I attended the first day of the Regional Innovation Forum 2009 held at the Portland Expo Center on Friday. A blog was created which has some videos and participant comments. I participated in the Social Innovations track which was led by Amy Pearl, Executive Director and co-founder of Springboard Innovation. The track was dedicated to exploring ways that individuals can make a difference in the world by creating innovative solutions to problems. Before going into the specific presentations and discussions held, I want to point out a technique that we were asked to use for introducing ourselves. In the style of her Native American tribe, Jolene Estimo of the Warm Springs reservation, introduced herself to the forum by briefly relating who her parents are and a bit about where they come from. We were asked to do the same in our introductions. I cannot underestimate the value of this technique. It not only opened people up, but added a sense of sacred-ness to our small group discussions.
Social Innovations Track - Morning Session
Amy Pearl got the Social Innovations track going with an inspiring introduction where she pointed out that we are the ones who are the social innovators. We didn’t come to the forum to just listen and hear what ‘other’ people are doing. We came to be the change-makers ourselves. She then introduced two local social entrepreneurs/innovators: Shane Endicott, founder of Our United Villages, and Amy Sacks, founder of The Pixie Project.
Our United Villages can be thought of as a sustainable catalyst organization for community action. After witnessing crime and thoughtlessness in his Portland neighborhood, Shane got together with other neighbors to brainstorm solutions. He told about a kid, I’ll call him Dave, who, when neighbors were asked about him, was described as someone to stay away from, always trouble. People seemed to know Dave, but no one seemed to really know about him. So they decided to approach him and ask what it is he would like if he could have anything. When he was approached with this question, Dave anwered “A million dollars, a motorcycle and braces.” The neighborhood group knew that they couldn’t give him the money, he was too young (fourteen I believe) for a motorcycle, but maybe they could raise the money for his braces. So they did that and a local orthodontist agreed to cut the price of the work from over $4,000 to an even $2,000. And he agreed to do the work even before they had raised all of the money!
Some time after getting the braces, Dave was seen walking down the street with some of his friends, when they approached a house where a woman was cleaning out her garage. Bicycles and other things were in the driveway. As they passed, Dave told the woman that if it wasn’t for who she was (part of the neighborhood that had helped him get braces), he would have stolen the bicycles. Shane pointed out to us that although Dave had not been changed in some way, what they had done had changed his relationship with his neighbors. This eventually led to his starting Our United Villages.
An important element of Shane’s organization is that it is sustainable. They do not operate on any grant money at all! Instead, he created The ReBuilding Center which salvages construction and remodeling materials donated to the organization. It is (from their website) “the largest non-profit waste-reduction facility (by volume) in North America, diverting 8 tons of reusable building materials from landfills each day.” The funds generated from the Center are used to fund Our United Villages projects.
What really sold me on this organization, however, was Shane’s statement about how everything they have learned is available to anyone to start community projects or even a rebuilding center in another city for free. He’s not about making money off of this but about building a stronger community fabric in our world.
The next local speaker was Amy Sacks of The Pixie Project, an animal adoption center and non-profit pet supply store. Amy has been taking care of neglected animals since her college days and started The Pixie Project because of the large number of pets that are euthanized every year. She also had the idea to make the organization self-sustainable and the pet supply store is the primary funding vehicle for that goal. What I found particularly inspiring besides the great work she’s doing for animals, is that she thought of partnering with Outside In, a Portland organization devoted to helping at-risk youth, kids who were or are living on the street. Outside In kids are learning business retailing by helping out in the Pixie Project pet store while some of the animals are watched in the Outside In’s Virginia Woof doggy day-care center. Bringing together at-risk youth with at-risk animals! What a beautiful idea!
We concluded the morning session by having discussions at each table. At my table, among others I met Louie Piu of the Warm Springs Reservation, Barbara Gerke who twitters @futurenow, Larry Greene of Navigating Our Future. We didn’t have much time to get into discussion after the personal introductions but one of the themes that did come out, and which was my inquiry for the discussion group, was how we can cross boundaries, whether they be socio-economic, ethnic, geographic, or other. This topic came up later in a discussion with others in the track and seemed to be of interest to a number of people. I brought it up because I see our American society changing drastically right now. President Obama has essentially laid down the gauntlet and stated that we must work together, across party lines, across all divisions. His reaching out to Iran, e.g., is so welcome after such a dry period in international relations. I can’t help but recall the reaction I received in my own neighborhood when last year I went door-to-door handing out a brochure that I had carefully crafted to welcome neighbors to a “discussion course” on global warming. Based on the Discussion Course curriculum developed by the Northwest Earth Institute, I thought that this course would be a great way to engage my neighbors in meaningful discussions as well as give us a friendly place to meet and get to know each other. To my surprise, no one in the neighborhood responded! A couple had conflicts, but hey people, we’re neighbors! This wasn’t a Democrat vs. Republican thing, which one of my neighbors implied it was. I recall this because in some sense there is a significant privacy boundary that I was apparently trying to cross in getting my neighbors together to discuss global warming and what we each can do about it.
Social Innovations Track - Afternoon Session
The afternoon was where most of the really great discussion took place, although I must say that conversations I had throughout the day, from prior to the forum introduction until the train ride home, were fruitful and inspiring. Amy Pearl introduced several speakers to the Social Innovations session and each of those speakers then took their place at one one of the tables in the room, where we were allowed to go from table to table and participate in discussions and ask questions. This format turned out to be great! Getting a little introduction to the person and their organization or project was perfect for deciding where to spend my time. The afternoon was just like the morning: oriented toward discussion following inspiring presentation, with a lot more time allocated to discussion in the afternoon.
I spent most of my time at the Life By Design table led by it’s Program Manager, Karen Shimada. This organization helps people in the latter half of life (us baby-boomers primarily) find their passion, design a plan to achieve their objectives and engage in the community. This approach is very appealing to many of us boomers who have been working for years to raise a family and/or grow in our profession and still feel a need to give back and become liberated from the dog-eat-dog world. At the table were a mix of very interesting people including Jim Newcomer, who has the idea of creating a cadre of experienced business people who can be brought in as consultants to get innovative ventures off the ground (I hope I’m characterizing this correctly!), Miriam Lange, a multi-talented coordinator, trainer and facilitator, an attorney whose name I failed to get who wants to bridge inter-generational communication, Matthew Spicer, an architect and old acquaintence who used to live in the same Massachusetts town as me and Beatrice Benne of ProjectDX, an innovative web-service-based tool for communities to manage sustainable resource usage.
One of the outcomes from this afternoon is that I will definitely be attending the Springboard Innovation Forum on April 8th at the Urban Grind Coffeehouse in NE Portland where there will be presentations and discussions about online tools for social innovation. Randy White, creator of BrightNeighbor.com, will I believe be one of the presenters. Although Randy spoke in the Social Innovations track, I didn’t get a chance to sit at his table and talk with him, so that’s something I’m looking forward to doing on April 8th.
Following up with Life By Design is another one of my outcomes. I’m intrigued about working with this organization that wants to capture the excitement of baby boomers to give back to the world. With my own experience in software development and training, I believe there are innovative ways in which I can use my skills and interests to make a difference.
I also talked with Laura Peterson, founder and Executive Director of Hands To Hearts International, an organization, from their website, “dedicated to improving the health and well-being of orphaned and vulnerable children and economically-disadvantaged women around the globe.” I spoke of what Amon Munyaneza and the Africa Mission Alliance is planning on accomplishing with Hope Village in Rwanda. There seemed to be a lot of synergy between these two organizations and I pointed Laura to the AMA website for further information.
Stephen Schneider Presentation
In the evening, after walking the floor of the Better Living Show, I was rewarded for staying around by hearing the renowned climatologist, Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University speak. What a joy it was to listen to someone who was a joint recipient for the Nobel Peace Prize along with the other authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His message was that we must continue grassroots and civic involvement to push for greater regulations and to develop sustainable solutions that will reduce the effects of climate change. It is too late (by about thirty years) to avoid negative effects but it is not too late to avoid catastrophic effects which will certainly occur if we don’t do anything. Dr. Schneider’s talk was so lucid and convincing that I can only point readers to his site, ClimateChange.net to read up on his work rather than try to convey it in as clear a manner as he does in person.
Summary
The Regional Innovation Forum 2009 could be a game-changing and life-changing event for those of us lucky enough to attend. The question is, what will each of us do to make sure that what we learned is not forgotten? My answer to this is to start taking action, now. In addition to going to future events such as the Springboard Innovation Forum on April 8th, I want to bring together others who want to be committed to a sustainable future and create something lasting. Maybe it’s an organization that, like BrightNeighbor.com, will use web technologies to reach across divides to bring people together. Maybe the organization will become sustainable by employing creative ways to solve local, community issues and use incoming funds to further more projects, the way Our United Villages does.
I’m compiling my ideas which I’d like to discuss with interested people, those who are seriously interested in making a difference in the world and want to start now.