Archive for the ‘Spotlight’ Category
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Is it time we started sharing our cock-ups?
When charities or voluntary organisations get together at events, it’s usually the successes you get to hear about. So hurrah for Sidekick Studios’ latest (beta) innovation: Cocktails and Cock-Ups, an evening of confessional presentations from charities and social enterprises about the disasters you never got to hear about - and, most importantly, what they did to fix them.
Dan Jones from Amnesty International UK, Andrew Dick from Envision, and Darren Taylor from EcoComputer Systems were impressively candid about the mistakes they’d made and the lessons they’d learnt. What struck me was how sharing failure led to frank discussions and a sense of shared experience which is often missing from the usual “look what I achieved”-style presentations.
I was surprised to notice how rarely - if ever - I’ve seen someone deliver a PowerPoint presentation which actually highlighted the things that went wrong. Reviewing mistakes is something we do a lot in Agile web development; at the end of each two-week section of work, the whole team comes together to talk about what went right, what went wrong, and what we could change to make the next iteration more productive. But sharing that learning with other organisations? I don’t do that much.
So what did I take from the event?
- In the third sector, we’re so used to reporting to funders, trustees and bosses on what went well, that we’re in danger of forgetting that the lessons we learn from failure are valuable - not just to us, but to others, too.
- Talking about failure, rather than pretending we can prevent failure, can help us to expect and manage it. It’s also fun, and quite cathartic, once you get past the initial fear.
- “Failing fast” - building prototypes, running pilots, get feedback early on, not trying to plan everything up front in immense detail and instead being willing to embrace negative feedback and change - can actually help to avoid more catastrophic mistakes on a bigger scale.
- Sometimes a perceived failure actually leads to something better.
- It’s easier to admit mistakes with a cocktail in your hand.
So if you’re looking for valuable lessons, I reckon you’d learn more from inviting others like you to share their cock-up tales over drinks than from any of the usual seminars or conferences. Find out more about Cock-Up Cocktails on the Sidekick Studios blog.
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South London volunteer radio station ‘Reprezent’ gets a licence
Reprezent, an on-line radio station created as a platform for young volunteers to air their views, has been granted a license by Ofcom and will hit the airwaves in 2011.
‘Reprezent’ was launched in 2008 and was the first FM station to be programmed solely by young people. Created with support from Choice FM, the station provides a voice for underrepresented minorities in mainstream media. Believed to have positively encouraged the youth of South London to communicate with one another, the radio station became a popular platform for debates on burning issues such as knife crime, teenage pregnancy and career aspirations.
Many youth volunteered their time, skills and creativity in ensuring the success of the radio station. Aaron, 17, has been presenting his own show online for a year. “This is about giving young people the chance to represent themselves and get involved in something positive. Everyone hears the bad things, but Reprezent is about our music, our culture, and what we can bring to society,” he says.
The station will reach out to over 160,000 13-25 years old, providing many young people with broadcast and media training. Schools, councils and businesses alike will rejoice at the prospect of a broadcast platform in which the youth, the general public and the officials can amicably highlight issues, discuss options, and settle on resolutions.
The radio station is a real boost at a time when youth unemployment is on the rise, and young people are looking for practical experience for their CVs. Finances have already been secured for the station to work with over 300 young people over the next year, and ‘Reprezent’ plans to continue growing in creativity, community support and cultural significance for a long time to come.
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Youth Venture: awesome inventions to change the world
Anyone who doubts young people’s ability to create innovative solutions to the problems faced by their communities should check these amazing inventions from young people.Ashoka’s Youth Venture project ran the Invent Your World Challenge to reward 16-25 year olds from all over the world for inventions that help their communities. The winners were a big hit at the recent Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India.
Still only 16 years old, competition winner Javier Fernández-Han invented an algae-powered energy system that combines a dozen new and existing technologies to treat waste, produce methane and bio-oil for fuel, produce food for humans and livestock, sequester greenhouse gases, and produce oxygen. The VERSATILE system is targeted at developing communities which need sources of power and waste disposal - and while it hasn’t actually been built yet, you’ve got to admire the sheer ambition of the project.
We also love Tractor Factor, designed by 23-year-old Shailesh Upadhyay from Velore, India. He found it difficult to study in the evenings at his home in rural India, so he came up with a system which uses the battery in a tractor to power a fluorescent light at night. It’s now being installed in homes throughout his village.
Really inspiring stuff for a Friday read - find out more about the winners here.
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“Volunteering is now cool” - rallying cry from rent-a-crowd for non-profits
We were always going to fall in love with an “unincorporated disorganisation” who state their vision as “a world where volunteering is as mainstream as cheeseburgers and breathing.” Youth Tree is a group of young volunteers from Western Australia who are shaking up volunteering Down Under.
They’ve just launched the Big Help Mob, a diverse army of 100+ young volunteers who regularly get together to do favours for non-profits. Then they celebrate with “enormous, ludicrous flash mobs”.
Any local non-profit can submit an idea for how this rent-a-crowd could help them out, via their website. The best ideas are taken on. So all kinds of causes, charities, people, animals or environments can benefit from a sudden, one-off burst of people-power.
Did we mention that we love it?
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Digital volunteers help Haiti
Back in June, we blogged about micro-volunteering project The Extraordinaries. In the wake of the Haiti disaster, the site is now catering to the huge numbers of people inspired to help by offering volunteers a real opportunity to make a difference to the relief effort.A new Haiti support page is harnessing the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons. Volunteers can give just a few minutes of their time to sort and tag disaster images, and match sorted images with the faces of missing persons. The goal is to help desperate families find their loved ones.
Meanwhile, Crisis Camp Haiti kicks off in London tomorrow (Thursday 21 January). Crisis Commons facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs. The goal of the London session is to establish Crisis Commons London and a series of Crisis Camp events in London in support of Haiti, where both technical and non-technical people working together on tasks as diverse as coding apps, mapping work and translation.
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Cybermentors virtual volunteers take on the bullies
CyberMentors, the online peer mentoring scheme run by BeatBullying, is in the headlines today after its hard-hitting new advert was banned from TV for being “too brutal for younger audiences”.
But it is CyberMentors’ ability to forge partnerships with social networks that really stands out for me. YouTube is featuring CyberMentors on its front page all day today. And back in November, Bebo became the first social networking site to install a CEOP “report” button on the profiles of its 8 million users, featuring a link to the CyberMentors site.
By using social networks to offer reach out to young people in the very spaces where they might be bullied, CyberMentors helped over 176,000 young people with bullying and cyberbullying since its launch in March last year.
Lots of young people who’ve had horrible experiences are motivated to help others in the same situation. What’s great about CyberMentors is that it genuinely helps them to do that.
Young people, aged 11-25, are trained as CyberMentors, in schools and online, so that they can offer support to their peers. They’re also supported by trained counsellors, available online if needed, so site visitors always get the appropriate level of help, and younger volunteers are not in danger of having to deal with issues they’re not able to manage.
This video shows how using her experience of bullying to help others helped CyberMentors volunteer Georgia get her confidence back.
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Help-Portrait: “The greatest thing we’ve ever done with our cameras”
The vlabsblog team has been inspired and excited by the success of Help-Portrait, an innovative photography project which successfully spread masses of festive joy by creating 40,000 free portraits for people to treasure for a lifetime.
On Saturday 12th December, more than 8300 photographers and volunteers in 715 locations in 42 countries gave up their time for the project. The brief is beautifully simple: find someone in need. Take their portrait. Print their portrait. And deliver it to them. That’s it. Simple to do, but as the website shows, a photograph can mean the world to someone, perhaps making a person feel special for the first time in their lives.
Help-Portrait was founded by celebrity photographer Jeremy Cowart with his vision of the photography community and individuals giving back this holiday season. This event reached a magnitude that nobody saw coming.
“On December 12th, cultural borders were crossed on one side of the camera and competitive borders on the other,” reflects Cowart. “I honestly don’t know which side of the camera was blessed more. For many of our subjects across the world, Help-Portrait provided them with their first-ever family photo. However, we’re consistently hearing from many photographers worldwide that this is the greatest thing they’ve ever done with their cameras.”
It’s a lovely way for photographers to be able to share their skills - structured enough to form a template for collective action, yet open enough to let each participant stamp his or her mark on the project. Best of all, each portrait is a memento of a personal interaction between photographer and model, between someone who deserves to feel special and someone who wanted to help. You just can’t buy moments like that.
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Crowd-sourcing funding for voluntary projects
I’ve just discovered Kickstarter, a US-based website which allows budding entrepreneurs to crowd-source the money they need to bring their ideas to life. A service designer I know called it “my favourite website of all time”, and I can see where he’s coming from.
Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits (”rewards”) to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5. It’s up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers to inspire people to invest.
From crocheted yurts to plans to write everyone in the world a letter, the site is packed with weird and wonderful ideas, but it’s the voluntary projects which really got me thinking - such as this appeal to save a local community garden. Could it be that by stepping away from the format of traditional funding applications, we could actually inspire more creative volunteering opportunities? The very act of selling a simple idea, rather than a huge project plan, seems like a more natural way to test out your idea on the general public. Winning public support could inspire courage to test the boundaries and be really innovative.
I’m a big fan of Junction 49 and its commitment to supporting young volunteers in working together to bring their ideas to life, as well as v’s vcashpoint project. I’d love to see what would happen if we could add crowd-sourced funding into the mix. Something tells me that these young volunteers could teach hardened fundraisers a few tricks, and inspire new creative approaches to promoting charitable giving.
I love the idea of voluntary projects having a whole group of supporters, right from the start, who care enough about a project to dig into their pockets to help make it happen. As Kickstart says, a large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
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Inspiring ideas for the future
3 billion. Thats the number of young people under twenty-five in the world - as threebillion points out, thats half the worlds population.
How can the energy and ideas of this group contribute to development? Well, Michael Boampong has some thoughts. We’ve featured Michael’s organisation, Young People We Care, previously on the vlabs blog.
Here, Michael discusses Youth-Led Development: Promoting Sustainable Development and Empowering Youth in an essay for the website Youthink!’s International Youth Day Essay Contest.
Responding to the essay question set by the World Bank, What are your tangible ideas for how youth can create effective, long-lasting change? other ideas include a TV channel by and for youth around the world, a wider look at how our attitudes can help shape our planet’s future and how obstacles like red-tape or limited finances should not young people from making a difference.
What are your ideas?
In preparation for the Y2Y Global Youth Conference 2009, the World Bank is seeking essays on Youth Entrepreneurship in times of crisis.
Get writing.
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Time to unite against climate change
With the United Nations Climate Change Conference looming in December, the pressure is on to get the world working together to cut carbon emissions. Today sees the launch of the 10:10 campaign to cut persuade the UK’s individuals, schools, hospitals, businesses and organisations to pledge to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. Created by the Age of Stupid team, the campaign has already drawn support from celebrities and environmental campaigners, but also from the likes of British Gas, Tottenham Hotspur FC, and the NHS.
747 to 1010 in 34 seconds from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.
It would be easy to dismiss the role of 16-25 year olds in taking practical action to cut emissions - after all, they’re less likely to hold the power in businesses, schools and even in households. Yet many charities are harnessing the enthusiasm and dedication of young volunteers for climate change projects, and what’s inspiring is the way that diverse organisations are working together.
The UK Youth Climate Change Coalition isn’t just another brand-new organisation, it’s a youth-led coalition of youth organisations, large and small which have joined forces to reach out to millions of young people up and down the country. Their vimeo site creates a platform for the voices of climate change activists from all over the world.
Climate change and Nepalese Youth from Avishek Shrestha on Vimeo.
Also in the UK, the digital team at vinspired and the team at Made by Many have just launched a new website for Climate Squad, a network of young volunteers taking practical action against climate change. Supported by v and Bank of America, and delivered by Global Action Plan, Climate Squad will train 300 young people to lead their own carbon-cutting projects in their own communities. These young leaders will work with businesses, schools, colleges and householders to show them how to measure their carbon footprints and make small changes in their behaviour to produce measurable reductions.
Recently published research, Climate Squad: young people’s views on climate change, shows that three quarters of young people in England would like to volunteer on a climate change project. So we’ll be down at the Tate Modern this evening to find out more about what 10:10 have planned, and will be keeping an eye on The Guardian’s new 10:10 portal.
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Nice piece, yourself.
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