Mette Elmgaard Pedersen joins London Creative Labs

Josef Davies Coates, Alex Osterwalder, David Mills, Mette Elmgaard Pedersen

Things have not been the same since the arrival of Mette at London Creative Labs on October 19th 2009. Mette is on a 2-month internship from the renowned business school Kaos Pilots in Denmark.

You could be fooled into thinking she is just a wonderful person because of her gentle spirit and compassion for others. She is also however, the sort of person that has trained herself to define her own path as she goes along. She has trained herself to take initiative, rather than “sit back and wait” for an education.

She has brought this skill to London Creative Labs and the last 6 weeks have seen many wonderful mornings with us sitting together, using a very intuitive approach to sense the changing context and to adapt our plans daily. She has co-led this period of outreach.  She helped us to step away from the heady lights and noise of the digital world and actually make the important steps into the communities. This is where the rubber hit the road. My deep thanks to Mette for bringing her whole self with her to tackle the challenges so authentically. It has been priceless to have someone on the team that is so open and capable of  working with the dynamic plans that a start-up has to have and also having the courage to push the plans in new directions. Dear Mette, thank you!

Mette Elmgaard Pedersen

Mette Introduces herself

My name is Mette and I am a graduate student at the school KaosPilots in Denmark. I am trained in creative project management, creative process leadership and creative business design, and I feel so lucky to get the chance do a two month internship with London Creative Labs. I have spent one month at London Creative Labs already, and I have learned so much from being involved in this courageous and beautiful experiment and way of creating positive social change by empowering. My main focus and interest has been moving the project to street level, and hearing the quiet voices who are closest to the challenges of joblessness, and possibly also therefore closer to the solution – with a little help. I spent my first weekend in London talking to people, and really listening, and my understanding of the challenge has grown from then. I am very exited that we have now had our first MicroLab to test, challenge and prove the concept and that we have entered the phase of outreach.

Dear Sofia and the rest of the London Creative Labs team, thank you so much for taking me in. Lets get this baby flying!

September Update

A Nomination!

September Update

September has seen a lot of brains converging around the core idea of London Creative Labs and the first Job Lab.

The Highlights:

• Outreach: The response to the Job Lab video was fabulous! People really seem to get the core idea. Our digital following has grown steadily. We were listed on @Montero’s online social entrepreneurship list. We have had emails from all around the world and the mayor of Brixton is following us on twitter. Thanks to Mamading Ceesay for significant, quality outreach.
• Met a number of ‘elder’ figures who will be advising us at a strategic level.
• The peer fund continued and with it came some wonderful affirmations. Max Schupbach from the Deep Democracy Institute wrote: “Here is the why we want to invest in Creative Labs: London Creative Labs has a great purpose – empowering people: that’s needed!!! It does it with a big heart: that makes us smile!!! It rocks in its creative fun attitude: that’s the leadership we are looking for worldwide!!!!”
• Started a friendship and collaboration with the University of East London, who have been a great sparring partner. They are keen for their students to get involved with the project and there are plans to run a Job Lab for them.
• Produced a ‘brain dump of all the core ideas and theory behind London Creative Labs. These make the beginnings of a business plan!
• Re-planned the Job Labs for the new year, thereby also allowing a healthy period of time to reach out to people who are long-term unemployed.
• Structured a series of monthly and micro labs that will help us to test the Job Lab process.
• Continued to design a structure of engagement and collaboration with the help of a growing ‘Evolution Team’. [Irene Rukerebuka, and David Pinto]
• Sofia got nominated as a London Leader 2010, a programme run by the London Sustainable Development Commission. What they liked was our holistic approach!

This month took us from high-level idea definition to mapping out a network of collaborators at the conceptual level, and a path forward which includes testing the process as we develop it — putting some solid ground beneath our feet. Roll on the next month!

Announcing The First Job Labs Program!

Inspired by Grameen and BRAC, London Creative Labs is proud to announce it’s first Job Labs program to facilitate the creation of Social Businesses in London.

The program, which welcomes collaborators and partners from all fields, will deal with the issue of joblessness through the use of a specially designed process by Sofia Bustamante.

The process will holistically address the societal challenge of joblessness by:

* Nurturing individuals and their capacities through the use of Peer Coaching and Deep Support.

* Identifying systemic opportunities for Social Business Startups which also address the needs of the Jobless.

* Incubating these Startups using Creative Facilitation to go from idea to successful Social Business!

If you wish to be involved, do get in touch — sofia@londoncreativelabs.com

We welcome job camp participants, entrepreneurs, cultural creatives, analysts, researchers, government reps, industry specialists, artists, process workers and all who are interested in creating a better society.

This is about tapping into the wealth of our collective thinking and, together, finding the solutions that will break through our societal challenges.

First Monthly Update! (August ’09)

Beautifully designed offices at Grameen Creative Labs. Now that is creativity at work!

First Monthly Update!

Wow!!! August has flown by and it’s been a wonderful month for London Creative Labs!

The Highlights:

• Visited Grameen Creative Labs in Wiesbaden, Germany and engaged in all things Social Business with Hans Reitz and Saskia Bruysten. Came back super enthused!
• Outreach: Launched the Peer Fund and with it, began to engage with a wider audience about London Creative Labs, getting feedback at all levels. Realised that the need to communicate the core ideas in an accessible manner was paramount.
• Populated the website with material co-edited by Mamading Ceesay who also wrote a great guest post — a review of Dr Yunus’s first chapter in “Creating a World Without Poverty”.
• Welcomed the talented Katerina Symiakaki onto the team to help with marketing and innovation management.
• Wrote some articles for various media outlets who have expressed a keen interest in what London Creative Labs is doing.
• Spoke at The School of Everything Unplugged.
• Engaged various collaborators in a creative and agile process to scope out the first program of London Creative Labs — the Job Labs!
• Raised £2,226 via the Peer Fund.
• Established a nascent presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in order to engage with the wider community.
• Finalised the Job Labs structure and process — the first one will be in Brixton and starts in October!
• Produced a YouTube video explaining the Job Labs Program — very pleased with the final video!

It’s been a brilliant month and I would like to thank everyone who’s support and engagement has made this possible. Thank you!

A New Kind of Business – An opinionated digest of Chapter 1 from Creating a World Without Poverty

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Mamading Ceesay of Confessions of an Autodidactic Evangineer.

Dr. Yunus begins this chapter of his book with a discussion of the success of
capitalism and that despite the economic growth accompanying the
spread of free-market economics there is a persistent massive
disparity between the North and South in terms of income distribution
with half of the world’s population living on two dollars a day or
less.  Even in the wealthy US, a sixth of the population is excluded
from basic medical care due to lack of health insurance.  Briefly
touched upon are the UN Millenium Development Goals and the lack of
success in achieving them.

Given the above context, Dr Yunus points out that clearly the current
“Winner Takes All” form of globalization implicitly encourages the
externalisation of costs from the free market onto society and the
planet with a “Race to the Bottom” creating and/or exacerbating global
poverty and environmental degradation while fostering individualistic
consumerism at the cost of social well-being.  These constitute
massive and systemic market failures.

Walking On Water And Carbon Neutral Dancing

Social Business Meetup July 09

Synchronicity led me to glance at my Facebook news stream as the last-call reminder for a Social Business Meetups scrolled by. My peer and friend Robert De Souza was due to host this gathering two days later. The growing interest in Social Business stems from the achievement of Grameen following its meteoric success with microcredit; one form of Social Business. I eagerly joined the waiting list for the event. Fast forward to the 20th and I am sitting in a great space at the Host Universal venue in Lexington Street. From waiting list I am one of the speakers It is an informal environment that Robert has created, within which you can sense the keenness of all of us who have gathered there, to learn from each other and nurture that special spark that causes ordinary people to achieve the extraordinairy.

Yunus addresses 7th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture

A four-minute standing ovation was received, by Dr Yunus on July 11, 2009, at the Johannesburg City Hall, South Africa. He was addressing the Seventh Nelson Mandela Annual Address Lecture. Two excerpts follow:

Social Business is Crazy?

“I am talking about investing money in a social business. People give away their money – thousands of dollars of it – and no-one thinks they are crazy. How come when I say invest money in a social business then I am crazy? That is the most appropriate thing to do. If we had done that, we could reduce all the problems we have.  We can create social business to address poverty, to bring nutrition, clean drinking water and [allow] people to sustain themselves.

We have done that in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company and that’s what I do all my life. I created Grameen Bank to solve people’s problems. Not for myself, but for the people it helps.”

Council Of The Elders

“You keep your culture, I am creating a counter-culture.”

“We wanted to focus on women because we saw that when money goes to the family through women, it does so much more than going through men. The more we lent money to women, the more we were shouted at and condemned. We had male opposition and it was translated into religious opposition.

People said we were destroying their culture; that women needed to be kept at home because they weren’t supposed to have or handle money. They said, “You are destroying them by giving them money; they are not supposed to have money.” I said, “You keep your culture, I am creating a counter culture.”

Ever since then I have felt so strongly and said culture is useless unless it is supported by counter culture. People create culture; if people hide behind culture, that’s a dead culture.   Dead culture is good for the museum, not good for human society. Human society moves on, evolves and creates its own culture, therefore taking the culture step by step. We defied that culture that wanted to remain a dead culture.”

Downlead the full text of the speech here: