Ashoka Fellow Collaboration Stories (or rather, an analysis of how Ashoka Fellows collaborate)
The other day I was watching a documentary about how a key piece in unraveling the meaning of a set of ancient Mayan ruins was a gathering that took place between experts, all academics . They called it a collaboration. In the end this collaboration was successful because they were able to decipher a large amount of writing in very little time by making the most of each others' unique skills.
This brought me to last year when a team of volunteers, interns, and the Ashoka Fellowship team got together to unravel the mysteries of how Ashoka Fellows collaborate. We did this by searching through collaboration grant applications and the updates they gave our staff. This is what we found:
As in the Mayan academic gathering, we defined success as a collaboration that enabled a concrete output --something that went beyond an exchange of ideas, because to be honest, I respect knowledge exchange but I think that doing something with that knowledge is even better. And based on this frame of mind we went onward as explorers would in an unchartered land.
Through reading vast volumes of wonderful stories of success and failure, we quickly learned that our Fellows used the collaboration grant funding in three ways: either to replicate their models in their own regions (replication), to combine elements of models and create something new (innovation), or to change a law, public policy, or business policy that impacted both parties (policy change).
Replication. In a simple example, one Fellow would be interested in another's work. They would then ask that Fellow if he or she could visit their site and learn about the model; often they would then invite the Fellow to their own site for ideas on how to replicate it. This is the case for instance of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Jack Sim and his idea to bring Ashoka-Fellow Andreas Heinecke's model, Dialogue in the Dark, based in Germany, to Singapore. Read about the full story here.
Innovation. These are my favorite cases, where Fellows have to really learn about another's models and figure out how to bring relevant bits and pieces to each other's work and often come up with something that is completely new. One example that comes to mind is ow Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Juan Carlos Aguilar, who has an "inventions for social change" creation shop, together with Ashoka Fellow Amy Barzach, who develops playgrounds for children with disabilities, jointly designed a toy that would stimulate the creativity of children with disabilities.
Policy Change. Perhaps the least sexy of the three, but just as important, the policy change kind of collaboration involves Fellows coming together to come up with a strategy for how to achieve the policy change (business or government), and whenever required, mobilizing each of the participating Fellows networks as part of this strategy. I recently met with Ashoka Fellow Humberto Prado who led a collaboration between many of the Latin American Fellows to lobby their individuals governments for better prison conditions. I met Humberto when he was on his way to Geneva as the group was invited to the UN to present a simluation of the prison conditions.
Exploration vs. Implementation. What we also saw was that there was a bit of a curve, where Fellows carefully studied one another to make sure that the potential collaboration would be something that was strategic for their organizational goals. Some times, there was a long time lag between this study, or "exploration" and the actual implementation of their plan, and naturally, not every exploration led to implementation, which doesnt mean that it was a failure. Something that I do feel nostalgic about is that we do not have enough resources to continue these unrestricted collaboration grants, however I am excited and grateful that the Lemelson Foundation has allowed us to develop a collaboration series among the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows.
