Community-led Innovation: Resilient Citizen’s Action
In the session, we invited two community-led innovation leaders in Asia - Bosco Ng from WEDO Global (Hong Kong) and Sanon Wangsrangboon from Locall Thailand (Thailand) - to share how they harness the collective intelligence of the citizens in the post-pandemic era.
Key takeaways:
Recognising everyone is part of the community is key in driving innovation. All of us are contributing to the place/community we belong to.
Strength-based approach is vital to work together with the community. By deeply understanding the community, it is possible to unleash their power and drive change.
There has been strong and active citizen participation both in Thailand and Hong Kong in the past year. Active citizenship can be turned into constructive forces for change.
We need to compromise and find common ground for both the old and the young, for people with different political views to live together. We do not only fight against the past, but we need to create the future.
Regular exchange and connecting with like-minded people is crucial to sustain the momentum for community-led actions across cities and in the region.
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Change moves at the speed of trust: The value and loss of relationships in today’s global society
In this session, we invited Diane Roussin from The Winnipeg Boldness Project and David Robinson from Relationship Project to reflect on the different lenses they have taken in their own work, around building meaningful relationships to themselves, to their communities and to the natural world.
Key takeaways:
Solutions that are needed are ones that are good for the whole planet where relationships to the earth are interconnected just as much as they are with other people. This means taking risks which many mainstream systems lockdown on as they lack the centring of trust, co-creation and interconnectedness.
In the digital age, in an age where truth has become a game, in an age where trust in the people who are meant to govern us have been eroded, have we lost the ability to have meaningful connections with each other? When there is a breakdown of trust, all of the structures around us start to erode.
When we look at building different futures we must look at poverty through many different lenses; relationship poverty is a concept that needs to be picked up by the majority.
Taking an indigenous approach to relationships and trust in relation to our cities and society would mean leading with a knowledge system that would view healing and trust as ongoing work of inclusivity, instead of the western approach that is based on authority and power at the top. What would happen to our cities and towns if relationships were centred?
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How do you shape different possible futures for cities?
In this Open Duet, we brought together Javier Guillot from Bogota City Government and Jayne Engle from McConnell Foundation to reflect and have conversation on how we can shape different possible futures for cities and what is the role of citizens in them. How can we as citizens imagine culture and nature in different ways and take action and decisions differently in our daily lives? How do we create experiments that guide us to different futures for cities, which are more resilient and livable?
Key takeaways
Relationality is key for cities - The relationality is not only between people but also with life in all other forms, ‘making kin with all forms of life’. It’s not about human-centred approach but about life-centred approach.
Citizen culture and agency - Citizen culture and power of citizens is key to driving collective agency towards systemic environmental challenges that our cities and regions are facing now. The agency of people to be able to express and act on their own creativity and having the support to do that where they live is essential.
Narratives and experimentation - By sharing the narratives and stories with each other, we own the possibilities of hope. Citizen culture approach also puts emphasis on how we understand reality together, listening to diverse forms of life and population. It’s also about experimentation and learning -- there is a lot of humility in learning, trying and learning again.
Sacred values and cities - How do we bring sacred values in thinking about our cities (not in a religious way but things that don’t have monetary value -- freedom, nature, courage, truths)? Here, we are drawing on indigenous wisdom which we think is good for everyone.
Seven generation cities - How do we embed the notion of time into city building? Very often in the Western cultures, we tend to think and build for the short term. Democracy at its origin and until recent times, had accountabilities to future generations and somehow we lost that. What if we think about building seven generation cities -- looking back and learning deeply from what we’ve done, being present and also looking seven generations ahead?
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How to support community innovation through bridging across sector
At a time when we are hearing, seeing and feeling the impact of community-driven innovation, we asked Amalia Zepou, Bloomberg Fellow in Government Innovation at LSE Cities, and Hamdan Abdul Majeed, Managing Director of Think City: How can we better support community-driven innovation? They explored what kind of systems and structures we can put in place to increase impact without losing its value to our cities and how we can take a cross-sector approach, bridging local community, governments and the private sector.
Key takeaways:
The value of trust is key when it comes to working across sectors and supporting community innovation. Trust has become a buzzword that people talk about but more and more, we are losing trust in our institutions and communities. We need to nurture environments of social trust which inspire new ideas for cities.
New skills are emerging because of the new ways people interact with their places. With so many crises happening around the world, driving through chaos will be a skillset that people will need to develop to be able to succeed in community-led innovations. As well as this, what society wants from the city and how people participate in their cities is changing. Cities need to respond and adapt to the higher demand for citizen participation because of digital media.
Governments don’t speak in languages that everyone can understand and participate, which often leads to people being left out or getting their information from unreliable sources. Creativity and art are essential when bringing people together in cities and the value of that cannot be lost especially in a time where the economy focuses on materialism and consumer demands. Music and art are creative languages that expand participation.
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Why Scaling Matters
Miquel de Paladella, CEO of UpSocial and Geraldine Cahill, Director of UpSocial Canada have come together to discuss why scaling social innovation is an important topic that needs more attention, the difference in context for scaling globally, and why it is so challenging.
Key takeaways:
Why is scaling so hard? Perhaps we are just not that good at this work?!
We are good at creating patches, not affecting big systems - We are good at scaling on the business of demand -bringing the best innovations for locals to choose which to adapt and adopt. But we aren't so good at addressing how change happens at this systemic level and creating conditions for innovations to grow, in order to make sure the same problems don't keep happening.
Believing what can be possible and increasing our risk appetite - we need to push on people to help them believe there is another way. The risk of keeping systems that done work is greater than the risk of trying to do something new or different. We need to stop fighting each other, and find the insiders in the system who can help us change
There is no point scaling things that don't work! - Don’t fall in love with solutions, focus on the problem. If you are in love with a problem, you want to take the time to develop the idea, evaluate it and test it. It might be the ‘less sexy’ side of this work, but its the most important.
There are plenty of barriers to scaling - legal, regulatory, old business models don't fit new problems, funding challenges (the disconnect with private capital, granting streams aren't aligned with programmes), as well as the cultural appetite for change.