COMMUNITY:IT IS AN incredibly challenging time for social entrepreneurs in Ireland. We live in a society that is crying out for innovative solutions to its problems but as the recession bites, the people who can come up with these solutions are finding it increasingly difficult to attract philanthropic investment and sponsorship.
Despite the difficulties, there is something of a buzz: Social Entrepreneurs Ireland will shortly unveil a new support programme for 2010, while next month, the 2010 winners of the Arthur Guinness Fund awards – established to celebrate the philanthropic legacy of the brewery's founder – will be announced.
On Tuesday, at its annual awards in Dublin, the global organisation Ashoka will celebrate the achievements of two new "fellows" in Ireland – Steve Collins and Mary Nally. Since 1981, Ashoka has elected 2,000 social entrepreneurs as fellows (including five in Ireland), providing them with financial investment and professional support.
Speakers at the forum launch will include Mrs Mary Robinson, Minister Eamon Ryan, as well as leading social entrepreneurs from across Europe. As one of those speakers, Rob Hopkins, says, perhaps the buzz can be explained by the fact that "when the going gets tough, the creative and the brilliant get going." Here we profile three of this year's stars.
Steve Collins
VALID NUTRITION
Taking off after school to do some travelling is a rite of passage for many young people and the destinations are usually predictable – Australia, Ibiza perhaps. Steve Collins took the road less travelled and headed for Africa. He arrived in Sudan in the mid-1980s, during the famine, and was horrified by the suffering he witnessed and felt he had to do something to help.
"You just can't be a tourist in that situation. I came from a privileged middle-class background in Britain and then you see children who are starving to death through no fault of their own."
Collins trained to be a doctor and returned to relief work. He encountered all the worst famine and war-zones of the 1980s and 90s – Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone – where the problems of acute malnutrition, he says, were and still are immense. Approximately 80 million children under five are acutely malnourished, and up to five million die each year. The majority of these deaths are preventable.
Years of working within existing systems brought the realisation that the existing feeding centre model wasn't adequate. They drag the malnourished away from their homes, families and communities, and hold then them in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where disease is rampant.
In 1998 Collins initiated a programme called Community-based Therapeutic Care (CTC) which aimed to treat people in their homes and help them to understand their condition. It saved countless lives and in less than 10 years became standard practice for the treatment of malnutrition.
He then applied a second major innovation to the food treatment itself. Up to then, the main product being used was Plumpynut, a patented product made in France by a single commercial company. Collins set up a not-for-profit to make an improved product in Africa using locally- grown ingredients. "When you buy Plumpynut to ship to Africa, the bulk of the money goes to the factory in France. But if you make the product in Africa, using African crops, you are providing markets for local agriculture, creating economic activity, providing employment."
Effectively a nomad for 20 years, Collins put down roots in 2003, buying a farm in Bantry with his wife Claire. "I have learned to travel less and delegate more to the locals themselves, and that's a good thing. There are enough well-meaning "whities" trying to fix the problems of Africa." See validnutrition.org
Rob Hopkins
TRANSITION TOWNS
There are times when some of the problems facing our world are so overwhelming, vast and complex that it seems ridiculous to even try to fix them. The dilemma of peak oil is just such a problem. It's either imminent or already been and gone, depending on who you listen to, but there's a consensus that we are woefully unprepared for it.
"Cheap oil still underpins every aspect of what we do," says Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement. "We are dependent on a fragile oil supply system that is the cause of potentially catastrophic climate change. Our economies are enormously dependent on imported energy, food and clothes – virtually everything, really."
Hopkins believes the solution is, if not exactly personal, then at least local. A Transition Town initiative brings a community together together to assess what it needs to achieve sustainability, and mitigate the repercussions of reaching peak oil. According to Hopkins, by getting a community to work together for a common good, apathy is transformed into positive action, and people's fear into excitement about what's possible.
Though the Transition movement is now "headquartered" in Hopkins's home town of Totnes in the UK, its roots are very much Irish. While teaching permaculture at Kinsale Further Education College, he developed the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan with his second year students. It was the world's first attempt to design a community-based alternative to an oil-based future. "No one had done it before. We had it up on the website for people to download and it started going mad around the world."
The upbeat, grassroots, viral nature of Transition Town is a large part of its appeal. "It has a self-organising, open source ethos. We don't sit here commanding people around the world to do this. People take it up and make it their own. Our role is to inspire them and provide them with the model to do it."
There are now 300 formal Transition initiatives around the world, so can Transition Town change the world? "There's a cheerful disclaimer in the handbook which is that we have no idea whether this works and we don't make any guarantee that it will. But there is huge latent creativity out there and the most extraordinary energy getting released."
See transitiontowns.org
Mary Nally
THIRD AGE FOUNDATION
First impressions can be misleading. On meeting Mary Nally for the first time, mine are that this diminutive lady is kind, gentle and soft-spoken. But her amiable demeanour belies a steely determination – she is a force of a nature.
“My mother hated bingo,” she says, explaining how she started the Third Age Foundation (TAF) more than 20 years ago to keep older people engaged in their communities. It’s a typically modest account of how a small, local organisation morphed in to an international, not-for-profit and how Nally has gone from being a nurse to being an Ashoka fellow with the ear of President McAleese and philanthropic luminaries such as Denis O’Brien.
Her mother was the inspiration. “She came to live with us when my father died. She was creative and full of energy but there were few options locally for meaningful activities. So we held a meeting to see what we could do about that and more than 40 people came. Age and social norms had made them irrelevant. No one had asked them – what do you want to do?”
The answer to that question is what makes TAF so unique. Of course elderly people wanted social events, reflexology, transport, laundry and chiropody, but they also wanted to help themselves and others. To address the problem of loneliness, they came up with the senior help line – a peer-to-peer listening service run by elderly volunteers which now takes 13,000 calls per year and is open 365 days a year. A year ago TAF established a help-line in New York. “It’s a win-win situation. For the caller, we are their lifeline. But the volunteers also feel an incredible sense of self-worth.”
This win-win ethos is now being applied to other societal problems. While waiting in line at a supermarket, Nally noticed a young immigrant woman struggling with simple shopping tasks because she spoke no English. “We said ‘let’s invite migrants into the centre and teach them conversational English. There are now 18 Fáilte Isteach Centres around Ireland and more than 200 volunteers reaching about 450 families. One of our volunteers said to me recently that she used to love travelling but can’t travel anymore – now the countries come to her.”
“My dream is to see TAF in every town,” says Nally. “Our older people are a huge resource, a wealth of talent and experience sitting there untapped. ”
See thirdagefoundation.ie; senior help line: 1-850-440444
