An overview of the work done by Collective Invention and the Idea Factory in the field of education innovation over the last ten years. From a powerpoint presentation.

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A recently released video and in-depth report document Collective Invention’s partnership with the Vallejo Charter School.

“We must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.” – Pablo Picasso

For the four years since it’s founding, the Vallejo Charter School (VCS) has been on the forefront of innovation in education. By utilizing a cutting edge Experiential Learning model, VCS serves as a platform for innovation in the education sector.

Collective Invention partnered with VCS to assess the effectiveness of this model and to help the school understand its place within broader trends transforming education over the next decade. The resulting report is available to download here:

A School Worthy of Its Children

Highlights include:

• Many of the jobs that VCS students will hold in the year 2025 do not currently exist. They may range from Aquaprenuers who finding opportunities in technology addressing the state’s water crisis to Clinical Bioninformaticists who tailor drugs to fit patients’ genetic codes.
• 66% of education philanthropies are funding innovation in education, and 33% plan to increase funding in this area. By positioning itself as a center for prototyping and scaling new learning models, VCS can more effectively capture philanthropic investment.
• Ethnographic documentation of VCS’s model revealed a striking emphasis on attentiveness. “In classrooms around the campus we noticed an emphasis on the physical characteristics of listening: eye contact, empty hands and a still body. “Use your listening eyes,” we heard in one classroom. “Make sure your hands are hands are empty and your feet are still. No distractions while you are listening” we heard in another. Research by the Dana Consortium indicates that attentiveness is significantly correllated with improved scores on intelligence tests.

Arnold Wasserman at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club on Oct. 13, 2011.

New Academic Studio, based on our Creative DNA work, featured in NOCCA’s July newsletter
(See p.5 of PDF)
NOCCA Institute Executive Director Sally Perry Selected For National Cultural Leadership Program

We uncovered some fascinating insights curating our track at the Social Capital Markets Conference, Polycentric Solutions: Local in the World. We’re still buzzing here at CI with the interesting conversations and great people we met and worked with. On-the-ground leaders from Oakland to Sweden to Kenya came together to cross-pollinate best practices about local solutions to global problems. Facts and highlights from the track include:

• Co-ops: More US citizens are members of worker-owned businesses than are members of unions. Local governments are realizing the high local economic value of this model, and are building supporting mechanisms.
• Local Procurement: In the wake of disasters, relief organizations pay top dollar to rush supplies to effected areas, supplies that local companies are often more than capable of producing. Peace Dividend Trust is encouraging local purchasing for disaster response, pumping much-needed money into economic systems struggling to rebuild.
• Social Enterprise is the next wave: As a way of creating jobs that support communities, reinvigorating economic development, and solving social problems, more and more communities are seeing social enterprise as a way forward. The region around Malmo in Sweden is focusing on social enterprise as a cornerstone of its economic and community development strategies.

In order to prepare students for a rich and turbulent future, we need to empower them with the tools of design. That’s why Collective Invention cofounder Arnold Wasserman has been working with the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) to create an event which provides high school students with hands-on experience using design principles.

The day’s learning experience will kick-off a series of phased projects in which students will take an active role in the design and expansion of their teaching and learning spaces over the course of the next few years.

In addition, the students will continue to hone their design skills and understandings to then contribute to the planning and design of the future Homer Plessy Museum.

Learn more about this event here.

At the end of the day, all impact is local. Creating impact means understanding the complex web of local relationships in which it takes place. Scaling that impact requires a deep understanding of where those complex local environments overlap- and where they don’t.

That’s why the Polycentric Solutions track at the 2011 Social Capital Markets Conference is being built around two living case studies: Berjeson, Gotenborg, Sweden and Cherryland, CA, USA. Though separated by half the globe, these two communities have numerous parellells that SOCAP attendees will be leveraging in hands-on problem solving throughout the conference.

Meet the Communities

View Polycentric Solutions in a larger map

Located outside of once-industrial Gotenborg, the neighborhood of Bergson was originally built as a car-free suburb for Swedish factory workers. Now the factories are closed and the population is primarily Muslim immigrants, many of whom are refugees from places such as Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Named after the orchards that once grew there, Cherrylands is an unincorporated town in Alameda County. The 40% of the population are recent immigrants, a disproportionate number of whom are undocumented.

Economic struggles are a central challenge for both communities. Bergson is situated far from Gotenborg’s economic centers and Cherryland’s unemployment rate was at 15.8% as of July 2011. In Bergson these struggles have heightened already-smouldering ethnic tensions with native Swedes, in Cherryland they have contributed to gang activity and area’s clout in
regional decisionmaking.

Both regions laud their tremendous cultural diversity as a core strength. Eager to hold on to their native traditions, recent migrants in both neighborhoods have organized a wide range of festivals and other cultural events. Numerous community centers serve as local hubs of social capital, and community leaders report a healthy “soft infrastructure” of community support.

Both regions are also bestowed with significant access to open landscape. Bergeson still sits near the majestic natural beauty that inspired its founding, and Cherryland is eagerly pursuing urban farming initiatives to reclaim its agricultural roots.

These kinds of regional improvement initiatives are being spearheaded by forward-thinking public administrators laser-focused on their regions success. Cherryland’s activist-turned-supervisor, Nate Miley, has named the area his “adopted community” within the larger territory that he represents. Like his equivalents in Bergeson, he struggles for a voice at regional table dominated by more affluent communities with deep political pockets.

In the Polycentrism track we’ll be examining these communities in depth, uncovering parellels with communities across the globe and cross-pollinating cutting-edge solutions. How can these communities leverage one another’s resources and expertise? How can they learn from each other? How can leaders in these communities receive cooperation and support from their peers around the world?

In most ways, the Roman Empire was a boon to everyone involved. Once-warring tribes were brought to a place of peace. These tribes could suddenly trade local goods, exchange ideas, and invest in shared infrastructure. The only drawback to the Pax Romana was Rome. Rome sucked resources that it burned on extravagant gestures, often designed to distract. It served as an information bottleneck, forcing bad decisions onto people with the local knowledge to make better ones. Worst of all, Rome became a single point of failure that eventually brought the entire system crashing down.

Today, these wealthy, ill-informed single points of failure are still causing disasters on a regular basis. Our small tribes accept them as a necessary evil because in a deeply interconnected and interdependent world we need our Pax. But that may be changing. For the first time in human history, advances in social technology are letting small tribes build an empire together without elevating a Rome. (“Social technology” refers to systems of organizing like democracy, not social media tools like twitter.) These emerging technologies and their practitioners will be featured in an upcoming Polycentrism Track at the Social Capital Markets Conference.

The emerging Rome-less Empire is hard to see, because it lacks the centralized might and grandeur of empires of the past. In response to the global financial crisis, local leaders across the globe are building community resilience by developing local networks around food, housing, and the flow of capital. Through a combination of new communications technologies and new organizing methods, these local leaders are able to seamlessly trade local goods and services, exchange ideas, and invest in shared infrastructure in a way that was unheard of just a decade ago. The results are rapidly becoming transformational.

It all starts with deeply rooted community leaders, like Pandora Thomas, Zakiya Harris, and Konda Mason of Earth Seed, Dana Harvey of the Mandela Marketplace, or Jason Harvey (no relation) of East Oakland Food Connection. These organizations and individuals have the connections and on-the-ground knowledge to mobilize their communities around healthier systems for creating everything from food to housing to investment capital.

Historically, these leaders’ deep networks have kept them in geographic isolation, but that isolation is rapidly ending. Connecting organizations like Eco-cities, Smart Cities’ Advisors and Purpose Built Communities are able to convene and empower these leaders to share best practices, connect with policymakers, and mobilize their networks around good ideas that cross the bounds of geography.

Sitting in between these deeply-rooted community leaders and the global networks that support them are social entrepreneurs like Homayoon Shahinfar and Konrad App of Stima, Lakshmi Karan of Riders for Health, and Claire Herminjard of Mindful Meats. Homayoon and Konrad are building business models in post-conflict Africa, focused upon the supply of domestic-scale solar energy. Riders for Health have created an agile, sustainable distribution infrastructure for medical supplies in Africa, and operate with hybrid public/private funding models. Claire is building systems for local, humane slaughter of sustainably raised cattle, a huge milestone in building local food systems that can provide complete services to the community. In ways that were rare just a decade ago, Claire is not alone. National networks like Slow Money are able to connect her with financing, expertise, and leaders who have the sort of deep on-the-ground relationships necessary to make a polycentric food system a viable reality.

Far-sighted members of more traditional institutions are beginning to integrate these community leaders, connecting networks and social entreprenuers into their work. They see social entrepreneurship as the next wave of sustainable economic development. In the Eastern and Western regions of Sweden, around Gothenborg and Malmo, universities, local government and social entrepreneurs are working together to create a new robust economic sector. In the Bay Area the community development arm of the Federal Reserve is brokering connections between different community actors to align and multiply actions.

Government agencies are realizing that all of this dense community partnership has an unforeseen benefit: resilience in the face of natural disasters. The kind of community resilience being generated in Gothenborg and Malmo is seen as a cornerstone of any sound disaster preparedness or recovery strategy. This holds true from Afghanistan to Japan, where Peace Dividend Trust and Arabella Advisors have learned to effectively translate philanthropic dollars to community resilience and economic recovery on the ground.

What does it all of this mean? It means that groups like Earthseed are going to become part of a global learning economy around social entrepreneurship, in which size and location will no longer be a barrier to influence and effectiveness. It means that city halls will start feeling more pressure around best practices coming out of Bangladesh than around political winds at the statehouse. Get ready for the Pax Polycentrus.