One of the easiest ways to create impact in our community is what we call the ‘lift and shift’.
We take a non-local solution for a local challenge, and we put it on stage at one of our events. It is a breathtakingly simple move that inspires the emergence of community leadership that could apply the solution locally.
We have recently created two videos to demonstrate how this mechanism works.
The first is from a TEDxStPeterPort talk in 2014, by the MOE Foundation, a charity that trains people from all walks of life in coaching skills. After that talk, the project was established in Guernsey and has gone on to train more than 100 local people as coaches, with great impact. Many of the emerging social leaders in our community are products of the MOE programme. Watch this video to learn more about this impactful story.
The second is from a Thrive2020 talk in 2017. The Daily Mile is a charity that encourages children to run a mile a day, as part of the school day. Since that talk was held, all our local primary schools are adopting, or have adopted, the Daily Mile. Watch this video to learn more about this impactful story.
We have put talks like this on stage dozens and dozens of times, creating a wave of new leaders and implementing solutions locally that already work elsewhere.
It wasn’t something we expected when we first started The Dandelion Foundation. Like our own organisation, we expected innovation to be mostly new and home-grown. As it turned out, the majority of it isn’t. Most of the momentum is inspired by ideas from outside the island, but locally managed and delivered.
Impact like this is hard to predict and it’s even harder to measure its full extent. We never really know who is going to step forward for which purpose, and what will be delivered in the end. What we do know, is that if you present an opportunity to the community, members of that community will often build on that opportunity. We keep on showcasing those examples, raising the possibilities and offering those opportunities.
For those interested in transforming their own community, this is something worth considering. I would love to see many more communities and solutions partnering with each other to get more solutions off the ground.
To lifting and shifting.
Marc
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