Culture and Inclusivity: Putting your heart and soul into it
I’m interested in how change happens.
How it happens within us. How it happens with us. And how it happens in the world.
I believe that it is potentially transformative when we are brought into relationship with people and things in the right way and for the right reasons.
Very simply put — transformation comes about when we bring things together in a considered and purposeful way.
For the purpose of this post I’m going to be talking about ‘space’ and I would like you to understand this ‘space’ as being something where things can ‘be’, and ‘take place’. So, it can be online or offline. It can be a collaborative or learning space. It can be a social or functional space (communal or organisational).
Socially Enterprising as a network and as a platform is a space which would contain and connect elements of all of these other spaces and I have a very strong desire to ensure that all of it works — that it is brought together — in a way that promotes peace, inclusion, learning, diversity as well as social change and public benefit.
Culture and Context
Socially Enterprising is not an ego-platform. By this I mean that it isn’t there so that people and organisations who use it can post all day long about what they’re doing like they might on Facebook or Instagram.
I believe it’s possible to shift this type of behaviour over to something much more useful and that this can be achieved through culture and context.
Socially Enterprising, as well as providing a platform, also creates and promotes stories of collaboration which present a different world. These stories create a setting — the context — they demonstrate actions and behaviours which are social, creative and resourceful.
As the platform and its collaborative features are used for working with other people and organisations it is done so within this overall context.
The stories in this way help to shape, inform and guide.
This type of storytelling will be a craft and a practice and it will not come cheap (it would be funded by platform subscription fees) but the overall effect could be to shift actions, behaviours and understanding in a dramatic way.
We want to tell the story of a different kind of society coming into being.
It will be you that we are telling the story about and you to whom we will be telling the story.
Any person and any organisation who is joins becomes; audience, participant, co-designer, co-builder or co-author all at the same time.
Diversity and Inclusivity
Putting inclusivity at the centre of things would allow us to help shape understanding of what a participatory society could look like and feel like.
We want everyone to belong and feel that they are able to contribute in a meaningful way to society, the planet and where they live.
In my experience of how things work we’re a million miles from this.
I don’t believe gradual improvements are going to get us where we need to get to and I think we need to imagine and demonstrate the future we want to see.
The idea for Socially Enterprising is that as an organisation we are not the doers. We provide the story, knowledge, connectivity and infrastructure that supports the doers to do the doing.
We connect it all together but what happens is emergent.
We can promote highly inclusive practices but we cannot make you do them.
If you are a community collaboration making use of the platform, we cannot force you to provide a British Sign Language interpreter or avoid jargon and overly complex language that would help ensure that everyone in your community can access, become involved and contribute.
Our hope is that you will do so because you will see others doing it.
We tell the stories and we highlight the practice and results. Our network contains the skills and knowledge you need if you wish to reach out and implement them yourselves.
It may be possible for professional community facilitators and interpreters to be provided to you at some point through the platform but that is further down the line.
Where, as an organisation, we may be able to demonstrate the future is in creating networks and collaborations which are directed towards us as an organisation, platform and network that is taking on social and environmental challenges.
1. We are a cooperative
The potential to create a fully engaged, open and inclusive cooperative gives us a reason and a space where we can try and test new things.
A cooperative is required to engage with its workers and members and that for us covers potentially any person or organisation.
You are all crew.
We can make inclusion our default setting in everything ‘we’ do.
2. We can create dedicated spaces
As a network it is possible for us to create and convene spaces that ask social and environmental questions. This is as useful to us as it is to our audience and participants.
Much of this can be opened up in such a way that the network members actively shape and guide the future.
We become a learning organisation.
We will continuously be learning from people and organisations and people and organisations will continuously be learning while using the platform and participating in projects and activities.
We are all on a developmental journey.
How this would look in practice is something that I do no have all of the answers to. There probably aren’t any permanent answers to the question and I think that it can only ever be an ongoing creative experiment.
Please save me from the boredom of anything else!
To give you some idea of my thoughts I think there is much that can be learned from;
- Existing Disabled People’s Arts Organisations for example Shape Arts.
- The Northern Rocks Teacher Conference (2014–2018 a self-organised by teachers for teachers, cheap and accessible, fun and enjoyable, a diversity of activities allowing teachers to choose their own Continuing Professional Development pathway through the event).
I make mention of these only as I did attend some of their events remotely. I’m sure there’s no shortage of great examples and experience out there to learn from.
I’d would like to draw your attention to the Heart and Soul project which had an end of programme event which I really enjoyed and personally I thought that if you were trying for an engaging inclusive learning and community event then this really stood out from the crowd.
The future should look like this.
It’s worth reading about the entire Heart and Soul Programme. You will not be disappointed.
I’m of the opinion that creating an open, cooperative, distributed, organisational framework grounded in this type of approach and practice might be the route towards something not only truly inclusive and participatory but that is also able to act as a protection against power, privilege and politics.
It presents the possibility of a type of social and organisational space which is just too artistic, inclusive and human to ever be occupied by anything other than people attempting to get on and understand each other and make sense of what is happening in the world around them.
Power, privilege and politics have enough platforms and entire nations and economies at their disposal.
Socially Enterprising has always been conceived as being a society working together and putting people who are most often excluded and overlooked at the centre of this story is vitally important.
What point social justice and social change if not for those who cannot take it for themselves.
Peace, Community Building and Restorative Justice
We want society and communities to come together.
Peace and community building are part of the purpose of the platform and the organisation as well as the story we want to tell.
We don’t need any more division in these times and it is possible to tell stories, demonstrate behaviours and facilitate spaces which act as a counter to what we are presented with through our media and on our screens.
It isn’t difficult to see how this can be assisted by participatory arts and culture as well as purposefully designed learning and development opportunities and experiences.
I am interested in how it may be possible to model actions and behaviours within the network as a way of demonstrating how they could be brought into real world usage.
Socially Enterprising isn’t an ego-platform or type of social media as has so far been applied in the world.
People and organisations are not going to turn up and post photos of their evening meal. If you’re on the platform it’s most likely because you want to get something done or get involved.
We are not a platform for politics or debate.
We are a place for people and organisations to get together, roll their sleeves up and get on with it.
We want and need people to work together and get on with each other but we understand that things are not always that easy.
As a platform we have a responsibility to protect people, and it is after all a public space as well as a work environment that we are providing.
So, what do we do when things go wrong?
How do we avoid punishment, banishment and shaming (which divides us) and encourage learning and forgiveness (which unites us)?
Let’s say for example a person uses the platform and one day says something hateful about another member or expresses a view that is so offensive that there is a need to intervene in some way.
We could just ban them but we would only be preventing them and us from learning anything more.
The only way for everyone to benefit is to try to engage with the person in such a way as they feel fairly treated and able to see why their actions were wrong.
I’d like to open your thoughts to the idea of creating a form of restorative justice that operates as an integral part of the platform.
Our initial actions might be to refer the person/s to materials, short courses or experiential learning that have been designed by civil society organisations (the platform contains these materials anyway) and are aimed at changing ideas, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.
So, we intervene as a platform and we say what you did isn’t helpful to our platform, the people and organisations who use it, or to what your community is trying to achieve.
We offer a way to learn why in the hope that the person sticks around and finds a way to make a valuable contribution at a later stage, or at least remains involved and engaged with their community.
It is after all their platform and story too.
If the behaviour continues then it may be necessary to revoke their ability to communicate with others on the platform until they are able to engage positively.
It may also be possible to create a dedicated and highly individualised restorative space which is able to work with the person and those affected in such a way that everyone feels they have benefited.
None of this is the kind of stuff where an algorithm is going to be much help.
We want people and organisations to do this work and it’s possible that if we think about it sensibly then we might be able to prefigure and normalise the concept of restorative justice and practice that would benefit the actual towns and communities where we live.
Socially Enterprising creates a space for place-based work and activity.
There is a very real physical aspect to what we are trying to bring about and it could be that having peace, community building and restorative justice teams working both online and within place builds an important capacity which can be accessed when required.
Maybe as a network and platform we can fund part of this new capacity?
Facebook this isn’t.
I’m suggesting something much more alive and human / responsible and responsive than anything we’ve seen so far.
