Stories from the UnSchool: Meet Murillo Sabino
The UnSchool Emerging Leaders Fellowship alumni community is filled with incredible boundary-pushing change agents who are working in diverse and divergent ways around the world. In this series, we interviewed a few alumni from our June 2016 São Paulo adventure to hear more about their UnSchool experience and see what they’re up to now.
Meet 27-year-old Murillo Sabino from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives and works as a social change agent.
What do you do?
I’m the co-founder and executive director of Projeto RUAS, a NGO that aims to expand a self-developed social tool. What Projeto RUAS does is to try to break this constant feedback loop that gets people stuck in homelessness with our mission. Our goal is to promote the welfare and rights of homeless people with information and encouragement through the community around them. In short, we close the distance between the residents of the neighborhoods with the homeless people within their region. And by doing this we build a new configuration of a connected people or system in which the flow of information, resources and attention can benefit the ones who lacks from it.
Why did you come to the UnSchool?
At the first moment I was tagged by a friend that said to me it would be an incredible experience that would give me important tools to help me in the rising phase of Projeto RUAS and also my challenge of self sustaining myself out of this belief. I guess she was absolutely right!
What did you get out of it?
It was incredible, actually I started getting out of it even before it starts. First they gently gave me a 50% scollarship and encouraged me to run after the rest of it suggesting, for example, crowdfunding it. At that moment that freezed me to the bones. “How would I do it? I’ve never done it before. What would people think of me?”. But I thought they did it on purpose, and this was a opportunity to make a twist in Projeto RUAS and in life, putting my skills to test. If I didn’t get crowdfunded, at least, I would have learned a lot, right? Well, I did and was helped in the whole process by sooo many friends, not only contributing to the campaign, but way before it starts with all the strategy and preparation. The campaign was a success: it reached 242% of the first goal (it had 3), the one that was enough for paying my trip to São Paulo Fellowship. This process gave me strength to understand that what separate the dream from the reality is the action. The crowdfunded also helped because of the exposure it had on Projeto RUAS, at myself and the UnSchool content. And I used this opportunity also to build a ‘social boss’ for me, because the rewards linked with my campaign were all about sharing content of what I would learn. So I had the obligation to really extract the most out of this upcoming experience.
So I got to the UnSchool at the same time tired from this 1 month and a half rush, at the same time energized by this latest self (of course not by myself) victory. And WOW, what a experience I had during the fellowship week! So many diverse fellows with different realities and points of view. The experiences and the mentors were a blast. Leyla herself is a great leader and her abilities and expertise kept getting more evident for me everyday as I got out of the program, maily when I started reading her books, for example, Tips and Tricks for Making Change. In this book I could literally see her while she guided us through the week. At the first time my main critics about it were that we could have more interactions and our point of view contemplated (I still do believe might have a way for having this). But after reading this book I could better understand it was about time and so she conducted us in a more uni directed approach, which she describes in her book. Also, the contents of the UnSchool, its 12 modules, were meticulously selected to reaaaally give us AMAZING tools for change making. And this was another critics: I thought it was a too shallow way of transmuting it. But after a while, deep diving in some of them, I realized she just couldn’t deep dive on them. It was really about showing us the ways to change and hands on examples. And after I got it, and as I had this ‘social boss’, I ran after it to dive as much as I can in it. And one of them really kept me: systems thinking.
What are you working on now?
I’m still developing Projeto RUAS, but now I have some really kick ass tools for change and I’m getting more and more familiarized with them everyday. I’ve studied a lot! Bought a couple of books (systems thinking, gamification), started some courses (sustainable development), got access to UnSchools first online classes (disruptive design method) to keep helping me to link the dots of the modules. I have already conducted some system mapping tools based first on Leyla’s approach in the fellowship, then on my recent researches of other methods. The latest was a system mapping with Rio de Janeiro Legislation Development Forum for Social Business in which we iterated two mapps, divided into two groups, of the social business ecosystem with the objective of how the legislation and the actors could interphere positively in this system taking in consideration its relations. There were legislators, university teachers, researchers, consultants and social entrepreneurs. After it we had VERY good feedback and it went even to the news.
Also, it gave me strength and confidence (not forgetting — or maybe yes — about my own cognitive biases) to keep testing me. So I recently applied for a US State Department Fellowship program called YLAI — Young Leaders of America Initiative — and between 4000 applicants from 35 countries I’m between the 250 young leaders selected to develop their projects for one month and a half in the US soil! It will be amazing since I’ll bring with me a lot of new skills and tools that would help me to get most of the experience either filtering what wouldn’t fit in this new paradigm that I find myself in after the UnSchool or what would be resonant with RUAS’ purposes. And of course, my new fellows will be your new fellows! Cheers to the UnSchool! Thanks a lot for this life opportunity ❤.
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The UnSchool of Disruptive Design is an experimental knowledge lab that pops up around the world activating positive social change. Apply for our next fellowship program now!
