Imagine is rippeling out

Shortly after IMAGINE 2008, AIESEC in Austria organized SOLUTION in Vienna, where my colleague Wiebke went. Here are her reflections:

“From 14 to 17 February 2008 AIESEC in Austria and Emersense together with a variety of reputable partner organizations, guests and speakers hosted Solution – a learning platform for sustainable leadership. Building on Theory U – an MIT developed concept for personal and social transformation – this year’s conference aims to enable and empower young people from across the world to take initiative and provide leadership for a meaningful and sustainable development of themselves and their communities. Throughout the four-day conference, about 100 selected participants engaged in an intense experience – marked by the integration of latest learning methods with arts and formal education – to build clarity, confidence, capability and courage to contribute to a sustainable future. “

Read further here. 

Imagine 2008 - Delegate application

We are looking once again for inspiring delegates.

The online application will be available from Monday at: www.aiesec.de/imagine

More details about the conference are available here: imagine_2008_-_delegates.pdf

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

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.

AIESEC Alumni who IMAGINEd: Stig T. Grassmay

Yesterday, I went to the AIESEC Alumni meeting in Berlin. My former MC team member Achim pointed me to the story of the former president of AIESEC in Germany who was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 34 in July 2007. This is Stig’s story:

My name is Stig T. Graßmay. I am 34 years old and live in Cologne, Germany, together with my fiancee Franca.

In my “normal” life I work as Senior Manager for the Global Technology division of Vodafone in Düsseldorf. In my limited spare time I try to do some running and road cycling.

I have started this blog to document my fight against my bronchial adenocarcinoma (lung cancer) that I call Walburga, to share my experience with others who are affected and to get your support.

The picture above was taken a couple of weeks before the tumor was found; the blog will also show the changes to my looks.

Monday, June 25, 2007
I have had a dry cough for four weeks now and over the weekend dyspnoea has been added to it. I have been suffering from asthma since I have been five years old, so I go to to see my pneumologist who has been looking after me for the last three years. I expect him to diagnose a bronchitis, but he suspects something else and sends me to the radiologist downstairs.

The X-ray shows a shadow on one of my right pulmonary lobes; the radiologist answers this with a dry “You suffer from pneumonia.” Damian Franzen, MD, the pneumologist, assures me that antibiotics should solve the problem within the next two weeks, but I will have to rest a lot and will not be able to work during this period. He does a haemogram and a Tine test to find out the root cause. I will have to return on Wednesday to find out the results.

After a couple of medical tests…

Monday, July 2, 2007
Ms Koch, MD, who did the bronchoscopy last Thursday is a very nice person. Like very many doctors, however, breaking bad news to patients carefully is not one of her strengths: She tells me that she has got the preliminary findings from the histological and cytological tests and that I have got a bronchial carcinoma. Whoaa-ooh-oh, what??? In the background I hear her saying something about the type of the carcinoma still having to be determined, and offering advice if I need some after having talked to Franzen, MD, again, while I am not sure whether everything is racing in my head or whether it is completely empty. She expresses her regrets not to have better news for me. I thank her and say good-bye.
(…)
We don’t speak much this evening; Franca (I believe) because she is still hoping that it is a benign tumor, and I because I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel like eating and another Google search does not quite improve my mood: Wikipedia quotes the five year survival rate with 14%. Then again, this is a statistic only, it’s only true for the basic population and only in hindsight. It does not tell anything about my individual chance of survival that I determine to be 100%.
(…)
After some more sophisticated searches I have found a study that is more relevant to my specific case. It quotes the five-year survival rate for patients with non-small cell lung cancer with 26%. My argument from above, however, remains valid: This is a retrospective statistic, my chances are 100% until proven otherwise.

Stig is writing this blog about cancer “to keep my family and friends updated how my fight against the tumor progresses I have created this blog. Maybe it can also give some hope to my fellow combatants.”

Imagine 2008: the planning has started

AIESEC in Germany, tt30, and Pioneers of Change have agreed to support another Imagine conference in 2008.

Eva Luft has stepped forward as conference manager and the agenda design team is about to meet in Bamberg in order to plan the conference according to the Chaordic Design Process.

If you are interested in being involved with Imagine 2008 in any ways, please email: eva.luft(at)web.de

Bringing The World Home: From Study Abroad to Social Action

A very suitable topic for AIESEC

Young people today are studying and volunteering abroad in record numbers and learning firsthand about the opportunities and challenges of an interconnected world. These young people return home from their experiences abroad with a keen understanding of other cultures and an awareness of how to find common ground across differences. But when they return to their home community, they often find themselves plagued by the questions: What am I going to do with this understanding? How can I turn my experience into positive change?

The need for young Americans and Europeans who have traveled abroad to “bring the world home” could not be more urgent. Global challenges from terrorism to climate change dominate the U.S. and European political discourse and these challenges require global solutions. Yet, most Americans have little chance to connect with the world out there.

Moreover, the local television news, which is where six in ten Americans get most of their news about international affairs, does not offer Americans a vision of a world in which the United States can play a productive role. Rather, it presents a vision of “global mayhem,” in which the world’s problems appear intractable despite the best efforts of the U.S. This leads Americans to sometimes be skeptical of supporting international institutions despite recognizing the importance of cooperative solutions to global problems.

But if Americans can step beyond the “global mayhem” mindset and see the world differently, as an interconnected globe, research documented by the U.S. in the World guide indicates that they become more supportive of a cooperative U.S. engagement with the world. Young people who have been abroad and have a vocabulary of interconnectedness would seem an ideal group to “bring the world home” and showcase the positive opportunities for the U.S. to contribute to the world.

The question is how to effectively channel the insights and energy of young people with international experiences into awareness-raising and social change events here at home.

This Thursday, World Learning’s School for International Training, Americans for Informed Democracy, and LaGuardia Community College will be hosting a special conference on transforming international experience into social change. We hope you’ll participate in this online discussion which is taking place in concert with the conference.

• How has walking across differences made you more open to addressing the world’s problems?

• Why is international experience such a motivating factor in working towards global change?

Contribute to the discussion at: http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/philanthropy/bringing-the-world-home

What is our focus?

My last months were full of changes. I finished my studies, got a job and for that moved from Chemnitz to the other end of Germany: Heidelberg. Sooner than I expected I have adopted to my new environment and now feel very well. Nevertheless it took some time for me to get used to everything, esp. at work. But now after three months I have noticed that I have to take care that I do not lose my focus. - What do I mean by that?

It would be so easy just to go to work every day, spend your time there, meet some people in the evening or at the weekend and enjoy and relax. But isn’t there more in life? Is this everything?

I do not want to end up as somebody who had great visions and goals about positive changes in our society during his studies and later forgets about these ideas because of career, salary and daily work (this is what I mean by “losing the focus”). I am convinced that going to work everyday also contributes in an important way to our society - but not enough!!!

I talked about this with some of my colleagues and it was very interesting how different the reactions were. Very few smiled about this “unrealistic romantic ideas” - some on the other hand totally agreed. But most said that this is a good attitude and they also would like to do more but they “do not have enough time”. Don’t we have enough time or do we use them wrong?

At IMAGINE 2007 I came up with a vage idea about a project with German and Polish youths to get to know each other better. To be honest due to the finalization of my diploma thesis and very busy first three months of working life I have not really worked on this topic. But especially the last weeks showed everybody that there is still a strong need for improvement of each other’s understanding in this area. I do not want to watch misunderstanding and antipathies - and just complain about this. That’s why I now started again more seriously to work on this topic - and I am highly motivated to push this forward - without any more excuses.

AIESEC Alumni who IMAGINEd: Alexandra Schlossarek

After plunging back into the trot of life after the conference, I finally took the time to think about what inspired me at the IMAGINE conference and to reflect and share some of the thoughts since (and also before) then:

One thought that is often on my mind is the question of intention. Why do people do what they do, and most importantly what are my own personal reasons for doing things? Here especially, is doing a “good” thing really a good thing if the intention is a selfish one?

Attending the Lutheran church days last week in Cologne, I noticed that people do things for different reasons. Being rather unreligious myself, I however realized that people believe in different gods and practice this in different ways. But trying to make a difference in the world and having a positive impact (here in a human rights context) does not depend on in whose God’s name you do it, if the intention is right.

Another question that has been bothering me is, how do you convince people to change their mind, when you think what you think is right and the other person is wrong? And if you do want them to change their mind, aren’t you imposing your own thoughts on somebody else, thus maybe doing exactly the same thing as the person you want to change?

I also wanted to share what a speaker had said on a demonstration a few weeks ago:

that the life of an Iraqi baby is just as much worth as the life of an American soldier. Of course this is common sense, but I noticed that sometimes we don’t reflect on what is being presented to us, and that it is easy to forget these things.

These are just some thoughts I wanted to put down. Maybe you have some of the answers already and want to share them with us. They might not be the greatest questions or thoughts, but on this Sunday nite, after a stressful and exhausting weekend, this is all I could come up with. : -)

On this note, have a nice week!

AIESEC Alumni who IMAGINEd: Jens Trotzky

Jens writes about the path he’s taken:
“I am from a Finnish-German family and I am a very logical and somewhat practical person. My interest has always been in information retrieval and general science and engineering. However, I always felt the need for something on top of all the technical things and that’s why I always spend time in voluntary organizations like AIESEC, Oxfam or UNICEF. I believe in constant learning and I enjoy gaining new perspectives from talks. I love to listen to other people and telling stories is somewhat second nature to me. I’ve travelled the world during several internships and even though the ride was bumpy at times I enjoyed every moment. I am currently finishing off my four different university degrees and am looking out for the great challenges and opportunities to come. In Pioneers of Change I started to look out for new ideas in the field of technology and I enjoy reading about people and their ideas I didn’t know existed a few years ago. So I provide support when technical questions arise and I am happy to share my thoughts on new technologies as well as their pros and cons. So feel free to contact me to talk about those things. If you like to explore new technologies with me, let me know and I am happy to start something.”

Jens invites your input on the Pioneers’ web presence at jens dot trotzky at gmail dot com.

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