[MUSIC] Let's think about this idea of working with strengths to identify hidden resources in the context of social innovation in a community. Take a look at this video now about Street Store. South Africa, a country where the haves and have nots live side-by-side, but seldom connect. People want to help but aren't always sure how, and for the homeless, begging is degrading. In partnership with The Haven Night Shelter, The Street Store was born. The world's first rent-free, premises-free, free pop-up store for the homeless. Somewhere safe to give and easy to collect. Made only from posters, people hang up and drop off donations. [MUSIC] Then, the homeless choose they actually want and like. For many, used to rummaging in bins, this was their first dignified shopping experience. Shopping at The Street Store was for me, very nice. The people were accepting of me with friendly faces. A week before the pop-up, we called for donations on social media. Within days, we found ourselves on prominent national blogs, news, radio, and TV. But the world wanted in too. Bono's One organization, Huffington Post, Good, and hundreds of others. Thousands of homeless were clothed in South Africa alone. And millions in free PR was generated. [MUSIC] More importantly, we brought people together like never before. But homelessness is international, so we went open source. To date, 162 stores have popped up in a 119 cities. And over 2,200 are in progress. A brand new way of helping the homeless. And it's now on the McCallie Avenue in Chattanooga. A few simple posters to restore the dignity to the homeless in Cape Town suddenly touched the lives of so many more. You are sent from heaven, thank you very much. There's no way I can pay you back, thank you very much, I appreciate it. In the video about Street Store we see a whole new model applied to charity clothing stores. Something that's been around for decades. Typically, the resources you think about to build a charity clothing store, are a building, a lease on a storefront, a hiring staff, clearly donated clothing you need. But also, a whole lot of donated cash and capital to run such an operation. Particularly, if you want to do it at any scale. What Street Store were able to do was identify resources that typically aren't associated with clothing stores. And they brought to bear whole sets of assets. The sidewalk, the pavements that they built their pop-up store fronts on. The expertise of designers to create clothing, to make it an accessible and open space for homeless people. And, of course, they used technology to bring in and generate interest and media to get people to donate clothes at a grand scale. And they've used open source to be able to allow anyone to volunteer to make their own pop-up street store. And in a way, have created a much more efficient and cost-effective charity clothing mechanism that's scalable all over the world. But they've also created a space that was much more dignified for homeless people to browse and get the clothing they needed. And you can use this same kind of mindset, not just on one particular issue, but on a community as a whole. So, John McKnight and John Kretzmann developed this approach and called it Asset-Based Community Development, ABCD. And this approach would get lots of people from the community to come together and start looking at their assets, their strengths, their resources. What do we have here that maybe we're overlooking? So, one way I might look at a community that's struggling economically is, here's a place that's got crime problems. It's got economic problems. Drug and health problems. Education problems. A long list of things that need to be solved, might all be true. I can also look around that community and I may see a different picture. If I used something like ABCD, I might see a community that's well-positioned geographically that might have lots of interesting buildings to work with, even if they're not being used now. Might have an enormous number of skills and relationships to build off of. Might have a culture that's vibrant. And those things can come together to create, not only different energy, but lots of different kinds of solutions that will appear very innovative to us and very different from old models of trying to address needs. And it really is about shifting your mindset. Am I going to look at a boarded up building where a business I love used to be and you see bankruptcy and failure? Or I'm going to say, look at that beautiful building? Here's something that maybe we could do something else with. Am I going to be in my community and see a 65 year old woman with diabetes who was unemployed and say, wow, this is an economic and health problem? Or am I going to say, that's a person. And that actually is a person who knows everybody in the community, who's trusted by everybody, who's an amazing communicator. Who can network, who can build. And coalesce, who could abrogate. Now, here's something to get excited about, and here's something to innovate with. And it's a choice as to which of those mindsets to use. And you can get accurate and meaningful information by looking at problems and diagnosing them. But you get generative and innovative information, I think more, by taking this appreciative strength-based approach to how you're seeing your community and the people and the physical world around you. [MUSIC]