The selfHUB - A Community of Social Pioneers

Some of the selfTeam has been sitting together yesterday with researchers from universities who work on social entrepreneurship. Victor, a professor from Israel asked us how we capture our learning in this very hectic and crucial phase of setting up the selfHUB by November.

We were struggling for an anwser and even today, I spent the whole day in front of the computer with a very long ToDo list and many emails sent. In one of the last emails sent today, I was asking the to-be hosts of the Pioneers of Change Peacebuilders community these 2 questions:

• What is your passion that has made you join this Peacebuilders community?
• What makes you feel that you belong to this Community?

And at 22:17, after a long day and with 82 emails still in my Inbox to work on, I pause and ask myself:

WHAT HAS MADE ME JOIN THE SELF COMMUNITY? WHY DO I BELONG HERE?

I "ended up" in the social entrepreneurship field (the Fourth Sector), after I felt a great disconnection in the other 3 sectors: I have studied political science and wanted to work for the government in the Foreign Office. But I did not belong: it was way too little space for change, creativity, and innovation . To pass the entry test it was not important to know how to apply knowledge but to reproduce facts without questioning them. During and after my studies, I was involved for 7 years in the world largest (business) student organization AIESEC where students wanted to change the world but most of them ended up in big multinational companies to make the big money, one day. I belonged and still belong to that organization but not to the business world of making profit for the sake of making profit. 3 years in the NGO sector that followed have exposed me to social organizations that do not work because the people working for these organizations get sick from the inhumane system. NGOs are not learning from the business sector which has role-modeled those unhealthy organizations - the third sector is even copying those systems and on top of that is missing a lot of the times the business knowledge to run them.

Why do the traditional organizational systems not work? How does the organization of the future look like? What are the new working roles evolving? What is my role in this?

I feel that I belong to the selfCommunity because I have the safe space to ask these questions and to have conversations with like-minded people about those and other questions. And slowly there are even working projects emerging around those questions that I can sustain myself with financially...

22:47...going back to my emails...