Unleash and Release: The Secret to Changing the World?

Published April 10, 2009 @ 03:52PM PT

Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS and GES2009 workshop facilitator, unleashing his own passion

I spend a lot of time thinking about how you unleash people's ideas and power to create meanging and create good in the world. My job working with undergraduates is to help them understand their individual talents and capacities in order to build a life of commitment to global social change.

Yesterday, I was listening to Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS explain how his job as to build a tool that the end user - community organizations around the world - could then use to do whatever it was that they needed to do, with no manipulation (benign or otherwise) from him. Basically, he views his job as to build a platform for creativity that unleashes people's ability to do their business more effectively.

It struck me that this is the same philosophy we have with the Global Engagement Summit. Our job is to create an ecosystem in which people's passions, expertise and ideas can discover one another, and new opportunities for learning and action grow. Everyone comes in through different doors - as a staff person, as a facilitator, as a delegate - but everyone has something to teach others and everyone has something to learn, as well.

A big part of it is knowing when to get out of the way. I think that sometimes conferences suffer from delusions of grandeur when we ask "how do we keep this going?" Maybe that's not our job. Maybe our job is to create the richest, deepest, most connective experience possible, all the while knowing that it must by definition be temporary, and figure out which other support structures to hand it off too.

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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.