My 2-Year Journey Traveling the World of Social Change
A brief summary of the frustrating yet empowering journey filled with tears and laughter. I hope you can get something out of my experience to continue building the world up with more empathy and perspective.
[Disclaimer: Last week marks my 2 years traveling in the world of social change. It is important to recognize countless ways to work on social change. My journey below is an exploration that best suits my passion, and has no intention to discredit any other wonderful efforts out there. This is an essay about my learning process. I have countless family members, friends, and strangers to thank in the past 2 years.]
“What are the most effective ways to get people to take action for climate change?”
It was the question the team that created “Time to Choose (2016)” and MyDomino spent two years looking for answers for. We interviewed thousands of people who were alarmed by climate change but weren’t doing much. We wanted to know what the barriers are. It was 2013. Our world already had the ability to provide clean water, clean air, and clean food for every single human on earth. The bottleneck is at behavior change. So how do we enlighten most citizens in the world to co-create that future of abundance/equality for all? This threw me on a 2-year journey of activism.
Background
During the pre-production period of “Time to Choose,” our team was coming in from a technological and economic standpoint. Many of us were from the solar industry. We worked with national NGOs to explore ways to unite the bigger goals and consolidate actions. This process was to help us figure out the decision tree we can cascade down to the personal level. And we learned about the powerful stories from Low Carbon Diet, so I reached out to the founder, David Gershon at the Empowerment Institute, to explore synergies and partnership. Meeting David opened my first window looking into the power of community. Cool Block was a community-based empowerment program to tackle climate change and build community resilience. His programs had transformed cities by building community engagement in the neighborhood blocks. “Livable Neighborhoods” were created in cities from Portland, OR to Columbus, OH. Even the post-911 New York City created a greater sense of community through his program. At this point, I felt like grassroots movement is truly the answer to rebuilding our world.
I had always been fascinated by how disruptive a distributed or decentralized network can be. The Internet has empowered most of the world by bringing information to the tip of our fingers. Distributed solar power has generated electricity on millions of rooftops, saving millions of dollars on wasted energy cost in transmission. The climate movement needs decentralized people power like these. When my role at MyDomino was to build a relationship with community organizations and schools, I quickly became obsessed with people power reinventing a sustainable world.
The Beginning
After two years of research, MyDomino pivoted into a sustainable living concierge service that’s helping people switch to clean energy and save money. It is a valuable service to generate change in individual homes. But it did not include local communities. When I left MyDomino in 2015, I was determined to find the answer to create this people power that will stop climate change. A power that does not simply sustain life, but regenerates what we have trampled.
As I embarked on this new journey, I found a refreshing new freedom that allowed me to challenge myself to tackle the problem in bold angles. Maybe we weren’t asking the right question. Maybe our imagination was bounded by our question. When I was working with Tom Chi, I learned that the question we ask is more important than the answer we can come up with. Questions inspire the curiosity that sparks ideas, which leads to innovation. Tom said, “Knowing is the enemy of learning.” I let everything I knew go, in order to explore the right question to ask. The stage of my 2-year journey can be set in various questions and hypotheses I tested.
The Journey
Now back to the same question: What are the most effective ways to get people to take action for climate change? There were already countless resourceful individuals and organizations funding the answers to the question to get more climate actions. If we still see them frustrated, it probably means the answer is hidden behind the question — somewhere with unimaginable, unlikely combination. I told myself to keep an open mind and open heart on this journey for the right questions to ask.
As someone who has been working on climate change for almost a decade, I came up with a conjecture that offended many of my fellow climate activists: When citizens are first activated to be an agent of change for any issues they care about, then they will start to understand the importance of climate change. Climate change has been unfairly competing with other issues. Maybe we should just empower citizens to work on the issues they claim they care about. I let go of everything I knew and allowed my curiosity take me to crazy places.
Question #1: How do we get people to reprioritize their social passion to the top?
There are a lot of problems in the world that people care about but not enough to prioritize it to do something about it everyday. Many of them were not as lucky as I’ve been to have a solution-oriented network to tap into. I thought to myself, what if we give them an outlet to do more than sharing on social media? After all, human beings are social animals. We respond well with social proof. We crave for in-person engagement.
hypothesis #1: people feel alone, and if they have a partner to work on this with, they will do it.
And what’s the best way to create a social connection? Dating. It is a perfect platform to show that you are a kind human and get laid. At Protohack, I tested a prototype for a charity-auction dating site. Dating for a cause. I played with various UX designs. I studied a lot about donor behaviors. I interviewed people working in the development sector. An interesting thing I learned was the dynamic between NGO, beneficiary, and donors: In general, NGOs go out to serve the beneficiary, but often need to satisfy the donors who tend to be removed from the deep problems the beneficiary faces. To sustain funding, solutions tend to be built to impress the donors or create flashy stories.
It scared me. I am by no means saying NGO or charitable giving is wrong, but NGO without deep intention can be dangerous. It is incredibly difficult to distinguish between an actual solution from an “illusion of a solution.” I read “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde years ago. Maybe you disagree with his point, in which case, I’d love to hear you out more. To his point, an illusion of a solution only perpetuates the problem by concealing the core of the system, which then will only be realized by those who suffer from it. Good intentions don’t always translate into good deeds. Once we look deeper into the downside of a solution, often, the shinier it looks, the more likely it being a hypocrisy that the first-world encouraged because “we don’t have the time to look deeper into accessing its viability and legitimacy.” There are many organizations out there doing real work. Organizations like DonorChoose and blueEnergy do it well by closing the gap between donors and the beneficiary. It’s unfortunate that they rarely get the spotlight because real work and sweat are not sexy and shiny.
I didn’t feel ready to be part of this dynamic.
hypothesis #2: people don’t know how to start and need someone to hold their hands
Speaking of deep connections, there is no better way to connect to solutions than with the subject experts themselves. At FactoryX Academy (now Prototype Thinking), I tested a mentorship matching program: Pick an issue you care about, and you can find a list of people you can connect with to learn more about what to do. I received an overwhelmingly positive response from 10 user testers. The problem is we are building a relationship without a leveled playing field between the giver and the learner. It is not guaranteed real relationships are formed from any matches. Mentoring newly activated people is an investment many changemakers don’t have time for. Heck, they don’t even have enough time to deal with the problem they are trying to solve! To many, delegating and mentoring a person takes capacity most people don’t have. Without an obvious added value for the mentors in this dynamic, this model is not sustainable. If we have rich enough data, AI could be the solution. Currently, we got neither.
Question #2: If we get people to be empowered to do something, will they do more for the world?
I decided to make a pivot and look for opportunities that empower individuals to show up and step up.
Maker Movement:
The individual possesses the greatest capacity for instigating positive change. And this belief coalesces easily with the maker movement. The maker movement is an encompassing term that embraces a can-do philosophy for every aspect of life. As individuals begin to look to themselves rather than to others for innovations and resolutions, this personal confidence can be directed toward addressing the climate crisis at the level of the individual. As a test, I partnered with Beijing Makerspace to work on this project to expand their ecosystem beyond China and into the Silicon Valley. The goal was to bridge the gap for the Chinese on innovation and help them through the transition into the maker-focused industry. Our plan was to bring Chinese government officials and investors to the Bay Area, but visa issues scaled back our project scope to exclude government officials (long story…). In Fall of 2015, we led a group of 10 forward thinking entrepreneurs, investors, and managers of incubators from China to the Bay Area to help them understand the importance of community in fostering creative talents. The central government started to focus on the ability makers, and entrepreneurs could shape the future (as they have done many times in Chinese history). China is facing a massive transformation into the maker-focused industry as they increase urbanization and modernization. As global citizens, this is our opportunity to leverage the support from the government to help steer the transformation to the right path effectively. Here is a video briefly summarizes the learning expedition:
Leadership Development Program:
Then there is the personal development side of empowerment. I worked on building the strategy for Future-Ready NOW. We went around the world developing leaders capable of imaging a thriving planet and working at the commitment required to get us there. From Berlin to Honolulu, we led one-day training designed for leaders ready to step up, so they have the clarity to make a difference. People came out of our full day training with breakthrough solutions and practical plans to bring them forth, and more importantly new capacity for leading collaborative innovation. It was fun and certainly required a different angle to tackle the question. It was like going to the roots to inspire more seeds to sprout.
The Spark
After running into so many walls, the constant learning and iteration got me back to focusing on environmental issues. This time, I came in with a richer background to look at environmental community groups. In September of 2015, I attended the Building Resilient Communities Convergence up at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, CA to test the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis: If I can connect to the solutions to build sustainability in my local community better, it is easier for me to be activated to take action.
As a privileged Asian woman who grew up in Asia, I have spent the majority of my life committed to clean energy, energy efficiency, and solar power as answers to the problem of climate change. I found a beacon of hope against this huge problem through the creation of unlikely yet powerful solutions from within small, local communities. My mind was blown away when I learned about the intersection mural that reduced traffic accident with art in Portland, OR. In San Francisco, CA, a group of community organizers significantly reduced neighborhood violence simply by growing food. Black Lives Matter communities are leveraging community clean energy to take back their clean air and jobs.
These took my understanding of community-power to a new level.
Through observing projects in local communities, I suddenly realized that climate change is being tackled every day when the core of many social problems are being dealt with. Climate change is the symptom of the broken system we are all in. The frontline communities are those who deal with the core of the social issues daily. The solutions they come up with are the unimaginable, unlikely combination of solutions that have been forgotten in the digital age of instant gratification. They might not know it, but they use design thinking to its core.
Instead of being absorbed in instant gratification and shallow quick-fixes, the community organizers are deeply connected to the people they serve. However, the connection to people is so deep that they are often stuck in their own disparate silos. While in their own silos, they are still able to rally together hundreds of people to build community projects. Their acute focus on building solutions in their local communities causes them to sacrifice the opportunity to reach out to more resources. Outreach and fundraising are generally viewed as a distraction from solving the real problems, such as people getting evicted or event getting shot in the streets. It is very common that these community organizers are working on multiple projects with no staff. The lack of capacity is part of why it is almost impossible to find them online.
I worked to help build the NorCal Community Resilience Network with the goals to build capacity and foster solidarity. After witnessing examples of solutions being born at the frontline of the problem, I began to understand that we are moving closer to beating climate change if we let these effective solutions thrive. They will not coalesce in a top-down manner. In a contrary, they only emerge in the bottom-up fashion.
Much like how the internet has connected our knowledge and ideas…
Much like how an efficient electricity grid can support a distributed solar power system…
A connected network of community organizers can reinvent a new system using design thinking with local communities.
TODAY
Looking back in the last two eventful years,
✓ I delved into various agency of change: from donor system that supports NGOs, to maker spirit, to leadership development, and to community organizing
✓ I’ve completed 6 projects through collaboration with different inspiring teams
✓ I’ve traveled to 9 countries
I learned that there are three ways to take action for social change:
- Resist: Stop the harm from being done. We protest. We cut back on the bad. We conserve the good.
- Reform/Recreate: Create a viable alternative. We electrify our entire home. We build clean solutions like solar to power everything we do. We buy and eat locally.
- Reimagine: Change the story we tell ourselves. We use a humanized lens to look at each other. We choose empathy over sympathy. We build solutions with people not for people. We use the essence of design thinking to come up with unthinkable solutions that solves multiple problems. There is no “them.” There is only “us.” We don’t go out in the name of “empowering others” because we know we are all in this together. We are doing this for ourselves.
For that past several months, I collaborated with many visionary community organizers to build a digital platform to connect them to each other. We aim to change the way the world connects to community projects like theirs. We call it CrossPollinators. We believe the best solutions to a problem are created at the front-line of the problem. And, only when they are connected, can we solve problems as daunting as global climate change. It is the place for you to find community projects and organizations that solve a combination of issues you may care about.
For the first time in my life, I found myself liberated from the pigeonhole of labels like “environmentalist,” “hippie,” and “tree-hugger.” I knew I didn’t fit in with the labels. Now with a brand new lens to the world, I see a new possibility.
What issues in the world moves you the most? Energy? Food? Water? Nature? How about throwing in Women Empowerment and Social Justice? Maybe Immigration Rights?
Our search quarry helps find the most relevant and unlikely solutions that solves multiple problems at the front-line by the community. You can find projects like the one that reduced crime in San Francisco through growing food (The solution is a combination of Carbon Removal × Food × Social Justice). Not only is CrossPollinators an intersection of issues, but it is also a place for community organizers to find allies to build solutions in their local communities. We are currently building a list of opportunities for anyone to engage with local solutions. We invite everyone to join as collaborators to co-create a new operating system that brings clean water, clean air, and clean food for every single human on earth.
Let’s build the world up together.
Original post on LinkedIn Pulse
