Social Entrepreneurship: Nadezhda Savov at TEDxBG

Hi! I won't start with the bread right away. I brought you something more interesting, which brings me back to the beginning. I never thought I'd have anything to do with bread, I thought I'd work on carnivals. That's how I went to Brazil to do a research on the Carnival and the way it changes peoples' lives. I had the theory that the Carnival is not a one-day celebration, but a way of life. People prepare for it throughout the entire year - sewing costumes, dancing, singing. And I thought that, in the ghettos, the so-called favelas, this can create social change. It turned out I was right. People see the carnival not as something that ends on a particular day, but as a lifestyle. So, Carnival is a very interesting form of art that gives meaning to people?s lives no matter how poor they are. This undermines the notion that poverty is a vicious cycle that can be broken only if people get nicer houses or better streets, if they have better jobs and higher salaries. It turns out that there is something subtle, creative and beautiful that can change the way people think: it is art. So I went to Brazil to study Carnival, but I ended up working with a man who had started off with just one computer and over the course of 3 years had changed the lives of over 1.5 million people in 15 countries. Inspired by his example, I started working with a food cart selling small buns filled with cheese in the streets. I will tell you why. This man, you can see him there in the middle, his name is Rodrigo Baggio, he has been recognized by Ashoka as one of the best social entrepreneurs in the world. Here is why. He was an IT specialist. When his firm decided to discard an old PC, he said, 'Why don't we leave it in a poor neighborhood? They'll make some use of it.' His story is a bit like Sugata Mitra's - he placed the computer in a garage in a poor ghetto. But he organized some friends to be volunteers to teach people how to use it, especially how to use the Internet, for specific social campaigns: to change something in the neighborhood, to create things like a nice poster for a local concert, or to prepare for Carnival. And starting with this PC in a tiny garage, he created a huge network of computer clubs first in Brazil and then, as I said, now in 15 countries total. These clubs help people to use IT and change their idea about the information they share with other people and the ways in which they can make themselves heard. While researching Carnival, I realized that one of the main things adding flavor to people's lives in Brazil is street food. It is uniquely widespread in the country and people sell all kinds of food in the street. A great deal of it is home-made. Vendors go out with baking tins, with baskets or tables on wheels, with their own plates, glasses and forks. They bring them back home after that and wash them ready to be used by half the city the next day. And this street food does something very, very interesting. In a very subtle way it deletes social differences. It breaks the clear-cut divides between people from different walks of life, different neighborhoods. Brazilian ghettos are right next to the richest quarters, so the divides are very obvious. Street food is sold at the border lines between these neighborhoods and brings together both rich and poor. Because both rich and poor love eating fresh-fried, even if often not quite healthy, food. Street food in this sense proves to be truly revolutionary, because it overcomes the divides between people. The streets of Brazil are infused with food aromas, they are edible, they sing. At the time I worked at UNESCO - all this is part of my research work for my PhD thesis at Princeton University on the topic of social development and culture, and more precisely on safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Intangible cultural heritage basically means the living cultural traditions in the world, which are constantly being re-created. It's not folklore, which is set in the past. Heritage is breathing and living. I gave UNESCO the idea to include street food in the global list of the intangible heritage, to study the old recipes used when making street food. While studying the topic, I discovered that women sing very interesting songs related to street food. They create entire mobile street performances that engage all the senses. And I started working with these food vendors, moving with them through the streets, as all kinds of people stopped by - people in suits, people from McKinsey, poor people, rich people. And I'll repeat again, in a very interesting way these street mobile sensory experiences can break up the divides in the urban environment and improve our life. They can really give us a more creative and entertaining idea on how we can live better together, no matter how different we are. I explored street food in many countries, since the main subject of my thesis was global. The subject was to study how small community cultural centers, like the Bulgarian chitalishte, can change our worldview, our lives in general. I ended up observing street food in Peru, then in Mexico, where people sell corn in boats, in Thailand where they sell roasted bananas... This is in Laos, where people make various kinds of rice pancakes with very beautiful, colorful garnishes. This is in Cambodia. There they have fried tarantula spiders, but I decided not to show them, for fear you'll flee in disgust. Yet I lived on fried tarantulas for 2 days. Such things happen. In Mexico I lived on fried grasshoppers for quite a while. Travelling you can have some very interesting experiences, and it's wonderful to step out of your comfort zone, because then you realize how small but creative things can bring you closer to people. In Bulgaria, unfortunately, the only street food I managed to find is this genetically-modified corn imported from the USA and also some roasted chestnuts and roasted pumpkin. So we are in a dire need for a street food revolution, a revolution to make our cities tastier. Thus striving for a tasty revolution I connected the two dots: the chitalishte, or the community cultural center, where all kinds of people come together to create art, and on the other hand food, which gives flavor to public spaces. In the summer of 2010 I organized a summer school, called International Summer School for Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation. It was an international forum exploring the ways in which arts, ecology, and the sciences can make social transformation sustainable, with environmentalists and artists working together. People from 30 countries came to the town of Gabrovo, Bulgaria, I'll tell you why Gabrovo in a minute. It's not only because it's the World Capital of Humor. Things were fun, indeed, but they were also serious. One of our workshops was to create carts for street food and to ignite a revolution in Gabrovo by selling street food in order to provoke and inspire people. And people did react in incredible ways, it was great foy! There were tons of smiles, as befits a fun town like Gabrovo. The workshop was a huge success and it showed that people crave small, yummy things in their everyday life. And as you saw with the link on top of the picture, this gave rise to a global movement for street food revival. The idea was that more and more people would post on the Internet, sharing their impressions from street food from around the world commenting how it changes their lives. Then it dawned on me that we can unite the local cultural center with street food and to have a model of social entrepreneurship on a small scale. In Ethiopia I worked on a project together with a woman from the UK. We organized a small bakery. Its new fire oven looked like that, because traditional Ethiopian fire ovens are very bad for the health. In fact, many women there die very young due to lung disease. The bakery was housed inside this building - the home of this woman and her 8 children. The bakery was off to a great start, it brought together the whole neighborhood and also attracted tourists. Thus this small tin shed in the picture turned into a kind of an entertaining community center. I wanted to put this together with my past experience, with the experience I had gained the previous year in Mexico. There, as an anthropologist I helped develop two small initiatives for a tribe that descends from the Mayas. One of the activities involved painting Orthodox-style icons, as bizarre as it sounds. Icons featuring the *** Mary but dressed in the Maya?s traditional clothing. Nowadays, most of these tribes are Catholic, after so many centuries of Christianity in their lands. The other enterprise was making dolls featuring the same traditional costumes. Together these small ideas for social entrepreneurship show ways of safeguarding local traditions. Such businesses give people an interesting occupation and at the same time add meaning to their lives. They enable them to create something colorful, beautiful, without taking away from their local culture, but rather complementing it. For example, to drink coconuts, not Coca-Cola in the jungle, to think about what they eat and do. And now I'll show you two centers that eventually led to the idea that I brought to life in Gabrovo called the Bread House. The first center is a small place called Flour House. It's located in Brazil. It is a cooperative of women, created to revive local products made from a traditional type of flour called cassava (mandioca). And the second center is The House of Culture, or Casa de Cultura. It's part of a network similar to the Bulgarian chitalishte. Such networks of cultural centers exist in over 56 countries. And while working for UNESCO, I undertook the task to locate these networks and invite them to join into a kind of an informal family. All these small centers all over the world inhabit various spaces, some in very poor neighborhoods like this favela in Rio de Janeiro. On rooftops and in sheds on the beach, even in old factories in South Africa... We brought all these centers together in an organization, called the International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C). It's registered and based in Bulgaria, but it connects people who act as local coordinating points all over the world, coordinators of their national networks. I3C played part in organizing the international summer school in Gabrovo. Here, I've brought you an object. It's called shekere. I want to use it to visualize the idea behind I3C. We can think about social networks as something much more fun than statistical graphs. The shekere is a musical instrument that can illustrate the ways networks work best. Here we have a net of points/balls, which, in our case are houses or cultural centers and sometimes bakeries, as you will see in a minute, all of which have a social role. All of these dots are connected, but the net is not very tight. If it's too tight, it won't be able to move, and if it doesn't move, it won't produce sound. So, as simple as this instrument is, when making it, you need to calculate the size of the net very precisely, so that it's not woven too tight or too loose around the gourd. This is just a gourd. You also need to take local peculiarities into account. Sound is produced only when the seed or ball hits the gourd. Thus you always have to remember this distance between the net and the gourd, this delay between the movement of the net and when the seeds hit the gourd - or, the point of contact between the larger network and the local community. You have to plan what happens there, but you can never be 100% sure. You always have to be flexible in your plans. The sound, the rhythm you produce in a particular place might not be that specifically planned, but you have to bear in mind that the sound comes with a delay. I tried to outline all these concepts with the so-called ?three L's?: They sound better in English: looseness, lapse of time, and locality. The Bulgarian translation is not as good, but you get the idea. This is how we can think about these social networks. But in the course of my work on networks I realized that I had never created such a place, such a community house from the very beginning, with my own two hands. There is a very interesting case in Chile: the house you saw in the picture was dug out of a pile of waste in a very poor neighborhood. For long, people were dumping their waste without realizing they buried a whole house! One day a kid started playing there and discovered a chimney in the trash. The kid started digging together with 5 other children and they discovered the whole house. When they did that, a local woman suggested: 'Why don't we use this house to benefit all of us? Let's get together there for entertainment!' So people cleaned the whole area with the help of the local authorities, and created a unique community cultural center that enlivened the whole neighborhood. Now it houses 10 small businesses based on arts and crafts, and the neighborhood is no longer the poorest in this town in Chile. Well, in my case I didn't dig out a roof. Rather, it was a roof that collapsed - the roof of my great grandmother's old house. At this critical point I realized I had to act. With or without a roof, you have to act to make things happen. That's when I decided to try to create a center that mixes the two types of houses I saw in Brazil - the Flour House and the House of Culture. And here is the result - a house called Bread House. In a nut shell, it's a place where people come to knead bread together. The simple idea is that it incorporates two things: social entrepreneurship as something, which is self-supporting and serves a good common, social cause. The social cause is to unite, to bring different people together, people with disabilities, too. We've had people with mental disabilities, people with physical disabilities, with impaired vision, children from orphanages all over the country, as well as university professors and so on. All these people can work better when together and then they can come up with creative solutions to local problems. Bread-making, as a creative process, facilitates problem-solving. Doing something with your fingers stimulates the brain and helps you see things in a more creative way and realize that you can change them little by little. It sounds surprising, but this Bread House gained global popularity. There is something very appealing in this model. Kneading bread together with many people is a universal art. By the way, let me tell you about the origin of the name 'Bread House'. It is a translation of the name of this place - Bethlehem, which means in Hebrew 'House of Bread', Jesus Christ's birth place, as you know. I wondered why Christ chose to be born there... It seemed that it must have been because there is something universal in bread-making. Bread unites us in peculiar ways. Thus, my vision is that bakeries should not look like this. These are the Socialist factories in Bulgaria with mass-produced bread. I am working to create a national as well as a global network that unites small bakeries that make and sell bread, but not only aiming the profit. Rather, the bread is made by various groups of people, integrating disadvantaged people. The profit is applied towards community activities involving arts and bread-making also in various other social and cultural centers. The network is quite large already, spanning 12 countries. Right now there is a Bread House being built in New Zealand. Some of the people got involved in the network after meeting me at academic conferences, or after hearing about it from somebody else. It's quite interesting. I go to academic conferences, because I'm now a professor at Sofia University. I'm almost done with my PhD at Princeton. But academic people embrace the initiative too. Let me show you just a few of the Bread Houses. These are pictures from Italy, from the Peruvian Amazon jungle... This is in another Peruvian town, below Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo. It's a small house, here's what it looks like inside. And here is an orphanage in South Africa where youth started baking in order to sell bread in the neighborhood, and also supporting an elderly people's home. These are a few of its residents. This the Bread House in Jerusalem. Again socially-oriented bakery. It helps sustain a shelter for mothers who are victims of domestic violence. It's actually the mothers who run the bakery. This the Bread House in Moscow. It's community oriented too. These young people go to drug abuse rehab centers and make bread there, thus giving the people ideas on how to support themselves. This is the Bread House in Zlataritsa, a small town in central Bulgaria. It tries to use bread-making to unite six ethnic groups, six different languages and different religions. It's very interesting, and the House manages to do it. That's their wood-fired oven. And this is in Sardinia. Two Bread House initiatives opened there just a couple of weeks ago. This is their wood-fired oven. The people revived grinding the flour using stones. And here is the newest Bread House initiative that evolved just a week ago in Brazil. It's on an island called Florianopolis. It's also a community cultural center. It has restored old cassava flour mills and it's also used for concerts and the profits are used to benefit a very poor neighborhood where the organization helped create a waste recycling system. In a nutshell, all of these models are types of social enterprises, and I want to share with you how they inspired a young woman a Brazilian woman living in Amsterdam and working at The Hub. You probably know that The Hub is a type of social center that provides a shared working space for many people, who don't have an office of their own. So this woman is now looking for a way to initiate a Bread House in Amsterdam. She is negotiating with the Municipality to help her start and unite people from the 160 plus ethnic groups in the city. It's one of the most international cities in the world. We've also organized company trainings. Right now we are taking part in a festival in London called Feast on the Bridge. This is the London Bridge. The festival will take place for a second year in a row, it will be in September. There will be lots of activities that have to do with the bread theme, including people kneading together around one table. A Bread House is also planned right next to this old wind mill in Brixton. Right now the locals are securing funding from London Municipality. I will end with the hope for an even greater journey. It seems I can't get enough of these travels, but I do see how they foster change and hope they really do good. I hope that this next trip will be by ship. This ship is real, it was built by a Dutch man as a replica of Noah's Ark. He hopes to preserve wildlife diversity as it currently exists around the world and to show how such safeguarding was done so many centuries ago. I similarly hope that we will manage to preserve the world?s cultural diversity by creating a floating Bread House. Here is the vision, inspired by a ship called Kaliakra, which is anchored in Varna. It's a Bulgarian ship built using traditional techniques, entirely out of wood. I hope that this year we'll take to the open sea with it and we'll go on a journey. It's not quite impossible, but for now I won't say more. I keep working at it. The idea is that people from the different harbors come to knead bread together, while exploring different ways to solve local problems. When you bring lots of minds together and these people do something by hand and break the fresh bread in the end, they come up with unique ideas. A fantastic kind of brain-storming. We aim to foment such brain-storms, hopefully not real sea storms, but just positive, creative storms, which will change communities along our voyage. I hope that this floating Bread House will simply serve to unite people around this idea. The journey will be called Saint Nicholas, because He is the patron saint of sailors. And I will conclude now with my favorite painting by Magritte, a great painter. He called this picture 'The Birth of the New Dawn'. And you see the bread waiting on the window, resembling a bit the honey bread in a famous Bulgarian fairytale, smiling at us and thinking, 'The wide road ahead is waiting for me to roll and travel!' I hope that the Bread Houses Network continues to grow, that we make more and more street food carts and share more and more loaves of bread with people in the streets. And I hope that we see more and more smiles in return. I'd like to wish all of you that you inspire such smiles in various ways. Most of you do that. But I'm sure we can do it even better. Thank you very much for the attention! Please, come visit me some day by the wood-fired oven!