Where Worlds Meet
May 22, 2013, by Cassie Robinson
Our new tag line Where Worlds Meet (credit to Anna Pearson there!) makes more and more sense to me. I mean, it always made sense, but these last few weeks when I reflected on all the conversations and meetings I had with various Point People, it was really brought to life.
I met with Amanda who has just started working 3 days a week with FutureGov leading a new project called PopCash; developing a mobile product to support the most financially vulnerable into better borrowing and saving habits with Credit Unions and away from the likes of Wonga. In these first few weeks Amanda has been getting to grips with this hugely important and increasingly relevant area. And all credit to her (boom boom) she has just finished a front-end developer course at General Assembly and is now coding too! #Finance #CreditUnions #TechyGeek
I saw messages from Anna popping up in my Facebook stream in relation to her work with 38 Degrees. Anna is working on 38 Degrees’ Campaigns by You site for the next two months. The site enables people to start their own petitions on issues they care about, on everything from saving Herefordshire's libraries to the fight to stop changes to legal aid. #Campaigning #MovementBuilding
A coffee with Jen and I was updated on the brilliant new initiative she has started called CharacterCounts. This is an area that Jen has been building up expertise in over some time, having written a high profile report - Building Character - back when she was at Demos that is still making significant policy impact today. CharacterCounts is a new, independent centre that promotes, evaluates and designs public policy interventions that build character. #Resilience #EarlyYears #Evidence
Earlier in the week Ella and I spoke to a class of MA in Applied Imagination students at Central St.Martin's and I was reminded of Ella’s work as a screenwriter. Having finished a screenplay based in Afghanistan, she’s now developing projects closer to home. She’s also setting up The Comms Lab with 10 founding organisations, to redefine the industry’s social impact #Comms #socialimpact
Sophia is shortly going to be starting a piece of work with Nesta’s Creative Councils programme. She’ll be extracting learnings and helping them to think about future strategy and links to policy. Also her book, The Squeezed Middle, came out last month. Sophia bought together experts from both sides of the Atlantic to ask what the UK can learn from the US when it comes to the declining living standards of ordinary families.#LocalGov #Policy #Welfare #Livingstandards
The last time I saw Kyra she was just about to head off to the States and hand in the final draft of her book, Co-authored with Alexa Clay, called The Misfit Economy. Published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster, it tells the stories of how we can learn so much from misfits, stressing the importance of diversity and our own dark sides. Not only has she been writing a book, she's been recruiting for the Sandbox Network as their London Ambassador and now she's going to be a Mum too! #BlackMarketEconomy #TalentNetworks #Mum
Talking of Mums, Ellie, Kerry, Sarah and Rachel are all on maternity leave and living valuable other experiences. We're lucky that they still input in to meetings, and Yammer, as much and as often as they can. Their experiences of becoming mothers for the first or second time are really important for us to have in our group. I know that they have questions about how to balance all the aspects of their lives and I reckon a Point People book about motherhood may be on its way soon! #Mums!
I had a very quick catch up with Hannah just before Spark+Mettle's pub quiz this week. She's been busy planning her trip to New Zealand and the South Pacific as a Winston Churchill Fellow. Kudos to her for being selected - they had 1200 people apply for only 100 places. I'm not surprised though, she is on a mission to bring collaborative/collective social entrepreneurship into common practice, especially in the international arena. And much needed it is too. She's got big plans to share the approach widely when she gets back. #CollectiveEntrepreneurship #Networks #International
Kate has continued at Nesta where she works with the education team on their Digital Makers programme, which seeks to support a generation of young people to create rather than simply consume digital technology. She's recently went to SXSW r where she ran a session with Doug Belshaw from the Mozilla Foundation and then was at the UK Maker Faire in Newcastle supporting members of the Make Things Do Stuff consortium. She's building up a real expertise around digital making and education, and also considering how these areas can be connected more broadly across social innovation. #DigitalMakers #Education
Anne is working at Public&Private focusing on patient empowerment, co-production, and how to make a reality of the commitment across health and social care to make integrated care happen. She’s also getting more and more into the way in which networks are going to be the future of our public services –not just in health, but also families are childcare #families #health #social care
None of us have really seen Polina the last few months but that's because she's just doing her final for her Law Degree (Good luck Polina!) - she already has a job to go to full time but has still managed to squeeze in helping with Hub Westminster's Academy. #Law #Enterprise
And I've been busy getting DataStore off the ground. We won the Urban Prototyping Festival award for Urban Resilience and have spent the last 3 weeks building the first prototype of the store. Initially for the Digital Shoreditch Festival and an exhibition at the V&A. Now that Intel have sponsored the second version we will be taking it to the States later this year. DataStore is the digital literacy aspect of LondonScape and as I am about to start a 12-week course on Data Science at General Assembly, I think it's fair to say I'm becoming a bit of a data geek. #DataConsciousness #OpenData #Data&Design
So looking back at all those conversations (and the variety of the hashtags), not only do I think we really embody the phrase "Where Worlds Meet", I also feel hugely grateful and inspired that I am working and sharing with this brilliant group of people.