Blog 1

While in search of a “globe shaker,” a truly momentous social issue that could be solved (hopefully for momentous profit), I began by asking myself: How do I solve a problem people want solved? This guided my ideation, heading the list of ideas with “What the world needs now, is:” because whatever wound up on the list should be able to reasonably follow that lead in. The list was overall left intentionally broad for the first round, so there could be greater focus given to any area that made it to the second round. There were twenty three broad issues discovered, such as more trust between communities and certain institutions (banks, police, government, etc.); access to energy, water, education, fresh food, or transportation; greater social and institutional equality across gender, race, and sexuality; mitigation of pollution and climate change; greater access to voting; economic and environmental resilience; closed-loop lifecycles for products; and others. As I was trying to think of quick solutions to these hairy and often globe-spanning problems (as if the solution to a global problem millions or billions of people struggle with could come to me in about a minute of thinking hard enough), I realized that many of the issues are interconnected. Perhaps some of them were not even the root cause issues, but merely symptomatic of more deep-seated problems. I showed the list to a friend who suggested I open up a weekly discussion among our classmates, diving into one of the topics each week. However, we both quickly realized that discussing these issues in an academic setting before going back to our regularly scheduled assignments would probably not do much good. If we were going to make an impact, there would have to be people with access to resources at the table. More than that, we probably wouldn’t know what the real issues are unless we did some deep ethnographic studies. Each week. On twenty three topics. While still finishing our classwork. Not only did this seem infeasible, it also felt rather egotistical to think we could sit in an ivory tower, huddle up in a closed room, and come out each week to tell different communities how to solve their problems like they were incapable of doing so themselves. That’s when it struck me that the communities should be involved in every step. In fact, the communities should lead the charge on solving their problems with which they live, because they will be the ones living with the solutions. I decided to pivot my concept from trying to solve one of these huge problems on my own to helping neighborhoods find solutions for their current issues and equip them with the tools to handle what may come in the future. This requires a reframing of my original question: How do I help communities find opportunities for solutions?