Wanna Create Social Change? Be Creative

Britt Bravo — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:36:21 -0500

David Bornstein's book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, describes the qualities Ashoka looks for in the social entrepreneurs they support through their Fellowship program. The quality that stood out the most for me was Creativity.

In the book, Bill Drayton, Ashoka's founder, says that social entrepreneurs need to have two kinds of creativity:

• Goal-setting creativity, "the visionary seeing over the horizon to a different pattern in the field."

• Problem-solving creativity, "to get to this new place, there are a thousand hurdles, a thousand adjustments that these people have to make and they have to be creative about it."

I'd never thought about the connection between creativity and social change before, although it seems rather obvious after reading it. It made me want to hunt down some creativity exercises you could use to inspire creative problem-solving and big visioning.

Here's a selection of what I found:

skelliewag.org's 110+ Resources for Creative Minds
eVentureBiz's 8 + Ways to Train Yourself to Be Creative
Creating Natural Influence's: A Simple and Inexpensive Creativity Support System
Web Worker Daily's 4 Ways to Get Unstuck
The Marketing Fresh Peel's Interview with Author Gregg Fraley: Creative Problem Solving (CPS).

What other resources and tools can you recommend to increase creativity and creative problem-solving ?

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Wanna Create Social Change? Be Creative