[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]