Secret Seed Society is making healthy green living simple and fun for children. It connects a young audience with food by creating a fantasy world full of vegetable beings. I am working with Shena & Amy Cooper to bring this venture to life.
Worn Again is a pioneering upcycling company making new design-led products from corporate waste materials. Check out their new Virgin and Eurostar range of bags and jackets. It is an exciting new business model, with excellent growth potential. I am a non-exec member of the board.
Myoo Create is a community for environmental and social innovation – where people can come together and apply their talents to challenges that matter to them. The premise is that “nobody is smarter than everybody” and so collaboration is key. I have helped design and develop the platform, and am now spreading the word!
Collaboration is a powerful skill, made tonnes easier by the social media web. A few of us have set up a site where we filter and share some of the emerging practice for connecting, and co-creating with others. The aim is to get all our peers in the sustainability movement to become collaboration ninjas.
In March 2009 I did a short study into the benefits of fairtrade organic cotton farming with Zameen Organics in India. In Maharashtra there is a ‘suicide belt’, where 26 farmers reportedly commit suicide every day because of debts they can’t repay.
Click through to see a systems map illustrating both the assumptions that keep us driving cars and the new realities that are challenging this highly unsustainable paradigm. I designed and presented this at the launch of WWF’s One Planet Mobility report in Sep 2008. Illustration was by Lucy Blackwell.
Brave New Collaboration was a learning journey to the USA during the summer of 2008 with sustainable designer Ed Murfitt. We were funded by NESTA to take our cameras and interview some of the emerging pioneers of online collaboration.
Seed funded by UNICEF, I project managed a global team across six cities to co-design, develop and launch a site for collaboration and sharing knowledge in the field of of mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies and situations of extreme stress. It uniquely connects practitioners, organisations, academics and service users around the world working in this field.
I designed and delivered two ‘insight journeys’ for the Innovation Exchange in order to help identify opportunities to solve complex problems such as excluded young people or independent living. The faciliation and filming was led by Amy Cooper.
In Jan 2008 I co-founded a knowledge and networks programme of events exploring and nurturing disruptive social innovation over the course of a year. The community continues to grow on facebook.
Hubs are places for meeting, working, learning and innovating, dedicated to inspiring and supporting enterprising initiatives for a better world. There are currently 12 Hubs around the world, from London to Sao Paulo, supporting over 3000 people. I was on the leadership team of the organisation for 3 years during a rapid growth phase.
Working with Barclays Bank for 2 years I was on the strategy team behind a number of new products and services that delivered a blended value - increased financial and social returns on investment. One of them was a micro-debit card for the financially excluded.
The Equator Initiative is a UN partnership programme. It evolved in response to the the fact that the world’s greatest concentrations of biodiversity are found in countries also beset by the world’s most acute poverty. I profiled community-led projects in which the environment was being used as an asset by the poor. Here is a microcredit example.
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