A crash course in changing the world.
Economic Sustainability is key to a continous social innovations.
Without it, being dependant on fundings, continous presence of an NGO/INGO to making a difference to a society would be chronic at the level of "investment dilemma" -- the more you are investing your time and funds in that particular community, for particular issue, the more 'addicted' society is to the funds, and the more failure it becomes.
NGO/INGO should comes as a pioneer, and transition out to let the community itself changes their attitude and behavior for a lost lasting life's improvement. And for this very reason, economic sustainability becomes the key word of any social innovation project. To put it in a summary: without sustainable incentives, there will be no sustainable change. Quoting Levitt and Hubner in their interesting works on "Freakonomics", it is incentives that makes society ticks.
I'm working for Unilever Indonesia. And from my experience on how Unilever Indonesia change the wh*** community perception in waste management in our CSR Project in Surabaya, Indonesia (Surabaya Green and Clean Project) was that element of incentives embraced by the people that makes the wh*** change.
As a sample, a simple mindset change for making Brantas river riverbanks as your "garden" instead of your "backyard" -- and provide them with plants and seeds of fruits to enlive that spirit -- was working well because they can feel directly those incentives. Our waste segregation campaign was working there because we teach people how valuable composts are when you segregate organic waste and transform it to compost instead to throw it away. And supplemented by linking each community to composts buyer.. voila! we are creating additional income (incentives) for community to live the waste segregation spirit as part of their daily household culture.
And it is that mindset that we should always think of when designing any social innovation project, anywhere, in any subject.
Thats my key learning today.
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