Here is to the crazy ones

What makes this video so powerful? Is it speaking to the crazy one in us, the one who wants to move the world and change things? What does it mean to be crazy? Do you have to be like Ghandi or Einstein to be crazy and move things? Don’t we all have a crazy one in us?

For me Social Innovation is a lot about being crazy, because you have to be creative, think out of the box, take the courage to find your own way, to ask for help, to learn, to try, to fail, to try again and to believe you can actually succeed.

Do you have the courage to let out the crazy one in you?

Tell us more: Blog Action Day

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. That means we need you!

AIESEC Alumni who IMAGINEd: Henrique Bussacos

AIESEC alumnus Henrique Bussacos was a mergers-and-acquisitions investment banker.
However, a side-project with Amana-Key helped bring him into alignment and radically reshaped his career.
Amana-Key, Oscar Motomura’s company for corporate innovation, was Henrique’s focus
for four years before he turned his attention to his present sources of rapture.
These, currently, are The Hub São Paulo, a sustainable chain called Tekoha,
and a newly-reinvented family business. We asked Henrique a bunch of questions.

 

Links in this article:
AIESEC
Amana-Key
Oscar Motomura
The Hub
Tekoha

 

Thanks for chatting with us Henrique. How do you see your Amana-Key learnings applied
in Brazil today? What do they have to offer people working at grassroots social levels?

 

First, I think there are two main ways to work as a change agent:
working to change organizations that already exist and starting new ones.
Both ways can be effective and helpful; choosing one or the other
depends on where your passions are.
Amana-Key have developed a methodology to … talk in executives’ language
without losing identity and purpose. This is the knowledge I use the most
to start social companies. I need to be able to make bridges between grassroots
organisations and companies.
For example, at Tekoha, we have to make the bridge between local communities
and our consumers and most of them understand the corporate language.
When we propose partnerships with companies,
we have to speak their language and yet keep our principles and purpose.

 

Consciousness in the management process can be relevant to any organization -
a big corporation or a grass root one.

 

Tell us about the café you run. You were able to take a family business and recreate it
so as to align with your deeper values?

 

My parents started the Café 18 years ago… My sister and me used to help them,
working there during vacation and weekends. Last year, when my parents started
thinking about continuity, my sister and me thought that selling coffees and snacks
was not meaningful for us. At the same time, we had a strong connection with
the people there. Some of the employees are there for 18, 15, 12 years…
Which is not common in a coffee shop.

 

We decided to reinvent the business to make it meaningful and think about
the expansion of a company with purpose. So we changed the brand to
Ekoa Café (Ekoa means home, a place where meaningful dialogues take place…),
introduced organic and more healthy food, stimulated the dialogue
about sustainability and consciousness in the coffee shops and rebuilt the stores
with sustainable materials.

How do we visit?

 

Campinas is a hundred km far from São Paulo, so everybody that will pass through São Paulo
before or after Rio de Janeiro should get in touch with me and then I can arrange a visit!

With Tekoha, your artisans make a lot of simple and traditional handcrafts using materials
that are both sustainable and customary, which preserves a cultural diversity. Who is your market?

 

This is a big challenge in Brazil, the fair trade market is not very developed.
So, we have a lot of work on education for conscious consumption. We created a
newsletter talking not only about Tekoha, but also about the communities that
are part of the network, and how conscious consumption can help change the market dynamics.

 

We focus on the market of gifts. Our value is to offer a meaningful hand-made gift -
telling the story of it and guaranteeing social and environmental sustainability.

 

How do you reconcile artisan cultures with market pressures to sell “sustainable industry”
to conforming capitalist classes?

 

I don’t have an answer to it… It’s a challenge that I believe has to be faced with transparency
and creativity to start new ways to establish relationships and commerce.

How did you establish relationships with the Tekoha artisans?

 

The first community I visited when I was dreaming about Tekoha, so they were the
first community to be part of Tekoha. The others we started to evolve, checking
the organization of the community, the role of the handcraft in the community, and
the quality of the products. Now, we are working with four communities around Brasil
and two others will be part of the network this month.

 

Will Tekoha go international? Why or why not?

 

We’ll operate abroad to balance our work in an undeveloped fair trade market, Brasil
and in a developed fair trade market. This is important, because in Brasil we have
to work on education of conscious consumption, while in other markets fair trade
is much stronger and we can generate revenues to more quickly reach the break-even.
Even though we are a non-profit organization, we consider economic sustainability
a strong point in our strategy. We will start our strategy abroad working in partnership
with AIESEC and Artemisia Foundation in 2008.

Are other Pioneers involved with your projects?

 

There are many levels of involvement… people that are directly involved
(as Pablo Handl and my sister), people that I exchange ideas with about the projects
(many), getting help with contacts at companies (Patrícia Sogayar, a Pioneer, helps
a lot, and others), starting partnerships with their projects or companies.

How are you and Pablo doing with The Hub?

 

Actually, I just came from the Hub! It’s going well. We have rented a space close
to Paulista Avenue (the main road in São Paulo) and now we’re rebuilding the space.
September 15 – 16 we’ll have the Design Workshop with architects and future
members of The Hub São Paulo.

 

Would you ever go back to working for a corporation?

 

Well, I kind of found my path on entrepreneurship of social companies.
So, I find very hard to imagine myself in a big corporation again right now. It’s not
that I have prejudices about it, but my passion is closer to the creation of new organizations.

 

What are you reading these days?

 

I’m reading Satish Kumar’s You are, therefore I am. He was a Jain monk
and left the religion to find his own path. His story is quite interesting and brings
many reflections on the meaning of life, the presence and many teachings that he got from his masters.

 

Oh – lovely book. Spirituality acknowledged, but I thought he was just taking culture seriously.
Great read – not necessarily light. How do you relax?

 

First, I’ve to tell that I’ve a lot to learn on relaxation. I relax at Aikido, enjoying a chat with friends in a café, laying down in my “Brasilian net,” and spending a day close to the sea…

 

Henrique Bussacos can be reached at henrique dot bussacos at tekoha dot org

News from We Are What We Do

Our resident DJ, Girl Friday, is featured here mixing it up with best of them – we told you changing the world didn’t have to be boring and worthy. After a certain MTV performance recently we believe there might be a spare spot in the music industry and are pretty sure we’re the next big thing. Check ya on the flip side homies.

“Dead long enough”..I’m strong enough. Music with a conscience

Dear people that dare to I M A G I N E

It’s great to hear the kind of words we believe in being rolled out in rhythm and song….

Deeply connected to the Imagine Community are the Pioneers of Change.. Tim Merry is a pioneer who has made some exciting music…

You get to hear it early! these songs at this link are all available for download.. (the album will come out later on this year).

Download the songs here:

I love “dead long enough…”.. it really strikes a chord..

ENJOY !!!

hugs from London,

Sofia

Presencing Global Classroom – Empathy Walk Reflection

Some of you might remember Sofia’s U-Process session from Imagine 2005 and 2007…

I had my first online course on the U-Process with Otto Scharmer last week. Here is my the reflection paper for the next class next week:

(1) What interests and intentions brought you to this class?
I have recently joined a start-up organization here in Germany which has worked with the U-process in their team processes and wants to use it in further organizational developments, as well. I am also a member of a small reading group in Berlin meeting every few weeks to reflect on chapters from “Theory U”. Finding the online course on the Presencing website is a very good opportunity to get insight from Otto Scharmer directly and to learn with a group of people across borders and time zones.

(2) What is the core question that you want to explore?
I left my job at Greenpeace International last year in order to start practicing
as an “Initiator & Facilitator of Change Networks”: how can I use Presencing in my new job?

(3) What did you learn from your empathy walk?
I imagined a group of young people that I did a workshop with a few weeks back: they were catholic rural youth from the south of Germany. I remember that I felt really foreign in my own country that day. I realized that during the empathy walk I was quite curious to ask them questions such as: “How does a typical day look like for you? What do you do after school/work? What is important to you?“ I think, I was consciously preventing the Voice of Judgment to interfere in this “silent conversation”. I felt the urge to actually pick up the phone and ask these questions personally.
In summary, I learned that I was curious about the foreign and quite eager to explore questions with somebody unknown in order to start a dialogue.

Can we achieve world peace through films?

5 big questions in 5 minutes….

What are the five big questions that you are avoiding in life?

http://www.fivebigquestions.com/index.php

6 months later

A couple of weeks ago I was happily surprised when coming home to find the card in the mail that we wrote in February at Imagine 2007. A part of it was not surprising, and I think I even succeeded, but a specific idea had completely slipped my mind!
I succeeded in finding a job within the field of diversity, but I was reminded of an idea that I had in Wuppertal: how to deal with the fear that blocks us so often to approach the unknown. Oh well, it was actually not the solution or anything, but just another way to look at the issue.
I had been wondering that if fear often blocks people to open up, how we can get around this fear. If we can create a social epidemic, or a troyan horse, that enters our lives without notice, and dissolves the fear from the inside, when we are not being defensive.
Probably just a naive thought, but it was great to read this thought, that otherwise would have staid un-reraid in my notebook.