Bricolage: recombining ideas and people

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來自 University of Cape Town 的課程

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

302 個評分

University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

302 個評分

This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC

從本節課中

Getting out of your comfort zone

By nature the world of social innovation is made of crossing boundaries, bringing together different actors, resources, spaces, but it can be overwhelming. Part of our challenge on the journey to becoming changemakers is to learn how to become comfortable with discomfort and how in the social innovation space where you take yourself into spaces and you surround yourself with people that you normally do not engage with. Understanding how we define differences using cultural, sociological, psychological and spiritual lenses and what the nature of the differences is helps to develop tools for getting out of your comfort zone. It takes a little bit of courage because it makes you uncomfortable, but that’s how you build the competencies, the personal resilience to engage with difference when we do go and drive for innovations or we look to make differences in communities that are unlike us or operate in a different way.

RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 36:31

Bricolage: recombining ideas and people3:52

Thinking about difference7:08

Engaging difference3:41

Negotiating difference8:51

Reflecting with RLabs: comfort zones12:17

與講師見面

François Bonnici
Director
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Warren Nilsson
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Marlon Parker
Founder
RLabs

[MUSIC]

Social innovation rarely involves ideas that are entirely brand new.

Thinkers and researchers like Geoff Mulgan and Frances Westley

emphasise that social innovation almost always comes from Bricolage.

What's Bricolage?

Bricolage involves taking aspects of ideas or

systems or models and bringing them together,

recombining them in new ways rather than coming up with something entirely new.

So, for example, you might take aspects of the formal legal system and

then elements from counseling and negotiation, you bring them together and

you've created a model of mediation.

Or you might take aspects of a formal banking and lending system, and

to take elements from kind of community cultures of mutual support,

bring them together and you have created a peer-based lending model,

very similar to what the Grameen Bank is made famous in Bangladesh.

One of my favorite organizations in the world and they're also masters

of bricolage, I think, is called Santropol Roulant, and this in Montreal.

They've been around since the 90s, and

they started life as a fairly small Meals-on-Wheels organization.

Meals-on-Wheels simply involves some people cooking and

delivering meals on wheels to people who may not be able to do that for

themselves because they're living with a loss of autonomy of some sort.

There's nothing new about that idea at the time,

Meals-on-Wheels had been around since World War II.

But Santropol Roulant had a little bit of a twist,

most Meals-on-Wheels programmes are older people cooking and

delivering meals to even older people, that's the typical pattern.

Santropol Roulant brought together ideas around youth development into this model,

and created a really intergenerational Meals-on-Wheels programme.

So a lot of young people coming, not only cooking and delivering the meals but

managing and running the organization itself.

And this little innovation at the time became one of the most vibrant and

successful social innovations bases in Canada, over the last 20 years.

So many, many different kinds of programmes have evolved out of this and

continue to do so, many different sorts of community benefits.

Well, the biggest one was probably in the 2000s when the organization decided to

think a little more broadly about food security and sustainability and

started experimenting with urban gardening and agriculture and the whole food chain.

And since then has become quite an expert,

a go to expert around urban agriculture and sustainability.

This all sounds great, do some bricolage, get a couple of ideas,

put them together on paper, there you go.

In practice, it's a little harder than that.

And that's because when you're bringing ideas together,

aspects of ideas together, when you're doing this recombining,

this bricolage, you're also bringing people together.

And you're often bringing them together from very different social spaces.

So you're asking people to cross significant bridges and barriers and

boundaries.

And these might be cultural, ethnic, professional, language, etc.

And most of us aren't so great at this.

And even Santropol Roulant, quite experienced by then, had

difficulty as they started doing more and more work around sustainable agriculture.

The kinds of people that were attracted to the organization then were different.

They had different interests,

they brought different technical kinds of knowledge, different ways of doing things.

And they didn't integrate that easily into the organization at first, but

over time, as they stuck with it, what was a bit of a tension actually became another

powerful force for innovation and did come together.

And I think that that's representative of very good social innovators.

And so part of our challenge on the journey to becoming social innovators is

to learn how to become comfortable with discomfort, and

that's what we want to look at this week.

How do we become better at engaging with diversity?

How do we become bridges across these significant social divides?

[MUSIC]

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