For social transformation we need:
- An entrepreneur, someone who will lead the way, someone who knows the terrain.
- To act on the causes of the problems.
- To find efficient solutions.
- These ideas must be scalable.
Examples:
The game abcespañol enables 16 or 17 people to learn to read in 4 months, and it only costs $2. It was invented by a teacher who wanted to change things; we should have fun while learning. And these children can teach others, it’s scalable.
Educational therapy unit: A prison officer, tired or seeing drugs and violence inside the prison, of seeing people coming out worse then they went in, in Villabona (Asturias), got together with the inmates and other prison staff to change the system, so that everyone would make a commitment to eradicating drugs and violence. They are exporting the idea to other places in Spain and other countries.
Self-Financed Communities (CAF), very widespread in Latin America, bring together a number of people who pool their money into a savings bank and decide what they are going to do with it. Normally they help each other, setting themselves up like a bank. At the end of the year they share out the interest earned. CAFs are present in 50 countries and join together 6 million people. After 6 or 7 months there is more money in the savings bank than is needed in loans.
People can be self-financing, it is a type of do it yourself. It creates social cohesion and trust. We tend to think that people are generally bad and that we should not trust them. But, until proved otherwise, we should trust people.
We have to relegate poverty, prisons, hunger, and illiteracy to the museums, so that our children will not have to see all these problems.
