This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC
Reflecting with RLabs: comfort zones
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From the course by University of Cape Town
Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation
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From the lesson
Getting out of your comfort zone
By nature the world of social innovation is made of crossing boundaries, bringing together different actors, resources, spaces, but it can be overwhelming. Part of our challenge on the journey to becoming changemakers is to learn how to become comfortable with discomfort and how in the social innovation space where you take yourself into spaces and you surround yourself with people that you normally do not engage with. Understanding how we define differences using cultural, sociological, psychological and spiritual lenses and what the nature of the differences is helps to develop tools for getting out of your comfort zone. It takes a little bit of courage because it makes you uncomfortable, but that’s how you build the competencies, the personal resilience to engage with difference when we do go and drive for innovations or we look to make differences in communities that are unlike us or operate in a different way.
Meet the Instructors
François BonniciDirector
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Warren NilssonAssociate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Marlon ParkerFounder
RLabs
[MUSIC]
In one of the earlier videos in this module,
Marlon was talking to us about the origins of RLabs.
And how from Bridgetown they needed to get out of their comfort zone and
understand how to build a tech platform that was going to address some
of the issues around drugs and gangs in the community.
In order to do that, they needed to go to tech conferences,
they needed to engage with the Department of Social Development,
the counselling professions of South Africa.
And that's been quite a journey for them.
Today, we're here with Clint and Rabia, thank you for joining us.
Perhaps you want to talk a little bit about how, in your own personal journeys,
or in the work that you have been doing at RLabs, how you've needed to get out of
your comfort zone in order to do the work you do?
My name's Clinton, and I've been with RLabs since its inception.
Well, since before we became an organization.
And from the very beginning I was pushed outside of my comfort zone.
Coming out of the background of gangsterism and drugs addiction,
to then being exposed to technology.
Firstly, that was out of my comfort zone.
I always enjoyed technology, but looking at it, not really interacting.
It was exciting but at the same time it was very challenging,
in that it was new, it was something that we weren't used to.
I enjoy quoting something that I read somewhere that says,
if it doesn't challenge you, it won't change you.
So that has been the essence of my journey with the organization.
From technology to go into different conferences.
I remember the first conference that I went to,
Marlon asked myself and Craig if we can go with him to Net Prophet.
And that was the first Net Prophet conference and we were like,
what's this all about?
And we went and it was very, very overwhelming the first time going there
and sitting and these guys talking about their businesses and technology.
And we were basically just exposed to technology at the time and
these people are running businesses using technology and online.
I was like, how do you even make money from that?
I think Marlon spoke at that conference, as well.
And of course, he naturally called myself and Craig up to say something.
And I stood there and
I looked at all these people and basically that was the start of it for us.
When I think of this whole thing about you need to be challenged in order to
be changed, if I look at my background story, I was a person that was very shy.
I didn't like speaking.
I didn't like being at the forefront.
I mean, when people like RLabs or people in RLabs or
at RLabs believed in us and said, you know what?
You can do it.
There is something in you that we feel that is significant in this world.
That made me step out and become a leader, because I always thought I was this person
that just works in the back and comes up with these brilliant ideas and try and
make it work, but never the forefront type of person.
I think that's what empowers me today to do what I'm doing for youth
is I think of believing in people and seeing the leader in them.
How does that work?
I know you spend a lot of time mentoring and teaching other young people.
And a big piece of their own leadership journey,
is learning how to get out of their own comfort zone.
So how do you help someone start to do that, what advice or
what experiences do you put them through to help them?
I mean if you're asking me that question in classroom setting,
it would be merely be having that patience with that person.
And telling him that, you know what it's okay, if you don't know, it's fine and
no answer is incorrect and that is what I believe gives him the confidence.
For me personally, it's allowing the person to just be who they are.
And growing up on the Cape Flats,
the people that we are serving through our programmes,
you kind of always have to be someone else.
You have to create this other persona for
yourself to protect yourself for various reasons.
Sometimes you have to be this macho guy because you get bullied if you're not.
Or you have to act as if you're tough because if you act
a little softer you get bullied on Cape Flats.
So you always are having to be something that you're not.
So when people come here, they kind of still have that persona.
But slowly we break it down because we allow people
to be the real person who they are.
And once they're able to do that, the real them comes out and
that is what we want to work with.
And do you think that then connects to their ability to go out into other spaces,
which aren't safe classroom spaces, RLabs spaces, and
still take the same kind of being yourself?
Yes, and it is about that so
that they become confident in who they are as a person.
From personal experience, once I became comfortable with who Clinton was,
I was able to go in and speak at a conference.
I was able to go and sit with leaders in the industry
where counseling and me, as an ex-drug addict, giving them advice on
how they should be handling a situation, as opposed to what the book says.
And to me, it's really important to emphasise this.
You talk about this on the Cape Flats, and you have to have a persona, but
this true everywhere, right?
If you're in a business, if you're in a Fortune 500 company,
you've got to have a certain persona and you have to act a certain way.
Might be a different persona than somewhere else but
you're still kind of caught in that, and it's still difficult to be yourself and
to learn to go into other spaces.
Maybe community spaces or government spaces or different geographies or with
different kind of social groups or racial groups or genders or whatever it might be.
So you guys have come from a particular experience but I feel like what you're
talking about is universal in the social innovation journey.
And often the thing that keeps people from going on that journey is
the inability to trust themselves and to go into those spaces.
With us expanding and us having to grow bigger and
go bigger within Cape Town, like we say it now, we're going deeper.
And takes us out of our comfort zone in a way that, because Marlon is asking us
now to go into our communities, which we don't normally do.
Like I'm afraid to do that,
because I never communicated with people in my community.
So that is also a challenge for me now but I actually enjoy doing it.
Part of this thing of getting out of your comfort zone is also breaking down
the kind of, the barriers that we think exist between groups, and between people,
between professionals, and
between the roles that we have in society that you kind of talked about.
RLabs I think has done that extremely well.
Now, operating at many different levels in the country,
even internationally across many different countries with many different kinds
of actors, from business organizations to non-profit organizations to
government agencies with different kinds or expertise across different sectors.
So I think that's also allowed a space for the next generation
of RLabs people to kind of navigate that terrain a little bit easier.
But what you've also done is created a kind of innovation incubator.
So I'm interested in whether this access to this diversity, all the diversity
that's created by mixing that up, allows new innovations to come to light.
Yes, of course, that definitely did
help with us thinking differently, thinking out of the box,
being challenged, being pushed out of our comfort zones, and
being exposed to different people just coming to this place.
And I just think of when in the beginning,people came and
they kept telling us that we're doing this really great things.
And for us it was like, we're not even sure what we were doing yet
but people were seeing the impact and they were seeing the value.
And the more people kept telling us what we are doing towards
the more it starting registering for us that we're actually doing something valuable.
And it's actually changing our communities.
We often talk about going off into these other spaces doing social relations
so we can learn about other ways of being in the world and other kinds of expertise.
But you're also talking about learning about different ways of seeing ourselves.
The example you're giving where people are coming into RLabs and saying,
this is amazing what you're doing, and
you're like, well, we didn't even know it was amazing.
So we start to have reflections of ourselves from different people and
different cultures as we moving in these spaces.
And that can really accelerate from what you're saying, you're own ambition
to keep changing and to keep innovating and coming up with ideas.
So my personal experience of going out of my comfort zone is,
I hate it, at first, right?
It's painful and usually, you talk about how it transforms you and
makes you feel good.
That's also my experience, but not right away.
The first few times I do something or
meet people that I'm not comfortable with, I don't have a good time.
I go home and I go, that was kind of a drag.
Later, you start to go, wow,
I'm really changing, I really can connect to this person or
I know something new, it's great.
How do you get past that?
With a leadership role you are required to network with people.
And I mean,
that is one of the toughest things because your language needs to change.
Everything needs to change within you.
You need to be able to mingle with people,
you need to be able to pick up on conversations.
Which I completely suck at, and I'm forced to do it.
Because part of it's kind of like
anything else, like building up the muscles, the experience of doing it.
And you do it over and over again.
You may never love it at the beginning, but you start to recognise, okay,
I'm just uncomfortable and I'll get over that.
Or knowing ways to kind of manage yourself but there's not a real shortcut,
in my experience, to doing it other than doing it over and over again.
Rabia hit the nail on it's head.
And at RLabs we always challenge, we always push.
Each year you're basically given a new role.
It's really, really uncomfortable because just when you thought you got this,
I'm rolling with the punches, this is good, then things get changed up.
Like, this is a new role with new responsibilities.
You have this set of tasks that you need to complete and
this is your goals for the year.
It's not even just, we push our comfort zone out there, we're actually going to,
on purpose, keep making ourselves uncomfortable every year internally,
in the organization.
Yes.
So if you have to give one piece of advice to the people who are taking this
course and possibly starting on their own social innovation journeys and
maybe haven't had that experience of getting out out of their comfort zone,
kind of could be someone who's been in the business their whole life.
Or a teacher who's only comfortable in a classroom.
Or someone who's from a particular community and
hasn't been outside of that community very often.
What's the one piece of advice you would give them so
that they can get started pushing their own boundaries?
I think be present and in the moment.
There's just so much reward in it at the end of the day if you
can see the results or the impact of what you're doing in a certain situation.
And seeing people's lives changed and transformed then,
what's there not to enjoy?
That normal change challenged you but it also changed you forever.
And also the people that, and more importantly for me,
it's the lives that you impact.
Their lives will not be the same again because of a little sacrifice that I made.
[MUSIC]
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