We found a very inspirational blog from our counterpart, the Global Changemakers. About exercising looking beyond than just the now. Here it goes: 

It’s Not About The Now, It’s About The Trajectory

by Jihad Hajjouji from Global-Changemakers.net

About one month ago, I was in Stockholm attending a training program on the use of media in creating social change. As part of the program, we were loaned an iPhone each to practice on. Out of a legitimate concern, or perhaps in an attempt to convince the program leaders to let us keep the iPhones, some of us brought up the fact that we don’t have iPhones ourselves, and the majority of our people back home cannot afford to buy one, which renders the training kind of useless. One of the trainers- Mark Comerfield then gave an answer that will inspire me for the rest of the program: “It is not about the now, it’s about the trajectory”  Beyond the iPhone story, this powerful statement got me thinking about how I should take myself to the next level as a social entrepreneur.

In my first entry I chose to define entrepreneurship as “the ability to identify needs in society and fulfill these needs”. With today’s quote in mind, we need to realize that those needs for which we’re looking out are not constant, but dynamic, and so are the tools that we use as entrepreneurs to fulfill them. This is a new level of entrepreneurialism altogether, for not only are we looking to solve the problems at hand, but we’re looking to solve problems that are yet to come up, with tools that are yet to come up. I must say that this mindset is definitely not new to for-profit enterprises. In fact, it is based on the prediction of the trajectory that most of the successful businesses were built. Today, I would like to invite us to bring this mindset home and apply it to social problems.

The inspiration from this quote changed my thinking towards two main things:

1)      The  needs: what is the social gap I am trying to fill as an entrepreneur? Is this gap getting wider or narrower? If it is getting wider, what can I do to account for that expansion? If narrower, what  is a possible need that can come up with the closure of that gap that I need to address? and how can my project still be relevant even after the gap is bridged? To make this set of questions more relevant, let’s think of a sample social need: a village that lacks electricity. A social entrepreneur with no interest in the trajectory can simply create a project, whereby funds are raised to link the village to the main grid. On the other hand, a visionary social entrepreneur with an eye on the future knows that the whole world is moving towards green energy, so instead of simply linking it to the conventional power source, s/he will think of how to use his/her village’s most abundant and renewable resources to generate energy with little harm to the environment. That way, the village will be developing along the same lines with the most developed regions of the world, as opposed to going through the full cycle of development the developed world has undergone to finally realize that it needs green energy.

2)      The tools: we must be all aware now that technology has increased the pace by which the world is changing around us incredibly. This is a great thing, but it also puts a lot of pressure on us as entrepreneurs. Our tools of change are constantly and rapidly changing, and we are challenged to keep up with this change as we do our social work. During the training in Sweden, Mark told us that during the 2010 training, participants from the Arab world said that learning how to use Twitter was useless because it wasn’t popular in the MENA region. In less than one year, we now know that Twitter was and still is one of the main tools that facilitate/d the flow of information in what is now called “The Arab Spring”. In this way, we shouldn’t restrain ourselves by today’s constraints, for they will rapidly vanish and new ones will come up.  Instead, we need to learn how to be always prepared for the next thing so that we are not lost in the current along with the change we want to create.

So, what’s the trajectory you see in your community? And how are you going to use it in your social work?