Sustainable ways

It is terribly embarrassing that this blog was meant to record my empirical and intellectual developments, my fieldwork, my baby steps in the promising fields of social enterprise and social innovation and my reflections, yet the last entry dates from some months ago. In a sense, those readers that know that completing this PhD is an irrevocable personal test and a key element of a wider family and societal masterplan, should be reassured that I have been extremely busy. A friend told me once that maintaining a good blog is the surest way of failing a PhD or distracting your attention from other core tasks...While I know many exceptions, I am rather proud of having little time for blogging.

I have been delivering training in London and surrounding areas for the support agencies that I respect the most on business and financial planning for social enterprises. This experience has been bitter sweet. The sessions usually run smoothly aided by practical activities, templates, best practice examples, warnings and ice breakers. It is sweet that training is one of the things that I do best. However, it is bittering to notice that most trainees are not anywhere near taking control of their organisations' destinies through a business plan. Business planning is just an illusion when an organisation is facing life-threatening income reductions and staff redundancies and when the day to day pressures of keeping afloat deter people from thinking strategically.

I have also been preparing an entire training module on social enterprise and innovation which I'll be delivering for a week in Vietnam during May. I've been trying to put together a coherent picture of the social economy around the world drawing on the best examples from Latin America, Africa, Asia, USA and the UK in a way that makes sense for government officials, NGO workers and entrepreneurs.

I am still working trying to provide some strategic and mundane support for two fantastic, bottom up social businesses in London. One is a community-led nursery operating in a very deprived ward of Lambeth and the other is an entertainment agency led by young people. You wouldn't believe the clarity of purpose that moves these two initiatives. And you wouldn't believe either that they are preaching and practising social enterprise without really speaking its fancy language or being connected to any of the 'key stakeholders' that make up England's pretty elaborated support and network infrastructure.

PhD wise, I have been interviewing inspiring entrepreneurs with mind blowing ideas for social change, with a good track record of developing and scaling sustainable social businesses and more importantly, with a good sense of humour that helps them to continue. I am also observing and participating from the formation of some extraordinary initiatives to democratise knowledge, led by the more innovative practitioners in the field (seriously, I will be writing about it once they are not confidential).

And finally, I have also been networking through a series of coordinated events. Networking (only one letter away from not working) has now become a routinised activity that only interests me if it helps me secure support for the causes that I believe in or for the organisations that I work for. I am meeting a great lot of smiley and energetic people but I am trying to harness the power and experience of only a few. I feel fortunate, overwhelmed and grateful with those that share their experiences and knowledge with me and it would be great if more people had access to the spontaneous conversations that I am having.

I am going back to Colombia. I don't know when and certainly I haven't started thinking about the how. But I am going back. I therefore need to take the learning with me. The examples, the ideas that can somehow be replicated or transposed. I will also be inviting some of the great people that I have met to spend some time there doing research, teaching, developing fledging SEs from the bottom up, rethinking and improving my country, my sunny city. I do not take this task lightly and I am working hard on developing my tribe selectively.

I read somewhere that the world needs both social and conventional entrepreneurship. But one type is sustainable and the other isn't. The argument and the future are clear for me.

On rhythm, music, theatre, poetry etc

A couple of weeks ago I learned an important lesson, hopefully for good. When working with clients, you should respect their rhythm and avoid imposing objectives and workplans that do not respond to their own dynamics. Ultimately, there's no point in having a good business plan or a perfect marketing or sustainability strategy if you don't have the skills to implement them. I had concluded this before, but sometimes I find myself learning the same things again and again, without noticing the unlearning that takes place in between.

The Latin American Youth Forum is a group that manages to congregate, with certain religiosity, more than 35 young Latin americans living in London on a weekly or more frequent basis. Their parents, with no exception, are in low-skilled jobs. Half of the youngsters are already cleaning offices or accompanying their parents to work. But they always make some time to come to the meetings. They text each other, share their facebook profiles, they flirt and they socialise. And in between, a beautiful, charismatic young Colombian manages to slip art workshops, coordinate critical thinking seminars, design and carry out consultation meetings and plan fundraising events.

I cannot describe very clearly the strenght that I get from this group every time that I, on a voluntary basis, help them bring to life a business idea they've been developing, an entertainment enterprise. Perhaps is the fact that they are all friends that makes me feel so warm. Perhaps is the fact that this experience combines well some of my passions, namely, social entrepreneurship, ethnography and performing arts. Perhaps is the fact that I identify with young Colombians living in London and that I get excited everytime that I see them opening new windows. Or maybe, after all, is the fact that the enterprise came to us, instead of us looking for it.

This force got me frantic, and I started putting a bit too much pressure on them to take certain decisions and to give certain steps. I needed a website in order to secure them a contract with a relatively big fish. The website took longer than expected, and I was fuming.
Until they finally told me: 'Is not that we are not working. Is not that we won't do it. We will, but following our rhythm. Please be patient'. They even said please.

The lessons that always marked me the most, were thaught with love. Everyone lives, walks, feels and dances at a different rhythm, and for an advisor, understanding and being able to get the best of your client's rhythm is critical. The website is finally here. It is not perfect, but a bit of my heart is in it: http: www.layf.org.uk

Now that it is here, please let your contracts come our way.

This PhD will soon start to take shape, at my own rhythm. In the meantime, I am having fun, am trying to help as many people as possible, am working on the ground and I am having very interesting conversations with enlightened thinkers, innovators and friends. Juan, Martin, Brian, David, Annemarie, Andy, Laura...you make this hell almost perfect.

If Maria must wonder...

If a boy must wonder,
let him recall
not the lightening grace of falcons,
the dizzying aeronautics, Darwin's finch,
the voyage of ancients
who saw farther, whose charts and sails
and bubbly telescopic minds
brought ashore hope
to lift
a charioting god to the moon
but how
even a rogue dream of stars
once birthed the possibility of flight.

(Leon Yuchin Lau)