REAL IDEALISM
CHAPTER I — THE FOUNDATION
I am not unaware of the fact that I have sketched an educational Utopia. I have deliberately hitched the Institute to a star; it would be wrong to begin with any other ambition or aspiration.- Abraham Flexner
NEW GENERATION CHANGEMAKERS
01|People — organized in Tribes (groups) — come together in Kingston, Kinshasa, New Orleans, Cartagena, Curacao, or Bahia to design (small) social projects to rebuild their own communities from the bottom-up. These projects deal with school, home, money, safety, debt, identity, health care, or whatever a Tribe thinks is important. The common thread of the Tribes is their ambition to create more opportunities for themselves and their Village (neighborhoods/communities).
02|They don’t want to wait on others to do it for them; they want to do it themselves. They are The Ambitious Poor and they are the new generation of changemakers. The Ambitious Poor collaborate with people from all walks of life and from all corners of the social spectrum. They partner up with us — the Social Mavericks Platforms — to change the world — their worlds, our worlds. The purpose is nothing more than to give new-borns & young children a better future by breaking the chains of generational poverty. The right way to do it is to rebuild society from the bottom-up — powered by the people themselves — and financed by society.
03|The Ambitious Poor register on the platform to become Mavericks and to join a Tribe. Each Tribe is part of a dedicated regional platform like Social Mavericks Kinshasa or Social Mavericks Kingston. The local platforms are connected to the global Social Mavericks Platforms forming a huge crowd of people with a specific shared goal: to produce Peoples’ Impact in a reliable, consistent way. The game plan is that our Mavericks inspire others to follow in their footsteps to build a self-propelling dynamic of perpetual social change from the bottom-up.
04| The Revolution of The Ambitious Poor (aka The Peoples’ Impact Revolution) details how we design the Social Mavericks Platforms. The goal is to change the mainstream thinking about fighting generational poverty. But The Revolution is more; the book describes the concrete foundation (blue-print) for a multi-million-dollar enterprise that puts the words into action. We walk the road we talk about. Our journey has four stages: (i) the long road to U$25,000,000 funding; (ii) post-money road to proof-of-concept; (iii) Scale the concept from a few towards many more locations and (iv) sign public-private-partnerships with governments.
Those capable of channeling the power of the crowd must turn their energies to something more fundamental: redesigning society’s systems and structures to meaningfully include and empower more people. The greatest test for the conductors of new power will be their willingness to engage with the challenges of the least powerful.
05|According to Bertrand Russell, power is the ability to produce intended effects. The Platform facilitates power from the social professional class towards the people living the problem. Its focus is on getting things done; on producing tangible results. Power is essentially the ability to get things done. So actual power is only created if people are able to transform opportunities into real things that work in real life for real people. So, Peoples’ Impact rebuilds society from the bottom-up with the people living at the bottom as the changemakers of choice. It transforms non-producers into producers; the non-influential into influentials and the powerless into people with power. It is the only way to break the chains of generational poverty.
TRAIN TO PERFORM
06|Mavericks are — by no means — invited to a free lunch. We do empower inexperienced people with training, adequate resources, and monetization opportunities but the nature of the business demands solid performances in a high-pressure environment. Providing adequate resources sounds good but it means nothing without the right skills and mindset to manage those resources. The Rookie Mavericks will go through the Maverick Be-Smarter-Today Program (Mayela Yango) in which they will learn the basics by doing them. The Be-Smarter Program teaches Mavericks not only to fish but to teach their peers also the basics of fishing. (figuratively speaking, of course)
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
07|The Mavericks recruited from The Ambitious Poor are trained to become changemakers. They take the first step to rebuilding society. They are not looking for handouts or the easy way out. They adapt to create value. But does society (the decision-makers) have the balls, vision, and guts to fundamentally support a proven Peoples’ Impact? We believe so because 96.2% of people around the world embrace the Teach-Woman-Fish mantra. They love to have alternatives to the traditional Fish-Giving nonprofit sector. The potential broad support is dormant and untapped. Our job is to deliver what is promised.
08| Traditional top-down projects have resulted in too many wasted projects with trillions of dollars flushed down the drain. Truth to be told, Peoples’ Impact will have many setbacks and disappointments too. Yet, there is a key differentiating factor. Even when a Peoples’ Impact Project is failing, impact (progress) is achieved because the Mavericks have become smarter and more experienced by learning from their mistakes. In platform-speak, we say some kind of failures still increase the network effects. It makes Peoples’ Impact intrinsically a superior strategy over top-down social impact, produced by smart, middle-class social entrepreneurs, at least in the realm of fighting generational poverty.
09|The real wealth of nations lies in its smart people. We assume what applies to nations, also applies to communities — the smarter, the more open-minded its people are, the more it is able to prosper — collaborating with others at higher levels. The basic element of breaking chains is to make people in The Village smarter. In our approach to make people community smart, we distinguish three levels: (i) smarter individual people; (ii) collective intelligence Village, and (iii) artificial intelligence, supporting individuals and communities. We believe that impact solutions should always primarily be judged on how they increase the individual and collective Mayela Yango.
10|The social reality is simple. It is impossible for large percentages of poor people to gain access to the middle-class using the current competitive systems of society. Making people more community smart increases the odds for more Maverick Changemakers. As changemakers, they focus their solutions on three main obstacles for progress: (i) poor people lacking the competitive power in The Job/Entrepreneur Rat Races ; (ii) the myriad of social obstacles of a rigged society, and (iii) no local opportunities to monetize skills for people in The Village. By rebuilding society from the bottom-up we create additional ways to make money for people living in The Village.
THE IRRELEVANT OTHER
11|The standard strategy for movements is to focus entirely on the evil of the Other; on the errors made by The Others or on the injustice done by The Others. Focusing predominantly on the ‘enemy’ poses problems. The tactic does not make us smarter and does not produce peoples’ impact. So, we need to take a fundamentally different approach. We need to focus to improve our own group, regardless of The Others. Maverick changemakers are Builders of Solid-Quality. And if they want to be better today than yesterday — and they have to be — they better start looking in the mirror. The message of the Mavericks Mirror is to be self-critical without losing self-confidence.
12| Producing Peoples’ Impact makes Mavericks and The Village smarter. As they get smarter, their competitive power increases. In the beginning, the stream of simple projects will hardly move the needle. As the number grows and the projects become bigger and more complex, the community impact increases significantly. The unofficial objective is that people in The Village start feeling progress in their guts — literally. As we go along, the SM Platforms become fully entrenched in The Village and in the lives of Mavericks and their allies in The Village.
13|Not giving The Others the central stage in our thinking, does not mean that we ignore them. Far from it. We observe, analyze them, and find their weak spots. We are competing with the Negative Forces in the community for market dominance. The playbook of The Revolution to conquer The Village lays out a simple strategy: (i) build quality solutions that address the pains of The Village; (ii) get smarter, get more Ayale Yambo; (iii) collaborate with positive, ambitious people across the social spectrum; (iv) use markets to favor the poor and (v) make The Antagonistic Forces irrelevant. Our Mavericks need to see the world in different ways; they need to understand themselves better as well as all the forces in society shaping it.
14|The Social Mavericks’ Platforms is built on the dreams of women and men who were thinking bigger and smarter than their oppressors. They understood where the world wanted to go. But freedom without economic choices is a very limited form of freedom. Being held hostage as a beneficiary might be seen as an act of charity but it does not make people smarter and it does not empower people economically. Few people dream big of being a beneficiary needing the help of others.
15| Just imagine a world where you and your neighbor make their living changing the world? Just imagine if Group Colored Black would be the leading force in redesigning society? Just imagine if people themselves could break their chains by becoming smarter every day? Just imagine if we create more economic freedom for more people based on a peer-to-peer model? The Social Maverick Platforms is a venture that has never been thought of before in the way we plan it. It is a Moonshot that could fail in a million ways. But even if we fail 100 times before getting it right, it would be totally worth it.
……THE END……
Keep on reading
Chapter II — Beyond Crazy — the next chapter is not yet available
Questions
- Do you know of any practical projects in the world that tries to rebuild society from the bottom-up?
- Which part of the article sounds good but is completely unachievable?
- Which part of the article (chapter) do you absolutely disagree with?
Glimpses Of Many Worlds
What goes through your mind when you look at this picture?
Doubt is a killer. You just have to know who you are and what you stand for. -Jennifer Lopez
….. and now for something totally- different.
Feeling the need to brainstorm?
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- Email: mavs@tribeqa.com
- Social Mavericks Website: http://social-mavericks.com
- Personal Website: robertoroberto.co (work in progress)
