After a liesurely morning of work, I set off to Brixton to meet Mamading Cessay and Sofia Bustamante of London Creative Labs. I first saw Mamading’s name when he was poking around wagn many years ago. Then I started following him on twitter. And about 2 years ago I met him in person. We share the venn intersections of alternative currency+social entrepreneurship+collaborative software.
I am standing outside the Brixton tube stop. There is an amazing amount of foot traffic. All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds walking in or past me. Swirls of color and style. Mamading and Sofia walk up to me with smiles blazing. We walk past Electric Avenue, where I notice all the street stalls selling a range of goods. Sophia gives me the history – first street electrified. Has been a high end neighborhood and also full of brothels. Seems an area with a history of extremes. She remarks that this is one of the highest foot trafficked areas in the city – it is a crossroads.
We wander a few blocks away to a cafe. I am eager to hear what London Creative Labs is doing. Last I had spoken with them, they were running these amazing skill camps. I think of Mamding’s work as post-all-the-things-I-don’t-think-work for community transformation. So I am super excited about what he and his collaborators are cooking up now! We sit down and talk quietly. Many of the people in the cafe are actively working on a project of London Creative Labs: career coach training and apprenticeship. Sophia leads me through parts of a slide deck so I have a visual reference. I ask a lot of questions like,”if you say this is a mashup like Grameen, how are you using peer accountability to ensure success for everyone?” And we talk about some financing models that might help this work scale from reaching hundreds to reaching thousands.
Mamading ans Sophia aren’t new to the work or overly idealistic. They are grounded in a very sincere, prudent, and persistent approach. Their social designs have cascading wins. They have even though through how their work can reduce government costs and increases tax base. I had sent Christelle, my writing partner, in their direction last year, and so they already knew her “risk mitigation” approach to social change. I took it a bit further, giving them a preview of the Action Spectrum work that may apply to what they are growing.
After an hour of jamming on London Creative Labs, we spoke of broader things. Again, I keep asking questions about narrative in culture and how it is constraining the possibility space. I mention the woman from the plane – and the demonization of the working class (aka poor) and the glorification of university and white collar jobs and lifestyle. We riff on it a bit. I am not sure how we came to it, but I am sure that we need a story to be told in our culture of how the working class has always been and continues to be the backbone of our economy, both as producers and as consumers. People I know who really value a hard days work usually come from a working class background or at least had stints of physical labor. What if we had a series of stories on tv or radio, “An honest day’s work” or something? Tell the story of where someone’s work ethic comes from? Bring pride to the work of the invisible backbone of our world – whether those are front line service professionals, plumbers, janitors, or others of the working class, we need to tell their story with pride.
Tingling with the sense of possibility about whispering that story into the right ear in a way that might allow a transformation in culture and sense of self for so many, I was giddy on my way to meet Manar. We spoke on it further. Somewhere along the line we collapsed the distinction between the working class and the poor. Maybe we painted them as uncouth or lazy, uneducated or even stupid, and willfully dependent on our systems. The political framing is about getting the working class/poor off of social services because they just grow dependent on social welfare. This is the equivalent of saying I met one alien, and he tried to eat me, so all aliens must try to eat humans. A few bad actors does not make an entire class bad. Another solution to the drain on social resources might be to acknowledge that the current design of our system prevents far too many people from achieving even a base level of human well being. And when the extreme gaps between rich and poor appear, we are ALL suffering for it. (See Geoffrey West on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyCY6mjWOPc
I wonder what to do next with this insight?
Manar and I concluded the evening with delicious Indian food, delightful conversation, and then some incredibly phenomenal italian ice cream. YUM!
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