One of the most critical secrets to social innovation is creative resourcing. This means identifying and leveraging the assets you and your target population already have within your reach to create social change. As a first step, map out all the assets you have before you. Consider what you love to do, what you are good at, the skills and gifts you have to offer. Next consider the machines, equipment, devices, tools and objects you have on hand that you might use to create social change. Next make a list of the people of influence that you know and the physical spaces you could use for your work. Finally, look about and consider what others see as waste and consider how you might use those items as tools, whether you could resell them for money, trade them for something you need, or use their parts to build something else. When I work in Africa with vulnerable women, they may only have a spoon, a rock or a wheelbarrow to their name. But then they determine how to use those items in new ways to advance their ideas for social change. A wheelbarrow can be used to fight domestic violence - just turn it over and beat on it with sticks like a drum to create an alarm if you hear someone being abused. A rock can be used to fund an illiteracy program - in Rwanda when a group teaching 1300 women how to read asked each woman to pick up a rock and bring it with her to class as her payment for her lessons, they gathered enough rocks to fill several dump trucks and sold them to a construction company as building supplies, making enough money to pay their teachers for a few months. Creative resourcing - we always have more than we think we do. A social innovator recognizes this and sees everything around them as a tool for social change.
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