A new coffeeshop in Brixton Village Market

This poster is in one of the new shops in Brixton Village Market.  It is an initiative of the Spacemakers Agency, who broker relationships between empty shop landlords, local artists and local councils. It is an exciting and challenging initiative. London Creative Labs is involved with some of the outlets. We ran our Skillscamp in Hannah Lewis’s “Remade in Brixton” unit and are now enabling participants from the skills camp to find work experience through the upcoming shops. A happy arrangement! Find out more about the Brixton Village  Market

Young professional arrives to work at the BRAC Dhaka headquarters.

What a New Year’s Eve gift to the world; the recognition of another outstanding man from Bangladesh. Some of our friends will know that  London Creative Labs was started out of the inspiration of BRAC as one of two giants to have transformed Bangladesh. Of course the other inspirational giant is Grameen and it has been a fantastic year for Global Grameen. How satisfying and even thrilling to see BRAC now being raised to the kind of stage it should have been on for a good few years now.

Why is BRAC wonderful?

When I heard that Fazle Abed’s inspirations were Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire and other revolutionary figures in liberating educational ideology, the ‘BRAC way’ made sense to me. What they have done is truly liberate people from their situation, and their interventions are systemic in nature.

Young entrepreneurs on the streets of Dhaka

Bangladeshi’s audacity of hope: See this wonderful article on BRAC

BRAC in the UK

It was a pleasure earlier this year to meet BRAC-UK’s director Sandra Kabir, who has been mentored by Fazle Abed for twenty years, and who has successfully rooted BRAC in the UK. This is no small achievement and I am was impressed at how many women and children they had already reached in the time here. Sandra described how on a budget of £40,000 they managed to reach 2000 Bangladeshi women, teaching them financial literacy. London Creative labs looks forward to collaborate with BRAC in 2010.

My wish for BRAC is that their ‘way’ gets more global recognition, and especially their deeper principles so that they can be attributed and so that the core ideas can be replicated or at least become the cause for more disruptive innovation in the world. Congratulations to Fazel Abed and BRAC worldwide for four incredible decades.

Fazle Abed’s biography

The official press release

Dhaka, December 31st, 2009.

Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, Fazle Hasan Abed, is to be knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for services in tackling poverty and empowering the poor in Bangladesh and more globally. Abed’s name was included in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List released December 31, 2009.

Abed is to be appointed Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG). He is the first person of Bangladesh origin to be honoured with a knighthood by the British Crown since 1947. Abed receives his knighthood for his work spanning four decades in education, health, human rights and social development and for bringing financial services to the doorstep of millions of the poor in an effort to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh and countries in Asia and Africa.

On receiving news of his knighthood Abed said, “I am humbled by the honour to be conferred on me. I thank my colleagues in BRAC, who are at the forefront of the struggle to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh and abroad and I share this honour with them.”

Abed is the second person in his family to be honoured with a knighthood. His grand uncle, Justice Nawab Sir Syed Shamsul Huda, was knighted by the British Crown in 1913.

A biography of Fazle Hasan Abed is in the article above. For further details please contact the following persons:

In Bangladesh please contact:
Tania Zaman, Director Chairperson’s Office, BRAC, cell: 01730013122
Bangla language media: Zia Hashan, Manager, Media Affairs, BRAC, cell: 01714242912

In the United Kingdom, please contact:
Penelope Mawson, BRAC UK, cell: + 44 (0) 7940 705097

In the United States, please contact:
Susan Davis, BRAC USA, cell: + 1- 646-239-4411

Please visit www.brac.net to learn more about BRAC.

Mr. Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder and Chairperson, BRAC, Posed for photographs at BRAC Center on December 02, 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh. © Shehab Uddin/Drik/BRAC

Biography of Mr Fazle Hasan Abed

Fazle Hasan Abed was born in 1936 into a landed family in Baniachong in Bangladesh’s Habiganj district. He matriculated from Pabna Zilla School and went on to complete his higher secondary education from Dhaka College.

He left home to attend Glasgow University, where, and in an effort to break away from tradition and do something radically different – he studied Naval Architecture. But there was little work in ship building in Bangladesh and a career in Naval Architecture would make returning home difficult. With that in mind, Abed joined the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London, completing his professional education in 1962.

Abed returned to Bangladesh to join Shell Oil Company and quickly rose to head its finance division. His time at Shell exposed Abed to the inner workings of a large conglomerate and provided him with insight into corporate management, which would become invaluable to him later in life.

It was during his time at Shell that the devastating cyclone of 1970 hit the coastal regions of Bangladesh, killing 300,000 people. The cyclone had a profound effect on Abed – in the face of such devastation, the comforts and perks of a corporate executive’s life ceased to have any attraction for him. Together with friends, Abed created HELP, an organization that provided relief and rehabilitation to the worst affected in the island of Manpura, which had lost three quarters of its population in the disaster.

Soon after, Bangladesh’s own struggle for independence from Pakistan began and circumstances forced Abed to leave the country. He found refuge in England, where he set up Action Bangladesh to lobby for his country’s independence with the governments of Europe.

When the war ended in December 1971, Abed sold his flat in London and returned to the newly independent Bangladesh to find his country in ruins. In addition, the 10 million refugees who had sought shelter in India during the war had started to return home. Their relief and rehabilitation called for urgent efforts. Abed decided to use the funds he had generated from selling his flat to initiate his own. He selected the remote region of Sulla in northeastern Bangladesh to start his work. This work led him and his organisation, BRAC, to deal with the long-term task of improving the living conditions of the rural poor.

In a span of only three decades, BRAC grew to become the largest development organisation in the world in terms of the scale and diversity of its interventions. As BRAC grew, Abed ensured that it continued to target the landless poor, particularly women, a large percentage of whom live below the poverty line with little or no access to resources or conventional development efforts.

BRAC now operates in more than 69 thousand villages of Bangladesh and covers an estimated 110 million people through its development interventions that range from primary education, essential healthcare, agricultural support and human rights and legal services to microfinance and enterprise development.

In 2002, BRAC went international by taking its range of development interventions to Afghanistan. Since then, BRAC has expanded to a total of eight countries across Asia and Africa, successfully adapting its unique integrated development model across varying geographic and socioeconomic contexts.

Under Abed’s leadership, BRAC has made remarkable achievements against enormous odds. That BRAC continues to evolve, experiment, and expand is a testament to the vision, courage and dynamism of its founder. Its work has been recognized internationally through awards such as the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2008, which is the world’s largest humanitarian prize, as well as the Swadhinata Puroshkar in 2007, the highest state award in Bangladesh.

For his contribution to society, Abed has received numerous national and international awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1980, the Unicef Maurice Pate Award in 1992, the Olof Palme Prize in 2001, the UNDP Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development in 2004 and the Inaugural Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2007. He is a founding member of Ashoka’s prestigious Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Abed has also received several honorary degrees including Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale University in 2007, Doctor of Laws from Columbia University in 2008 and Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford in 2009.

November has been a packed month mostly about face-to-face connections with peer networks and little by little with the local and jobless communities.

The First Micro-Lab took place on November 19th.

The Highlights

• Re-connected with a group of ‘Lab-Pioneers’ across Europe; Maarten Roels, Simone Poutnik and Philippe Vandenbroeck amongst others. Very inspiring work churning in this network!
• Mette, Mamading and Sofia attended a great “Laboratories for Social Change” Seminar by Reos’s Zaid Hassan. This was a very generous investment (in kind) in LCL by Zaid; a friend and peer since Sofia’s “Pioneers of Change” days. Thank you Zaid!
• Sofia facilitated a collaboration session at the exciting Media Ecologies Workshop. Her experiment worked! This p2p network is key to LCL for sharing and developing cutting-edge knowledge and practice on collaborating in a very open and participatory way.
• After office space deliberations, we have a perfect solution! We are now sharing a small part of 2 of the units in Brixton Village Market that are inhabited by our friends “Remade in Brixton” and “Transition Town Brixton” following the smart Spacemakers Agency 3-month rent-free brokerage.
• London Creative Labs was thrilled to be one of 107 organisations invited to a Global Grameen event organised by Grameen Creative Lab in Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Germany.
• Social business pioneers shared challenges: How do you ask a population to begin to pay for something they have never paid for before? (Context: Grameen Violia producing non-arsenic water 80 times cheaper than normal bottled water but of course, not free.)
• It was inspiring to hear in simple terms why some investors invest purely for social good and not for financial benefit. As Muhammud Yunus put it “I do not give this sentiment [of selflessness] to them. They already have all of it! I allow them to connect with it.”
• Executed the first Micro Lab on Nov 19th.The workshop was held in Brixton St Vincents Community Centre. The two hours were a great experiment which generated a lot of new questions to think about. See the flyer above!
• We finally established that we are still in the design and prototype phase — a very exciting and exploratory phase of an idea.  A full business plan is therefore not quite what we should be aiming for at this stage. Our road maps will take us to the Job Labs!
• After feedback about names, (too much use of ‘job’ and ‘lab’) “micro lab” is now  “watering hole”; where animals all gather to drink from the lake as it is a regular drop-in session. “Job Camp” is now “Skills Camp”. What about our “Core Job Lab”? Ideas on a simpler name are welcome! Refer to the video if in doubt!
• The peer fund reached £8040. Very encouraging and have had a number of people asking how we did it. My advice is this: stay authentic and very real in your requests. Believe in yourself and people respond to that.

In December we are preparing for our first mini Skills Camp which will take place in Unit 5, Brixton Village Market, hosted by Remade in Brixton. I cannot wait! Thank you to all who keep showing up with support, ideas, energy, feedback, and belief in us.

The high points  of October were definitely Mette’s arrival and the fantastic 1st workshop, pictured here!

Co-hosting with UnLtd, LCL brought a group of social entrepreneurs/investors/game-changers together to work with Alex Osterwalder in applying his Business Model Canvas to social business.

The Highlights

• Established a small international group who will steward the process design. This is a key thread in what London Creative Labs is all about: generating processes that generate real-world outcomes
• Spoke passionately about London Creative Labs at a dialogue event between female social investors and entrepreneurs hosted and led by Ogunte.  Received a spontaneous offer of investment in LCL, paying for us to use MyCake.org to put our finances online, which we are eager to do.
• Sofia facilitated a big Open Space Workshop on “Future Food” for Transition Towns in Brixton. It went very well! It was excellent to be doing this work locally. (See pics here)

Mette reading Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Generation Book

• Welcome  the true chaos pilot, Mette Pedersen from the wonderful Kaos Pilots school. 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.
• Ran a very successful first monthly lab:  entitled “How to systematically generate social business models” (see pictures)
• In the workshop we unleashed a hot conversation on social business model paradigms. Mamading initiated a google group: socbizmod and a twitter hash tag #socbizmod for practitioners uncovering these new paradigms. Join the conversation!
• Met the impressive Sandra Kabir, founder of BRAC UK. Established good rapport and intention to learn from each other; exchanging know-how on facilitation and outreach.
• Established a relationship with SMDI, the Student Microfinance Development Initiative of the London School of Economics (LSE). LCL was honoured to speak at their launch event alongside the likes of Sandra Kabir from BRAC.

This month has been about bringing the community of practitioners on social business together through the monthly lab and through the LCL role as facilitator of this process of innovation. We’ve also been strengthening partner organisation relationships — it is so great to work with those that share similar values. Thank you to all our friends and advisors for your help and support along the way.

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!

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.