Now this is what I call an achievement!!! 25 million books send to African children since 1988. That is about a million books per year. Great!!! Kevin Jones, one of our activists in our newly founded group , already works with this organization. Starting up, like we just did with this campaign, it is very useful to learn from other organisations and be inspired by very concrete examples. What could be the vision of the “Waste becomes Resource” Campaign on CoWorking News? Books For Africa writes very succinctly:”Books For Africa. A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to children in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa.” If I would try to describe the “Waste becomes Resource” Campaign on CoWorking News in similar terms, it would read something like the following:”Activists from and for the Coworking Community join together to form a network that translates a “resource-oriented-approach” into concrete actions and projects. Joining the know-how and infrastructure of various coworking spaces, the magnitude and impact of a wide range of projects is hugely increased thereby magnifying the special nature and value of coworking for coworkers and non-coworkers.” The motto could be: “Positive actions through coworking power!”
For better visibility of all activists we set up a “Waste becomes Resource” Group yesterday on Facebook. Two themes already popped up in the first few hours. Distribution of “books and furniture” for and from coworking spaces. Regarding books we could for example set up an “International Coworking Library”. In the same way as coworking spaces have their individual library consisting of contributions of their local users, we could set up a database of all these local libraries. Depending on the distance of the reader to the book, either the reader would travel to the book or the book would travel to the user. Very positive side effect of this library would be the exchange of knowledge about the different spaces. If you could locate a certain book in a space, chance is, their is someone their who has a special expertise regarding this subject. In this way the library would also become a “human library“.
The Spanish platform CoworkingSpain which promotes coworking for over 100 coworking spaces supports our “Waste becomes Resource” Campaign on CoWorking News. This is great!!! The first aim of the campaign is to increase awareness for projects that can be carried out and be supported by many coworking spaces. To have an impact we need to collaborate and use our “Group Genius“. The second aim is to demonstrate the vital role that coworking spaces can perform in bringing about more equality in our society. Without equality we produce poverty, violence, poor health, abuse, waste and misery for most of the people as the film “Zeitgeist moving forward” clearly shows. To follow the argument go to the film at 1:22:40 if you have little time. This point is also about the identity of the coworking movement. What is it that we believe in? Thirdly concrete change will be achieved if enough people, not only show their willingness to change, but actually act. Join our campaign today, like CoworkingSpain did and be part of the change you like to see!
Public libraries in Toronto and Copenhagen do it, so Coworking Spaces can do it as well. Reading in the human library. Of course this process of exchange and knowledge transfer is one of the backbones of coworking. It is taking place in every coworking space whenever two coworkers meet and exchange ideas, but it hasn´t got a name and is not formalized. To me, there is no harm in doing just that. Have a check on the number of daily visitors to the human library of your coworking space and you get a pretty good idea how well your community is working. Have you got a process in place at your coworking space which is just doing that? Let us know.
