TIU Day 1: What we stand for

Ice breaker of the day with Team Rwanda

June 21, 2012

Our whole team of scholars and advisers is now in country, and today market the official beginning of our official training at Think Impact University (TIU). We will spend from now until Sunday preparing to enter our communities and meet our host families in Rwamagana in the Eastern province with a wide variety of team building activities, technical trainings, language practice, cultural workshops, and local site visits.

I was thrilled that this morning began with a discussion of the mission and philosophy of Think Impact, as I think this establishes a really critical common foundation on which we can build our work this summer. I want to highlight three themes that dominated our dialogue today.

The tools of the trade. "The Innovator"
is our guide to the innovation process. 

• For vs. With. Perhaps most importantly, we talked about our work being in collaboration WITH rather than FOR the communities in which we live. This distinction is more than simply semantic, as it informs the whole approach we will bring to our work. We think of our community design teams as equal partners with essential assets to contribute to the innovation process. This is critically important.
• Needs vs. Assets. At first I struggled with this one. Don’t we need to figure out what the problems are before we think about solutions? Think Impact takes an asset based approach to development, meaning that will spend the first portion of the Innovation Institute focusing on assets rather than needs.  Traditional aid focuses on meeting gaps and filling needs, and this approach will encourage us to instead think about the strengths and capabilities of our partners.
• Outputs vs. Outcomes. Outputs focus on shorter-term, measurable, tangible results. Outcomes look for larger, systemic, qualitative change that is much more difficult to quantify. We want to use outputs to benchmark our progress along the way, but we will be focusing much more intensely on the quality of the inputs and processes we use to innovate. This will help to achieve the ultimate goal of co-creating and prototyping a product or service by the end of the summer.

Lunch break with Jayne from USC. 

We finished up the day with site visits to two local NGOs: Bridge2Rwanda and Generation Rwanda. Both programs prepare high school students to enter the university system. This was our first interaction with a group of young people, and through our conversations with them, it was exciting to begin to think how the themes and ideas of the Think Impact mission will inform and guide our work this summer. Get ready!