By Mark Little
As with many Prime Time stories, ‘Power to the People’ started with another Prime Time story.
Back in January, we presented a fairly optimistic report about the ‘Smart Economy’, which behind the irritating cliché is a promising concept (watch the report).
One of our guests on the show that night was Aileen O’Toole, who runs an internet consulting group called AMAS.
As a result of her appearance and her positive suggestions for rescuing the economy Aileen was inundated with messages of support. That experience persuaded her to found the Ideas Campaign which hopes to harness citizens’ ideas for saving our economy.
Aileen called me to see if we might launch her campaign where it started: in the Prime Time studio. As we talked, it occurred to me that she had tapped into a very powerful current in Irish society right now, a wave of anger and frustration at the powerlessness we all feel in the face of the current economic crisis.
When I looked at the vast crowds who turned out for those recent marches by public sector workers, I kept thinking of that famous monologue by fictional TV newsman, Howard Beal, who urged Americans to stick their heads out and scream: ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore’ (actually, when you look at that speech on YouTube, it has eerie parallels to our current situation ).
As I thought more about Aileen and that sense of anger out there, I also realised there was a parallel energy bubbling under, among grassroots activists and volunteers and innovators. They too want to take back the process of change and recovery from the politicians, but they are already making a difference in the lives of their community.
We decided to chronicle this grass-roots rebellion, casting our net for real initiatives to help save Ireland, one good idea at a time.
We talked to Elaine Bradley at Volunteering Ireland which represents the A to Z of voluntary groups in this country, from Amnesty to Dublin Zoo.
In the first weeks of 2009, as job losses cut deep, these various groups recorded an 80% increase in volunteering. Elaine told us that many of them are high-skilled people emerging from crumbling industries such as property and financial services, offering voluntary groups services they could never afford during boom-times.
In the process, the newly-unemployed volunteers get something in return: ‘We were all on board this mad runaway train,’ Elaine said. ‘For a lot of people, the train has stopped and what they’re doing now is seeing the opportunity to really take stock of their lives … and think about what’s important to them.’
Elaine led us to Neil Armour who worked for 20 years as a senior executive in the food and drink industry.
We met him on a cold, drizzly day at the Dogs Aid animal sanctuary near Ballymun. He has just started to work there as a volunteer alongside a dedicated but under-funded staff.
He is interested in fundraising for the sanctuary, and perhaps becoming its project manager as it struggles to expand.
Neil is a musician who also volunteers as an electronic music teacher an inner-city kid’s programme called the Clubhouse.
You can see immediately what Neil offers the charities he initially it’s hard to see exactly what he gets in return; it certainly ain’t money. But then Neil put you right: ‘I’m developing a whole new skill set so I’m getting an awful lot back from it as well. It’s all about getting to see the results. Sometimes, instantaneously, sometimes, in the future but you get to see everything from the bottom-up.’
Neil is no revolutionary but he offers up a radical idea: you will always have a chance to make a difference no matter how bad things get. That is also the guiding philosophy of social entrepreneurs, hard-headed business people who apply their talents to community activism.
Social Entrepreneurs Ireland is headed-up by Sean Coughlan, a former high-flying executive with a leading Irish internet company.
Since 2005, his organisation has invested almost €3m in 113 social enterprises which have provided help to almost 165,000 people.
Among the companies it has helped is Fledglings, which offers childcare services to disadvantaged communities hit hard by unemployment. We met its founder, Dara Hogan, at the company’s first crèche in the Fettercairn area of Tallaght.
Dara was an accountant by trade and volunteered for the adult education agency, An Cosan. When the group expressed an interest in developing childcare facilities, Dara jumped in and founded Fledglings, devoting himself almost full time to its expansion.
The plan is to turn the company into a national franchise, and its first stage of expansion will involve 10 creches in communities that might never have childcare otherwise.
Dara is an inspiring hybrid of innovator and activist, who sees big potential in small ideas. As his fellow social entrepreneur, Sean Coughlan, observes: ‘Social entrepreneurs are people who come up with things that will radically change the way we do things in Ireland and in doing so will not just benefit the local community but will benefit us all.’
What struck me was how the vision of these community activists mirrored the dreams of serious innovators in that fabled ‘smart economy’. More and more, I meet people who believe that small ideas will be central to our economic recovery, and they are some of the most powerful and influential business leaders in the country.
Over at Microsoft gleaming headquarters in Sandyford, we met Paul Rellis, the company’s top man in Ireland. His company reaches out to high-tech start ups through an initiative called BizSpark.
In Ireland, in recent weeks, more than one hundred grassroots high-tech companies have entered the programme which provides them practical help along the road to success. Rellis is a realist, who believes it is time Ireland came to terms with the notion of virtuous failure: ‘Of the 106 companies, I’m pretty sure there’ll be a high number of failures and we should accept that. We should learn from it, we should help people get back off the ground and we can help people get back up off the ground and get back on the horse and try again.’
It is a philosophy of risk which doesn’t seem to trouble Sheena Clohessy at all. You might have seen during her stint as a mentor on the TV series, The Apprentice. Now, she runs a company called I-cando which offers a beginners guide to digital technology.
The company is being supported by the Microsoft BizSpark programme and aims to turn that ‘smart economy’ cliché into a reality for the countless people in Ireland left behind by the digital revolution. Sheena talks with missionary zeal about the need to educate people to a new reality. ‘If you can’t keep up or you don’t know, you’re going to get left behind and that is a real social issue.’
There are many different life stories in our report, ‘Power to the People’, but there is a common theme: you can always make a difference no matter how powerless you feel. No-one of the people we met were naïve enough to believe they had a solution to our enormous, immediate problems. This grassroots rebellion we chronicle won’t save the banks or rescue the public finances. But think of it as a parallel track offering long-term change.
A process guided by ideas as much as anger.
Fuelled by the power of people not politicians.
