Last week, my friend Brigita Jeric invited me to join her at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law to speak on the topic of Social Entrepreneurship. We were participating that day in the Summer School for Social Work and Community Development and hosted by Professor Nino Zganec and the participants who were mainly social workers from across Croatia. In our 2 hour block, Brigita spoke about her work with Slava Raskaj and the problems with high unemployment (60%) among vocationally trained graduates with a range of special needs that come out of her program. Slava Raskaj has some excellent international and local collaborations which try at once to provide training and sustainability through social enterprise activities like catering operations. The together, Brigita and I shared the nonprofit and social enteprise initatives we are trying to support with our friend Vedran Habel. The last component, I did an encore performance of my Ashoka U 2013 presentation on Creativity as a New Competency for Social Change. This helped the audience members see a few ways of how social ideas are changing communities through different degrees of innovation. The series of our conversations were well received and I felt we could make change happen that day.
I asked each participant to write two words, one a social cause and one a business idea, on a piece of a paper with their name on it. I collected all the words and typed them up in a powerpoint presentation. When I arrived at my own Summer School class in Entrepreneurship at ZSEM, I paired up students and asked them to do word associations building on the clues the social workers had given. Each word was then elaborated by word associations from the students. Example here:
A different set of words were given two 14 other sets of students for 14 other social workers or entrepreneurs. The following day the students who came up with the word associations had to then transform them into 3 potential social enterprise ideas that the social workers could implement. From the audience, I connected with Ivana, the social worker who also shared the story that her husband happens to be a paraplegic artist of great talent, Ante Teskera and provided me with a catalog to his impressive artworks.
For this series of idea entries then I also needed to discover how these two words paraplegic and art are combined to generate awareness and revenue. Paraplegic is a medical condition which is most often associated with trauma to the the spinal cord resulting in reduced mobility of limbs. Art is used as therapy to release and communicate feelings, emotions and desires like the explanation given at myhandicap.com.
But this creative outlet can go from therapy to hobby to profession. I found musicians, make-up artists, fine artists, and a wide array of paraplegic and quadraplegic artists. One in particular, Mariam Pare, even makes videos of her process of creating beautiful oils on canvas by mouth.
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