9. blog post ENG

Explaining what social innovation means to us through animation

You can check our animations on our Vimeo or Facebook page

Love story or why to start talking about social innovation with young people

Do you live a life of a reactionist or the one of a pro activist? When you are 15+ you probably go to school where you get prescribed tasks. You are probably made to believe that a group of unknown specialists designed the best selection of knowledge for you and some other groups made series of tests to test you if you did your homework. You are supposed to live in that mode for some more years further. You are trained to react to what others bring to you. Nevertheless, will you be able to switch, when it´s the right time, to a mode of a self confident member of a society, a successful enterpreneur, a smart NGO worker or a skillful engineer? Will you be able to improve the life of many others, save the planet or at least not to consumme in a way causing vast destruction? These were the questions which authors of the project Empowering Youth to Become Social Innovators asked a year ago. And it seemed obvious that it would be important to make young people believe that their ideas matter. The sooner, the better.

We all probably understand what an innovation is. You just materialise a good idea and abraka dabra - an innovation is born. The aspect of „social“ means that there are a lot of other people who can benefit from that innovation and they just start using it in their everyday life. Petr Vitek, a co-founder of the Czech Impact Hub, a global network supporting young entrepreneurship, in an interview for a student magazine makes a point when mentioning an old Indian rule: all decisions had to be made with regard to the seven following generations.  We might not need to design social innovations if we respected such a rule!

All right then – we discovered what social innovation means for us, talked to inspiring people, shared our motivations to innovate, looked around to find existing social innovations in practice and improved in a number of useful skills. When it comes down to making things happen, there are still these major questions: How to approach social innovation? From which perspective? Where to start?

This is the moment when art steps in: when making your hands create scenes, let´ s say from clay, or trying express ideas through pictures, new connections come to your mind, ideas make sense and eventually you get it. Like with our Love story: a simple story of an old person being helped by a young lady. Yes, we made it! Our first team animation and it worked! Fantastic. However, how does it connect with social innovation, if ever? We invite you to watch the animation and find the answer for yourself, no matter what we have written there, at the end, for you. This is our connection but you may like it differently. Welcome to our own discovery.

- Anna

This blog is a part of the project Empowering Youth To Become Social Innovators, realised under the Erasmus+ partnership programme. The project is coordinated by a Czech NGO DYNAMA, z.s., seated in Brno and an Estonian NGO Youth Club Active, seated in Tallinn. This project contributes to the development of non formal learning of the youth.