permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Are We in Danger of Become the Fast Food of Social Change? | UNREASONABLE.is
http://unreasonable.is/opinion/are-we-in-danger-of-becoming-the-fast-food-of-social-change/?fb_ref=recommendations-bar

Why give a damn:

*The days of lone heroes and quick fixes are over, and never were what we
hoped they would be. Our problems are too complex to fix quickly, and too
big to fix alone. For everyone trying to change the world on a deadline,
give it up.*
------------------------------

*The author of this post, Cheryl 
Heller<http://unreasonable.is/author/cheryl/>,
designs change and growth for business leaders and social entrepreneurs.
She is Founding Chair of MFA Design for Social
Innovation<http://dsi.sva.edu/>at SVA. She also serves as a mentor at
the Unreasonable Institute.
*
------------------------------

We needed the Slow Food movement to remind us that meals can heal us
through their rituals of connectedness and their nourishing substance. We
need the Slow Money movement to remind us that money should serve life and
not the other way around.

I watch the accelerating popularity of social innovation with hope as well
as concern. Far more people take an interest in it, but it’s being shrunk
to fit our busy lives, and subjected to ill-fitting expectations for
gratification.

The notion that you can have a meetup and change the world is ludicrous.

My inbox erupts with invitations to meetups, conversations, conferences,
webinars and courses promising to provide the kind of wisdom it takes years
to earn. The notion that you can have a meetup and change the world is
ludicrous. (Yes, people do talk like that). If the world were to change
over a weekend, it would very likely not be good news.

Is our current social-media-fueled movement in danger of becoming the fast
food of social change—substituting short-term satiety for long term benefit?

The real point here, as with food and money, is that it’s actually not
about fast or slow at all. Time is not the right metric for anything but
races and three-minute eggs, though we have allowed it to become the
metronome of our modern lives: quarterly earnings, overnight successes,
two-day work weeks. We escalate, we are trapped in a culture and an economy
that drive us to keep doing and wanting more. It is precisely this that
slow movements want us to stop and think about, and this that we must let
go of if any of our efforts in social innovation have a chance of
succeeding.

Slow Social Innovation would measure progress rather than time. It would,
like the Slow Food movement, connect us more deeply to the systems we
touch, teach us to honor the rules of nature. It would make us aware of the
resources we use, the quality of what we produce, and give us a healthy
mistrust of short cuts and quick fixes.

It’s going deep and finding the truth that matters.

I have been asked, not infrequently, to list the outcomes of the first year
of our new masters program in Design for Social Innovation. Students have
already done remarkable things and we have seen enormous progress, but the
only lasting outcome is that we began. We have begun what we hope will be
the work of lifetimes and generations, of new ways of seeing, and seeds of
change.

There is already something called “Slow Design,” that is meant to imbue
design with more thoughtful principles. All good. But the last thing I hope
to accomplish here, of course, is to create another label in an already
label-burdened vocabulary. I write this instead to avoid the need to fix
something by not breaking it in the first place. Please let’s NOT need a
slow social innovation movement. Let’s just slow down and not lose sight of
the reason we’re doing this in the first place.

The poet Tess Gallagher said that *“you can’t go deep until you slow
down.”*It’s going deep and finding the truth that matters.