The OuiShare Awards focus this year on rewarding change-making initiatives, in line with the OuiShare Fest theme "Lost in Transition". As there is an ongoing online vote, we would like to introduce you our 14 nominees and specifically ask them "What is the Change?" they bring through their initiatives. Read their answers and vote for your favorite projects until May 21st!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/kI_-4kMcl2Y
Get to know Transformed by You!
Nominated for the Sharitories Award, Transformed by You is dedicated to bring public servants, young people & social entrepreneurs together to develop collaborative solutions to the needs of the communities they live in. Noel Hatch, Founder of Transformed by You answered our questions:
1. What got you started with your initiative?
"Thanks to technology, more people are creating content and collaborating online in ways that were not possible before. But transformation in society doesn’t happen when it adopts new tools, it happens when it adopts new behaviours. Many young people have grown up adopting these behaviours to interact with people, solve problems and get things done. We wanted to tap into young people's energy and invite them to work with their local communities to share their passion and skills in this area and put themselves in the shoes of people they pass through in their neighbourhoods, but don't speak to, be it older folk, families or people from other cultures. We wanted to create a way for people to work together to uncover their needs and motivations, not just to develop collaborative solutions but to put themselves in other people's shoes and make sense of the world around them together."
2. What Change does your initiative bring?
"We have developed an approach in which every activity contributes to building the connections of the 2000 people we have been working with and the skills to identify needs and assets of the people around them and develop collaborative solutions to these issues, be it helping remind older people with dementia to drink and providing non-intrusive social contact with others or a programme developing by young people to tackle bullying within their social networks. Through working with colleges and universities, we are able to not only support young people to become the designers and stewards of their communities, but to bring different skills that civic groups need - from interaction design to business modelling. Through our social incubation programme, we are then able to mobilise the support of local and national businesses, from Barclays to Cisco - to help take forward and scale these projects, raising over £200,000 in the process. We do this, not just to make the best use of the resources within our local area, but to responsibilise every actor in shaping the collaborative economy, so that we are making "collaborative" behaviours feel natural and connections between unusual suspects, from students working with people with dementia to communication agencies working with community groups, the default way of working."
Would like to support Transformed by You?
And join us at the OuiShare Fest 2015 for the pitchs session!