Sorry mum, I was at a Hold-Up!

(Pour l’article en français, c’est par ici)

When I was in Paris last July, I heard two people talking in the subway. One asked « Have you heard about MakeSense ? » and the other answered « You mean the Hold-Up events ? ».

A Hold-Up is an open-to-all and free workshop to help a social entrepreneur solve a concrete challenge. Since the first one in January 2011, more than 1 500 Hold-Ups have helped accelerate impactful projects all around the world.

The MakeSense community and activities are expanding and I think this is a great moment to remind everybody where the Hold-Up comes from, its impact and our next challenges to ensure our mission: Give everyone the power to act for the societal issues he/she cares about.

Did you say “Hold-Up”?

In late 2010, Christian Vanizette returned from his trip in Asia having collected dozens of challenges faced by innovative social entrepreneurs.

These entrepreneurs had many operational and strategic challenges but lacked resources, expertise and time to solve them — especially for early stage social ventures. To help them and make these challenges more visible, Christian decided to put some of these challenges on a website, the first ever version of makesense.org, but there were still no practical tools available to help actively solve them.

At the same time, more and more people around us were looking for ways to have an impact in their society, not only by discovering inspiring initiatives but also by helping them and giving more meaning to their skills.

There were already great organizations connecting social entrepreneurs with experts. We wanted to offer a tool for any citizen to contribute, even with just a few hours, to the solutions they wanted to see emerge around them.

We wanted to show that, beyond speeches and talks, it is possible to massively engage citizens, with a positive attitude, during solution-driven events in an easy and replicable way.

At MakeSense, we deeply believe in 2 major statements for our actions :

- Everyone can be creative, as long as they are equipped with the right tools and in the right environment.

- To brainstorm effectively, a challenge is not enough. It should be a challenge held by a person (the social entrepreneur or someone from his/her team) who will provide real and detailed information about the context of the challenge, collect the solution(s) and implement them. Challenges will evolve and emerge continuously. We need a person to receive the ideas, rebound, iterate and turn ideas into actions.

So what does a MakeSense Hold-Up look like?

The Hold-Up focuses on solving a social entrepreneur’s challenge. That entrepreneur is fulltime on his/her project, even if only at the idea stage. The challenge is framed with objectives and constraints. There are approximately 15 participants in the workshop. Anyone can participate, no need to be an expert. A Hold-Up uses design thinking and creativity techniques to help the participants give and share many ideas at first and turn them into 3 to 4 applicable solutions at the end. Anyone can learn to prepare and facilitate it. This video will show you what it looks like!

The Hold-Up format has gone through many iterations. At the beginning there were no post-its (yes this is true) ! The improvements came from the MakeSense community itself, from the members who facilitated Hold-Ups all around the world, always looking at ways to make it more impactful for the social entrepreneurs and for the participants.

We now have a set of tools that can be used before and during the Hold-Up by the facilitator depending on the type of challenge : business model, naming, service design, crowdfunding… Our goal is to have an open source library of tools to solve each and every type of challenge.

What is the impact of a Hold-Up ?

87% of the social entrepreneurs that answered our last survey said that the Hold-Up had helped them solve the challenge either with new ideas, confirming ideas, enabling useful connections or giving a significant new visibility to the project.

Here is some recent feedback from social entrepreneurs in Mexico, Belgium and France :

But the social entrepreneurs are not the only beneficiaries ! The participants discover a social venture from « the inside », connect and brainstorm with strangers sharing the same interest for one topic and play with new collaborative and creative methodologies.

The members of MakeSense have brought the Hold-Up in their backpacks to unexpected places. To mention only one, recently, Sarah Zouak organized Hold-Ups in Iran, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey….without speaking the local language!

Sometimes, participants have even decided to help the social entrepreneur to implement one of the solutions found ! We call these groups the mini-gangs ! Here a facebook post showing the impact of the mini-gang that worked on the crowdfunding challenge of Prakti Design.

It has been now more than 4 years since the first Hold-Up. This challenge-solving workshop and approach have penetrated schools and companies, in France and abroad.

What are our own challenges to bring the Hold-Up FORWARD for more impact ?

- These Hold-Ups happen every week in the world, organized by the members of the community, thanks to the support of the community developers of MakeSense based in Paris, Berlin, Mexico and Dakar ! They deliver trainings online and offline, co-create and distribute manuals, and support the members of MakeSense at every step.

The MakeSense pedagogical branch, SenseSchool has brought great additional training tools to the community like a facilitation tips video . We are aware that the quality of the preparation and the facilitation is absolutely key.

- The community developers also play a key role in guiding the social entrepreneur through the different steps. A good Hold-Up starts with a well-framed challenge and ends with a regular follow up. New online tools and an extended team of community developers will help us bring a better support system to the social entrepreneurs throughout their MakeSense experience.

Each member of MakeSense remembers its first Hold-Up as a very special moment when vision and action connected.

It’s time to place these tools in the hands of thousands more citizens! To do so, we are working on developing a fabulous team of community developers all around the world to support any citizen willing to have a concrete impact through a Hold-up. We are also working on improving our digital tools to scale our impact.

Leila, co-founder of MakeSense.

*Why is it call a Hold-Up ? The members of MakeSense, who organize them, are called the Gangsters. They organize a Hold-Up of ideas, they steal the ideas of the participants to give them to social entrepreneur ! The name was found by Maeva Tordo :)