The Creative Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

I think that the and the and the end the it

and what did I do hi

everybody good afternoon but having a good fit to the and the yeah my name is Bruce them

on the co-director of an organization called in place of war in place of all work around the world in some of the most marginal communities using arts and creativity to make change in those communities and bring opportunities for local people across the world so

all work started with a question

and the question was do people make all when bomb dropping on their heads and this work started back in 2004 so the the process just under a decade and a half we've been looking at how our is used in these communities why people make all of these times so i'm here today to talk about education and the role of creative education in communities that conflict what we found particularly in the most marginalized and poorest communities across the world is that the provision of education is very low but this actually has that back in May to think about

education across the whole of the world and thinking about whether the education system in place to work but before I talk about that I want to quickly tell you 3 things that you probably don't know about 73 short stories I

will use to meet benny benny is the hip hop artist based in the north of Uganda in the war-torn area of Uganda intercom that is the hip hop artist and along with 15 other hip-hop pop arteries he has a

farm he keeps bees and he makes approaches and the profit that he's stepping make from the parties that he sells enables him to go in the

local prison and work with prisoners with hit pop our creativity culture and transform the opportunities for the inmates meaning that they don't returns to prison after they leave and meaning that this improves the whole life within the community the

the 2nd highest I wanna talk about his picky picky is based in a place

called El Valle and neighborhood in Caracas in Venezuela did humans an organization called tuna elsewhere today to Elsworth a is a

collection of 100 converted shipping containers which make this incredible cultural space deep in the heart of the neighborhood inside this page you'll find sets of spaces music studios down spaces and every week 500 young

people going through this space taking them away from violent alternatives in their neighborhood they have this incredible social impact and if that person I would

introduce you to is far as the Monday sorry based in Beirut and she wants an organization called creative space they read that slogan is make designers not close she goes into the

Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon and find women who have very marginalized women from obviously the most poor communities and in Lebanon and she takes these women who have had no experience with fashion designer making and train them in all the skills so they can make fashion ranges and close these closed self the tens of thousands of dollars and the profit enables

them to work with more women every year giving them skills and enabling them to set up their own creative enterprises the now why haven't told you about these 3 things so these 3 things you might not find on an education syllabus or curriculum you might not even find them on the internet these are 3 examples from kind of isolated communities or people working with isolated communities but these 3 people have told me more about the world than I ever learned at school than I ever learned at college so I'm talking about education and I'm

talking about today what is lacking from most systems of education and I'll come back to these 3 people at the end of the presentation when I start thinking about

this talk actually start thinking about the context of education the history of education and so do the the thing that everyone does and I'll I'll get a dictionary definition that comes shocked to read the dictionary definition of education is the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction especially a school or university so when we think about but

how we all learn when we were younger it probably looks something not similar to this a big building with classrooms inside with death where people would sit behind the desk and a teacher usually older than the students would do that giving off systematic instruction and as I travel around the world of do with my work I see this

format that education pretty much everywhere that I go they say that

education is supposed to prepare a broke the workplace I found this picture which room which was very similar to the 1st picture I guess there may be a long time ago education did just stopped it prepared for workplace but perhaps things have changed now that does education

work with the jobs that we now do my experience of education

with both good and bad and my history lessons

where were kind is probably the bad it as my education my teacher was told Mr. Ellis and going to name and shame and every week we would go for the

history lesson and she would have a book we would also have this book and she would dictate passages from the book to words and we would write down what she said that 2 hours a week every week for 3 years that was my history and I think as we move around the

world we see particularly in the poor communities that I work here where

education is often a colonial imports that Mr. Alex's example of how learning happens is the norm

and this worries me because I've just come back from Uganda and this worries me because people are not learning how to use their

minds how to think critically all analytically about the world that we all live in the world has changed

exponentially over the past 100 years from how we access accessed information from having to have a physical book so now online digital tools having tablet to how we do our work for how we interact with people to how we live our life everything has changed but the way that we receive information has respective receive education has received pretty pretty much the same the they the saying that you

can teach somebody to finish and you can see them for a lifetime but what if we could teach people how to make the fishing rod about the ecosystem in the late about how they can sell their fish both in their community and beyond what about education was more than just the basic that we receive in school so with

my organization in place of war we've been looking to see how we can work with the most marginalized communities in the world and these are

all the people that we work with and this many many more

and understand how education should be right now so we've been through a process over the past kind of decade and a half what we started off

by doing is taking at the institute marginalized communities the idea is then training people quite simple take the most successful entrepreneurs in fashion in for community that's working with textiles see what happens but what we found within each really structures actually the experts that we were taking to the communities were coming away learning more then the people based in those communities and not made thing actually all knowledge is valid just because your based in the western you you're a millionaire it doesn't actually mean that you know more than people who were living in marginalized communities a we found that the most remarkable innovations were happening in communities with the least resources of course they are people have to innovate to survive every single day so what people know in those communities a lesson that can be learned everywhere in the world 1 of the things I learned last year was this idea of learning and unlearning so I was in South Africa and a woman said to me every day I wake OK and I learn

but I also on land and she was talking about the apartheid education system which told her that her culture was not valid that her language was not valid and this had been systematically put inside her brain the point where she started to believe this as a young black woman so every day she woke up and she was having to when Raphael back and on land up which I found really fascinating the we also know that borders I'm not a barrier anymore in the past I guess people from the UK from Europe could go and deliver education in maybe African countries but actually what was happening with the people from Zimbabwe was learning from people in Uganda because of access and resources and so on but now with digital tools and mobile technologies have the potential for people to interact within and across the continent is much more powerful much more possible we also learn new 3 or 4 years but the world's continues to change and therefore education should not be static and stationary it should be continually evolving and responding to everything that's happening around it we also learned that there were no long answers everybody holds the valid to knowledge everybody should be able to participate and introduce their ideas regardless of who they are where they're from and so on

so we start to think what this education was an

ecosystem when I think about the communities that we work with and we also the picture below those remarkable young people when I see the way they work together in their everyday life in that community is like an ecosystem and the dictionary definition of ecosystem is the biological community of interacting organisms it's not linear it's not giving is not receiving it all of these things interacting

with each other a and so we start

thinking what if education with an ecosystem and it looked like this which is beautiful what is the most

isolated people on the planet it starts to learn from each other connected each of the inspire each

other what if 1 day your classroom within South Africa and the next day was in Brazil and this is a photograph of some of the

work we do in the guy on the screen is in Brazil the other guys are in South Africa wife your

peers became your educators you were learning from other people your age like you doing the same things as you what

if you could create an effort involving living Bank of resources so the curriculum wasn't

just that what do we do this and we do this and we do this actually some dive in Palestine were introducing their ideas into the system and some of the guys in Venezuela and it was building you have this great Bank of resources the and what if you could connect directly

with the people in the world she wins by you the most and start to really have those conversations with the people that you can you want to work with and along with all

the fat boy if you could create some kind is creative Commons the around this which formalized

people working together so your in Uganda you wanna make a project so you wanna make it something that is less than a reality with someone in Brazil you can maybe make a formal way of doing that yeah and what if

education happens beyond the classroom and actually was part of everybody's every day life so is about how you bring up your children are exploring different methodologies and ways of doing them about how you work with your family about countering challenges around mental health and with the challenges in society so i'm placed of

war we created accidentally and organically this kind of community and it's about we created a creative and social entrepreneurial program so an education program that we devise with 40 countries

across the world and the programs started off with the basics of social entrepreneurship creative entrepreneurship we didn't want it to be a load British people saying this is how you do it because it's not applicable it doesn't work when you go to Uganda so we did is we ask people mostly from the global south what innovators who creators were making amazing things happen with limited resources we created a 100 real life living resources videos illustrations as you've seen and all these kind of things i we asked people to continue to add to its is growing old at the time they have elements of social and creative enterprise and around the delivery of this everyone who participated for the train of through train trainers in different parts the world and then they take into their communities which could be a refugee camp to be all sorts of settings and then people connect afterwards online so this community of people is starting to happen across the world those in Palestine 2 weeks ago delivering the trainers training in West Bank as in Uganda just last week those people are not connected with each other what we really want to do is actually

this education is important and is different and it looks different to any kind of university education but we won a university to back this so participants in the program receive a

certificate from the world leave a world-leading University the University of Manchester which means so much given that the people were delivering its you might be a

refugee he has had no formal traditional education as tho it's hugely powerful so again guess we start

innovating with are limited resources and we get began mobilizing

creative people to try and make change in this way we make the world's our classrooms hasn't got the walls that we see around us it's everywhere and we broke down those tools and the students and the teachers now became 1 and the same thing knowledge then becomes play with it and we also starts to learn and when learn how education can work the and it's been really powerful journey because it's so inspirational it's so true the people that we work with in a different context every time we do the work we learn loads and they're learning from each other and it's totally in a nontraditional way and most importantly we started responding to the technological environment and environmental and social changes in our world using what's around us to make education happen in places where it

doesn't so what free tools can we use to make these things happen and because if there is

I think the possibilities are endless there's so many people who missed out because of lack of education the so many people who have incredible talents the coffee and then I guess what's left

like this and more like these

examples of how people can

learn outside on the street in houses collective houses across the 0 and in different settings in communities across the world so this

is a picture but 2 days ago 3 days ago in Uganda and we train people from Congo Tanzania South the down and across Uganda cultural leaders who

working in communities these people will take all of these ideas they will add to the ideas and they will deliver its hundreds and hundreds of people in their communities then they full network that everybody starts to connect with each other so people who never would have had education opportunities have got an opportunity to learn from people right across the world using new methodologies to bring change in that in that context so so

far we've delivered and evaluated the program in 14 countries is in

multiple languages we trained 200 trainers and they've trained hundreds and hundreds of young people I think what we've learned so far we're right at the beginning of this this journey we only create the program relatively recently the innovations and knowledge in the program are the inspiration and it's the methodologies the things that we the things that we work with and the people we work with that inspire and give people hope that they know that other people can make things happen with very limited resources I think 1 of the key desires that people in this system we want to be connected they want to know that with the people out there who can work with them and the whole thing is about democratizing education and I realize this a few days ago enabling people in this world you have limited access to resources to education is the ability to access that and it's about alternative and accessible delivery

so going back to the 1st 3 people with these 3 people told me a lot and I've I'm from Manchester in the UK and have the opportunity to go to school and be educated and to me what they teach each

other they will part of the network is the nominal and then how that can be amplified and created in the ecosystem the potential is huge so I the education going in the direction of being an ecosystem and we should all

embracing have joined in in this idea that we can help everybody on this planet to receive education inspired by everyone on the planet that thank you very

much few

and then at the time uh any questions you will

have worked and so on the which

so was the questions please come to me your word to my colleague over from 1 over I this come over here you can stand up and the line if you like the fact that we know how many people want to ask questions this is normal isn't it right they say just I'm Howard along in doing wrong and I wonder at how do you find

your people the people you work with because some I'm wondering so how do you kind of pointing to the existing social structures the drainage and build your own education system as apparel of universe sort of or the where at the heart of the so as we as of for the past 15 years we've been working

across the world and networks have been built kind of quite organically so when we work the counter we've been working there for about

6 years and through a process of we do a whole bunch of other things as well so we build created spaces we mobilize people we do research all sorts of things so we really kind of identify cultural leaders or community leaders the idea is not to replicate is not to go in and do something is to enhance or assist people so for example in Uganda we we kind of go through different channels but we put calls out for people

we have a process of kind of identifying people that would never be to replicate anything it's only to work with people on the ground so in row 1 so we haven't we we've done historically bits of work there but I would a 1st 1 let your NGO and say hey he would be good to work with and we have conversations and do a little bit of kind is finding out and then we worked with those organizations and it might be that the training needs to be modified or that the elements of it on a relevant was contextualized so we do a lot of work around the world to make sure it really worked in the different countries they begin to to achieve that you and your any other questions

that at the hi on funding the sometimes good yeah I think so that this indigenous was a wonderful job hidden thank you on on it's might be a little bit naive but I was just curious call when building all networks and all these amazing

opportunities college illness languages home you have to be because you have this work here so

and we have translated the program in 2 different languages so we worked to train trainers in different places and we we change we translate the resources in 2 different languages as much as we can afford to do and depending on where we deliver the work and what we're working in community say Venezuela where we build a case that is that we have staff that speak Spanish and so on so it's half and especially when we're working in the African countries where there are many many local languages in Zimbabwe shown on the ballet and so on and I think it's very much about trying to find a way through against the people that we want to reach the most of the people who were the most likely to just speak the local language and so in that sense it's about working with local community leaders he can then helpers translate the resources and so on it's hard but I think we when managing to kind of get about that and and we we work in lots and lots of places that the loss of languages generally there's always the 1 in the community he speaks English or a kind of European language which is helpful and but yeah it's still a challenge yeah it so 1 must call

for the last question part I am can I lose and work of the of my question is how do you get the University of Manchester to formally certified these people are what the located in rural villages and know that the hotter to Canada is so my organization is a study in a partly at

the at the University of Manchester a when I 1st took this to them they said this is crazy they were like this is and because were vessel they said it was the money going to come from and so on and so I told them about in terms of this is kind of a social responsibility and we talk about widening participation in university of so actually this isn't going to be something that the university can monetize but this is a great thing to do and the University of Manchester has these beacons of and kind of priorities and 1 of them is social responsibility so if it really well with kind of their vision for the world and and so we went through a process of having this 35 and we also have an accredited and and it's a while but we we made it happen I think it's that thing about this house the university worked with lots of people who obviously very privileged and this is the end of that spectrum and it means the university of working with a wider range of people from across society so I'm I got there in the and the thing think you're much

somebody has a private question for the times you will be a year world started and then you're motivated moles for the year

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