Festival of Ideas
I think I’ve spent more time in London these past 6 weeks than I have in the previous 10 years. Yesterday I went along with Ana (who’s working on the OnTheUp development) to the Innovation Exchanges Festival of Ideas.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect - the idea I’d submitted over on their website was OnTheUp which we’ve been developing further since the Social Innovation Camp. The ‘Festival’ was held at Amnesty International HQ and basically involved bringing together various people in the young people/youth work world along with potential commissioners and funders, and then encouraging them to talk to each other and see who might be interested in who.
It was good to meet up with David Wilcox again who was busy making more live films streamed from his mobile phone - besides capturing my ‘pitch’ he also got some of my thoughts about this kind of event (below). I’m a big fan of this more open approach to bringing people together and sharing ideas, experiences etc. - for me it has considerably more benefit than the alternative and more traditional conferences that in my opinion are rarely good value for money and usually involve familiar faces preaching familiar messages.
The theme yesterday was supporting ‘excluded young people’ and of course to be doing so in innovative ways given the agenda of the organisers. I think perhaps the audience wasn’t diverse enough to truly stimulate innovation - largely the ideas put forward were fairly typical approaches to working with young people and while the projects themselves may be innovative at the local level I didn’t come away with anything in the way of truly new or innovative ideas for working with young people. There was much talk of developing programmes and forming ’social enterprises’ out of them although curiously not a single person with this ambition asked me what it was actually like to set up and run a Community Interest Company (answer - not simple & bloody hard work!).
I wonder if what we could really do with now is an event that seeks to match up people in the youth work world with a range of people outside of it - artists, geeks, police, health experts, business etc. etc. - people who may well have some familiarity with young people but who don’t consider ‘youth work’ their day job. I think maybe this could help with a bit more ‘out of the box’ thinking and it would be interesting to see the possibilities for forming ‘inter-sector’ working relationships.
Hopefully with a few more events like this people will become more comfortable with the format and start to look more outwardly as to how people can work together or share ideas. For our part I was hoping to repeat a version of last Octobers ‘Practical Ideas for Participation‘ later this year but its looking more likely this will have to be pushed into 2009 now.
Thanks for the reflections mas. I was disappointed I couldn’t make it to the festival of ideas in the end… would have been good to catch up with the progress of On The Up.
I noticed from the innovation exchange site that there were relatively few ground-breaking ideas… I wonder what space the real innovative ideas are to be found in? I think you’re certainly onto something with On The Up and linking that to PYD frameworks in terms of helping the sector better identify what works and what doesn’t… and I think there are probably some real innovation gaps in terms of linking services better with local communities (how do we get communities to volunteer to work with young people in our risk-averse and time poor culture?)
Perhaps we need a bit more of a ‘mapping the problems’ before we call for the innovative solutions? Or are the problems already clear?
Hi Tim - I very much see OnTheUp as fitting towards the aims of the Positive Youth Development Approach and I’ll get something up about this and discussions from the Festival on the OnTheUp blog soon. It was very useful for me to listen to people who even in conversations that were not about OnTheUp often talked about the need for things that it will seek to provide or help with.
There are a couple of innovative ideas on the Innovation Exchange but I think for the majority theres a degree of either ‘playing it safe’ or in some cases repackaging old ideas to appear to be new which is a trick I think many of us have had to master because of the funding requirements in recent years for “new & innovative” ideas. Somebody did make the comment that theres a need to fund those schemes that do work without forcing them to innovate - I’d wholeheartedly agree with this except that the ‘Innovation Exchange Festival of Ideas’ is hardly the time or the place! (but that mindset alone backs up my ‘repackaging’ thoughts).
I think true innovation requires risks - the ideas are often not proven. It also needs creativity and the ability to look at problems differently.
In my eyes theres a lack of funders in the youth sector prepared to take levels of risk - funders want to see evidence of need, evidence of planning and a strong case for sustainability - all of which is understandable but if they want innovation they also need to be prepared to support people & organisations to have space to try things out and accept that sometimes those things may fail (which should not always be regarded as failure).
I think with a diverse audience a mapping process would be very important - it would probably work well done similarly to how we use Prospective on our courses with people mapping the issues, the needs, the resources, the opportunities etc. etc. This would make a very interesting event!
For the broader question about linking communities with young people I’ll have to write a whole post on this - its something I’ve been interested in for years!