RJ's Blogtastic Universe

Creighton has a new major in social entrepreneurship. Got a slide reader here. We’re in the poverty group. Entrepreneurship – assuming both risk and endeavor. Entrepreneurship is a creative function. Knowledge entrepreneurship – college students. Getting involved in an activity without knowing if you will get any payback out of it. Strange… we measure our success by change. Opportunity to create social value. Still spotting a place (opportunity) in the market, just with a different goal. Lingo: we’re changemakers. Need communication, passion and skills. Social entrepreneurship is about stewardship. Public administrators as social entreprenuers?? Study the Montessori school system. Who’s highlighting the changemakers – lists of changemakers. Homeboy Industries. “Everyone is a whole lot more than the dumbest thing they ever did.” Created an organization based on values. Unconditional love. How important love is to people that have been hurt. Look these guys up. Homegirl potatoes and toast. USC is studying what they do. (This is turning into a Creighton commercial.)

People all think that the group that they joined – poverty, health, family… that their chosen problem is the source of all the other problems. Interesting. Life is too short to write in black ink! Turningpoint technologies.com – the clickers. They are revolutionary!! Entreprenuers are people who think they can do anything – so why such trouble with IT? Opportunity @ work works with microenterprises.

So – what keeps people down is an idea. The idea that they are second class, they deserve to be second class, and they will never be allowed to move. Put anything you want in the second class blank. Gay, Native American, so many things. There are two phases to the problem – the US offers second class citizenship. It does so in an informal way, but it’s pervasive. And official. And sanctioned. I don’t know if there’s a way to change this top down – we’re going to have to go ground up. Which brings me to the second part of the problem – people think they have to take the second class citizenship that is offered to them. They think they don’t have a choice. They think that second class citizenship is better than nothing, so they take it.

It’s like placing a value on people. White male landowners are at the head of the class. It just goes down from there, in a sliding scale. What if we were convinced that people were all of equal value? Or than we cannot really measure value at all, so we agree to treat everyone as if they were equally valuable? Hmmm… It’s going to have to be a choice that second class citizens make.

This goes back to how we treated my little sister when we were kids. Like we were the cool ones, and she didn’t live up to our standards. We acted like hanging out with her was charity. And she flat refused to believe us, basically. She came up with better things to do than play with us. I remember that she had quite the imagination.

Second class citizens know that the construct is wrong and get angry about it, but that doesn’t change things. You can only get angry about something that you believe is real. I only get angry at people when I believe their actions mean something about me.

Systemic thinking combined with “what if” thinking, that is what will make the difference. I have always believed that we have enough of everything we need, and that it’s a problem of distribution and imagination. What if I were equal to other people? What if I could have an idea that would change things? What if, what if, what if… these are the thoughts we need to be having. What we’ve been doing is looking at how hard it is to get out of the structure that we believe we’re trapped in. What we’ve been missing is permission and opportunity to imagine and strategize our way out of it.

How can I help to create this?

Grameen guy here. He talks about bringing people together, communities of 20 people. Borrowing money in the traditional way is demoralizing (and impossible) for some people. 1500 paid off in a year, while they teach people about money. Hook up with this dude!!! See if they need IT teachings.

How can the change process become the empowerment process?

Grameen Bank guy talking now. Impact. The idea of the moneylenders. Money lending for social change. People percieve money as power, money as a way to make a different choice. As a way to can say you can make choices, that others cannot force their will on you. I’m saying that you have the power to make that choice right now. If you had the power to make that choice right now, what would you do with it?

They’re having a grand opening, and the big guy will be there. I must meet him. I must. “We give them trust.” Meet with us every week and we’ll teach you about money.

Of course… take a model that works really well, and add something to it, see if it still works.

So how can I get these two together? Do I just copy the model and add IT, or do we get these two together? Grameen loans the money, I bring in the IT workshop with Google. Will they loan across the river?

Will I still be able to get research for my thesis?  Hmmm, that might be another post.