all the slim buildings that graced the canals lined with bicycles, bikes, bars, babes, and boys alike.
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