Reflecting with RLabs: moving forward

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Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

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University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

225 ratings

This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC

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What if it works?

In the end social innovation is about impact. We’re all trying to have a meaningful, positive effect on the world, whatever that might mean to us. If we do this and we’re actually successful, this is going to take us sooner or later to the question of scale. How do we grow that innovation? As social innovations mature, the forms they could take and the multiple ways in which you could organise around achieving impact increase. It used to be easy to label organisations according to non-profit and for profit, and government institutions based on their purpose, its organisational structure and the way it measured what it achieved. That’s all changing. There are different ways to diffuse and scale the work that we’re doing to achieve impact.

Rlabs: Journey of Hope Part 69:43

The evolving world of social innovation2:58

Organizing social innovation5:28

Financing social innovation5:45

Scaling social innovation7:32

Reflecting with RLabs: moving forward10:21

Conheça os instrutores

François Bonnici
Director
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Warren Nilsson
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Marlon Parker
Founder
RLabs

[MUSIC]

Marlon, so when you started RLabs,

it was a group of people getting together informally around an idea.

And it's grown through different forms, non-profit,

you've creating a business, a range of other things,

to really see how to do the things that you wanted to do as an organization.

And it's been through quite an evolution.

But maybe tell us a little bit about how that journey started, and

kind of the different stages that came with the growth of RLabs.

>> I mean, like you said, we started off as it was a little side project.

So there was no formal entity, no legal entity.

So everything was done leveraging community resources.

>> Yes.

>> As we started growing, and more people coming to ask RLabs for

support and they wanted to join our programs.

We didn't realize that maybe we needed to kind of have some form of legal entity

that would at least take care of the legality side of things.

There wasn't much thought put into it before.

It was literally just someone said, you're doing a social project?

You must be an NGO.

So, we just did it as an NGO.

And as we started moving on the non-profit side,

we were starting to find funding in the beginning.

And it was because of that,

that we started thinking about, we wonder if we shouldn't create some

value somewhere else that can pump money back into our social impact work?

So without us knowing it, we started a, what people would call a hybrid model.

We were doing a lot of consulting and building some new innovation to technology

on this side, and that was feeding our non-profit side.

And when we started kind of gauging from that moment on, when we started seeing

people in our community coming up with brilliant ideas and

wanting to start their own businesses, we said so, but

wait a minute, now we need another kind of structure.

Because of if we had to support them, we couldn't have the for-profit company,

being a non-profit entity, being a holding company of the for-profit ventures.

So we had to create a for-profit group company that then started being as

a holding company, providing the support that they needed.

And when we did expand it beyond South Africa, that then brought another

complexity, where we had to set up legal entities in all these different places,

trying to adopt a little bit of a franchise model, to a certain degree.

And through this entire journey, we always evolved.

Back then it wasn't, though.

I mean, I didn't even know what a social enterprise was.

This was 2007.

It wasn't thing.

But now we find ourselves in a position where we've got a non-profit,

which is the control shareholder in our for-profit company,

that does a lot of our consulting work.

At the same time, it's also the main group company that has holding company in

a lot of other regions and that is in with provide the support and

the fare needed for our share which is the non-profit.

What we are reflecting in an early video was that or a hundred of years we

just have this full profit and non-profit top structure but essentially what you.

Discovered by trying to follow what you needed to do if,

had to arrange the structures to serve your needs and your objectives, and

your concern was that sometimes if you pin yourself down to a particular structure,

then that limits either what you can do or

even worse, your mindset of what you can do.

And that's exactly the reason why we encourage, even for

many of the young people and community members that are now not just

coming to be hooked in development, now starting to own social enterprises,

images and ideas, we tell them to keep it as fluid as.

Don't go and jump In really into wanting to nail down

this is what I'm going to be based it as and this is the way it should be because

somewhere along the line you're going to realize, I should have changed that.

And I think that's what's happening so much and

I think in a way this is very liberating and we're seeing lots of new approaches,

legal forms, and not just legal forms.

Ways of thinking about copyright for example and connect to open source

dissemination of your work and so in a way it becomes your playground that

you're talking and that can be part of the fun and some ways a social innovation.

Even though it sounds heavy when we think about it in very technical terms.

But it also helps you to think about to think about your business model.

Your sustainability model.

Because all of a sudden you realize that doing a slight change, for us,

for example, when we decided, because we want to get to a place, of course,

where the more good we do, the more sustainable the work we.

So, that's for-profit, I think.

At the same time, we want to do things.

Not when there's resources to do something,

because that's the way we operate.

And when you are able to kind of find yourself in the place,

where you begin to innovate even from an organization and legal style of things,

you could actually start innovating in the business model side as well.

And I assume part of the reason you went there was to stop generating revenue

and because of one of the Jamixx drug counseling platform you started generating revenue.

But how are those different models also allowed you to open different avenues for

different kinds of resources and funding?

I mean the nice thing about the non-profit side is always you can

always go to your grants or donation, that kind of model.

And you donate your donations, and that kind of model.

When we started exploring the for-profit and

the hybrid model, it now meant that you could actually leverage some of the things

you're doing on your non-profit side, be it from a consulting perspective.

Or maybe people want to delve deeper from a research perspective.

Because many times, when you do social initiative projects, you are so

in the headspace of creating and delivering a lot of value that

you sometimes miss these value creation things you

created that can actually bring back a lot of value into the organization.

You see them as economic value in addition to the social value.

Yes. And that's kind of the big thing,

because any kind of social value that you create

Always has an impact on the economic side.

So you're talking very explicit.

Hey, we have an expertise in using social media to getting the word out.

Or, we have an expertise in organizing communities to think about problems.

And a company or a government agency as in the case of the Youth Cafe.

So we'll say, we want to hire you.

To do this just the way we hire McKinsey or some consulting firm.

And you've been able to do that regularly over

what's a pretty short history actually, less than ten years.

And, I mean, because generally, when you normally begin to address and

move yourself into those positions if you have all the qualifications.

You have the wealth of experience.

Our team is a group of young men and

women, many of them have dropped out of school.

Very few of them have got degrees, while they're going back to university.

So, it's interesting that you could all of the sudden use a collective

wealth of knowledge that was birthed out of serving the community.

That is now value creators for,

be it companies or international development organizations.

And that I think is where opportunity lies.

But it's allowed us to do that because we were fluid in our structural thinking.

because if it were just a chat vision,

none of that I cannot do that because we have to get money to do this project only.

Whereas our thinking was completely different, saying,

so we've done this, we've seen the impact.

What if we can do that in another community or do it in a different way?

As we run incubation model, we've also been starting to look at impact investing,

and actually saying, well, and therefore supporting new businesses to be created

around developing social value, but with a business mindset.

You've been providing seed funding and investment into them.

How's that journey been going from someone seeking resources to someone providing it?

A lot of the ideas and the social innovation that we address and look

into are generally things that know we've got we've got a lot of strength there.

So at the same time I mean our main thing is that we ensure that

hope becomes contagious.

We want to ensure that there is impact at the larger change.

So a lot of those things we bring from a financing perspective.

We provide resources through them plugging into our networks, number one.

Secondly, also many of them just need a space to pull the work from.

So the RLabs journey has been quite extraordinary,

less than ten years going from just a few people to a very complex organization

with partners in over 20 countries,

thousands of people moving through it, more than 100 people working here.

Generating half of its income through sales and self-generated income, and

half through more traditional grant-funded income, as you've said.

And I think a lot of what's been responsible for

that has been this flexibility and this creativity,

almost playfulness, you've taken with these organizational forms and finance.

So that's been a great journey and we've been sharing it over the whole course of

this six weeks that we've done this.

I'm going to put you on the spot here to take us out.

Here are people taking this course, probably starting on their own journeys.

Probably much closer to a few people in a room than to what you are now.

What's the one piece of advice or idea that you'd like to leave them with,

as they start on this journey and move forward?

I think the one thing that I can actually share with you is,

even if we can just make a difference in that one life.

Don't try to overcomplicate things, and

you don't have to understand everything before you start.

By making a difference in that one life, just starting very small, and

even if you don't know how to start,

find yourself in a place where you can add value to someone else's project.

It's through that where the learning will actually kind of take you on this journey.

But the best thing is, start today.

[MUSIC]

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