Graduation Exercises:

Designing Ariane de Rothschild Fellows Products

Our final exercise is to look at how we can design for the Ariane de Rothschild Fellows a mechanism to respond to major incidents around the world.

It is exciting working with some of the most innovative social entrepreneurs from around the world. There are some great ideas coming out. I shall go away today having experienced being part of a great course over the last year. I am joining a great Alumni Network.

The ADR Fellows are recruiting for this Summer if you are interested in joining us.

Designing our own projects and preparing Elevator Pitches

We are now reframing our own projects based on the learning and insights of the last three days.

Working in Fahrenheit 212's 'Back Room Bar': fantastic space

I have been working with other Fellows in Fahrenheit 212's Back Room Bar. This is a great space and we are supported by great people here at Fahrenheit 212.

Insights

Kosta from Fahrenheit 212 is giving a lecture on insight.

Now we are discussing the insights we learnt from yesterday's visits. Our group is inside the lab. We seem to have learnt quite a bit from four very different business models that all have social elements.

Inside 'the Lab' in Fahrenheit 212

Feedback Time

This evening we are reflecting on what we found out about the day.

Gilad and Rajae capturing our thoughts

Toms

Toms sells coffee, shoes and other items and uses part of the profits for good causes.

They have water projects and give out shoes. From selling glasses they ensure the sight of one person...

Drive Change

Drive Change is a social enterprise working with people who have been incarcerated.

Challenge: Young incarcerated people aged 16 end up in adult detention facilities in New York. Reoffending rates are at 70%.

Jordyn taught in the prisons. She found the criminal justice system soul destroying.

Mission : to use the food truck workplace as a tool to promote opportunity... So hence Drive Change. This is one year fellowship to enable offenders to move on

Roy explaining expectations on the fellows

Goal: to get fellows into sustainable full-time employment and enuresis that the fellows do not re-enter the criminal justice system.

20 fellows are trained and paid. They are taught to cook, work on a food truck and some professional development courses. There are strict work protocols. You have to turn up, work hard and not reoffend.

Use locally sourced produce too...

They won a Vendy award.

Runa

Adam (the guy in the white t-shirt) set up Runa in 2009. He uses guyusa leaves from the Amazon to make some clean energy teas and drinks. Low sugar, high caffeine...

Runa do fair trade with Ecuadorian Amazon farmers and sell some great drinks.

Adam spent time in Ecuador and discovered the guyusa leaf. He did not like coffee but liked this. He spent $500,000 demonstrating to the FDA that guyusa had no negative effects. It has lots of caffeine...

The ADR Fellows are asking questions to Adam about the validity of his claims, his business model and the long term goals of Runa.

Have asked Tyler about his social impact in terms of what $50,000 buys. He believes in supporting collective projects through a producer council but seems to prefer a model where the farmers get more cash.

These are Runa's claims:

These are the claims of Runa on Social Impact

So Adam claims that his business plan is not to maximize profit but to import a product and maximize benefit for the farmers. Adam believes in micro-finance models that empower women. The council make up was 5% when he started. It is now 55%.

He wants to build brand and go public. Will that change Runa? Adam thinks not.

Day 2

This morning we are looking at story telling. The morning starts with an introduction by Farenheit 212 Founder Mark Payne who wrote the bestseller How to Kill a Unicorn.

Mark Payne killing it... No unicorn in sight though...

Not sure why you would want to Kill a Unicorn but loving the theory of storytelling... Mark started with the JFK speech on getting to the moon. Very inspiring session.

Léonore gives a critique on storytelling.

Visit to the Met Museum

Tonight we have been given a private tour of the Met Museum's Islamic Art Exhibit. We are being given an interesting tour by one of the in-house scholars.

World's Oldest Chess set - gameplay is useful for social entrepreneurs

I could spend days here in the Met. Love this museum. What is really interesting is going around the museum with our cohort. There are some really knowledgable people here are involved in heritage, the arts and cultural projects.

Beautiful calligraphy from the 14th and 15the Century Islamic Spain collection.

Day 1 at Fahrenheit 212

Social entrepreneurs learning.

This is the second meeting of the Ariane de Rothschild cohort. We first met in the Summer of 2015 for a two week course on business skills, intercultural and interfaith dialogue and sociology at the University of Cambridge.

The cohort is made up of 30 fantastic social entrepreneurs from the US, Canada, France, the U.K., Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

The cohort have something in common: they all do great projects to advance the human and social dimension and are not afraid to use commercial and business models to achieve those social goals.

Day 1 includes on learning from Design Thinking, Two Sided Thinking and Innovation with the fantastic team at Fahrenheit 212

Amany, Nahim, Rajae and Linda listening to a lecture on innovation strategy.

Brilliant sessions. Now we are off to do a cultural activity.