The Institute for Social Inventions, the organisation which collected these visions, ideas and projects, was launched in 1985 with just this aim - of encouraging the innate inventiveness of the British public and collecting, researching, publicising and carrying out the best ideas.
'It seems to me that we have reached a point in our history where we are faced by a choice between two alternatives:
'EITHER we believe it would be best to leave our fate to a few 'master minds' who will decide just how the industrial and social life of this nation is to run, and who will issue their directives through their chains of command;
'OR we think it best that the national 'problem of survival' should be broken down into its smallest practical elements and that, by means of psychological and material incentives, every man and woman in the country should be encouraged to observe, tackle and help to overcome those anomalies and inefficiencies of which he or she has first hand knowledge.'
This competition is merely a lure to entice the punter by the finger so that the rest of the body will follow. The Institute then encourages the senders-in-of-ideas to take matters further themselves, often giving hints on whom to approach and how. Some ideas the Institute does take up itself. Most of these are described more fully in this volume.
The Institute has launched a social inventions workshop programme in many state schools; and it promotes Community Counselling Circles as a way of training large groups (and has published a book on this). It has helped a number of its own pet schemes get going, including a Natural Death Centre ('to improve the quality of dying' and to support those who are dying at home); an Adopt-a-Planet competition (where school classes caretake a vandalised part of their local neighbourhood); a Hippocratic Oath for Scientists (signed by many Nobel-prize-winning scientists); a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Posterity; a rating scheme for gurus and spiritual masters; a rating scheme for advertisements; and Forum Theatres (to help resolve children's disputes).
With help from the Network for Social Change, the Institute has also been active in Eastern Europe, helping found the East Europe Constitution Design Forum which brings together (at international symposia and by fax) the key constitution designers and politicians from Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, in an attempt to use constitutional and electoral models as a way of defusing some of the ethnic turmoil resulting from the decolonisation of the Soviet empire. The Institute has published a timely book 'Can Civil Wars Be Avoided?' which argues that Local Balance Representation might be a suitable model for many of the emerging democracies (and for Northern Ireland). In this electoral system, parties are penalised and begin to lose seats they would otherwise have won, if they fail to get a minimum number of votes in all areas of the country, thus encouraging them to appeal to all of the various ethnic groupings.
But the Institute's primary interest is in helping members of the public to put their own ideas into action - examples in this volume include the Prison Ashram Trust (to encourage meditation by prisoners), the Pathfinder Clubs for schoolchildren set up by Eileen Chandler of Leicester; the Wildlife Areas around Hospitals initiated by Pat Hartridge of Oxford (and now spreading to a number of hospitals); the agroforestry Forest Garden model demonstrated by Robert Hart in Shropshire (now copied in many other places and described in an Institute booklet); and Guy Yeoman's State Dowry project for Kenya (financial incentives to encourage women to have fewer children, now the subject of a small feasibility study). The 92 award winners in the Institute's competitions find a place in this book, and many of these show signs of progress.
My personal preference is for projects at the neighbourhood level, where there is still a human scale - indeed the Institute shares with the Prince of Wales the aim of helping to restore this sense of scale to our overblown 'giantist' societies, where most problems are insoluble (or at least beyond the reach of 'ordinary' people) until the scale has been reduced. It is anyway more productive concentrating on neighbourhood schemes at this stage, until the Institute gains leverage as it becomes more weighty and established. It is dispiriting work putting pressure on government ministries, which routinely resist new ideas from outside.
One of the greatest pleasures of working with the Institute is watching over the emergence of an international network of social inventors. The Institute itself is part of an educational charity and is backed by Sir Peter Parker, Lord Young of Dartington, Edward de Bono and others. Anita Roddick and her Body Shop colleagues have been especially encouraging with their own ideas and projects and with their help for our competition and for this book. Nor could the Institute have survived without the help of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and of Nicholas Saunders, who is the founder of most of the businesses in Neal's Yard, Covent Garden. He is one of the Institute's five directors; it also has sixteen consultants and some 500 members and subscribers, 'eyes and ears' around the world. There are now Social Invention centres modelled on ours successfully under way in Russia, Sweden and Germany. Many of the people within this network are natural social inventors, as even casual browsers through this volume will realise, for the same names crop up again and again - Clive Akerman, Fred Allen, Margaret Buckley, Steven Burkeman, Cairns Campbell, David Chapman, Margaret Chisman, Guy Dauncey, Alec Dickson, Robert Hart, Conrad Hopman, Tony Judge, Frances Kendall, Roger Knights, Marilyn Mehlmann, Phyllis O'Rourke, John Papworth, John Seymour, Meredith Thring, Gregory Wright, Michael Young, Valerie Yule and John Zube. These are a few of the great social inventors; to me they are the unsung heroes of our times. Rather than an obsession with one particular scheme, the ideal social inventor has a track record of successful projects, with plenty of ideas for more.
One of the chief theoreticians of social innovations has been George Fairweather. Writing in the early seventies, he argued that not only was our survival on earth threatened as never before, but also that revolution and non-violent protest were unlikely to bring about the social transformations required. In his view, there needed to be organisations that could deal with problems before they became crises, and that could set up, test, compare and evaluate small-scale innovative solutions before applying them more widely:
'What was good enough to create social change in the sixteenth century,' he wrote, 'is not good enough in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It seems inescapable that a mechanism for social change that involves innovation, advocacy and preparing the culture for the future needs to be created so that continuous problem-solving can occur. Experimental social innovation transcends revolution because it creates continous problem-solving social change.' It is as if Fairweather were drawing up a blueprint for our Institute, although we had not in fact heard of his work before our launch.
Anyone who is at all inspired by any of the ideas in this Book of Visions, please join in our adventure - join the Institute as a member (see details below), contribute to the Journal, become a social inventions workshop leader or whatever suits your talents. You will I hope find at least a few ideas in this volume that appeal to you as being not only new and imaginative but also feasible. Anything you can do to help implement them within your profession or sphere of competence, please do. Some of the ideas are evidently not feasible as they stand, but have been included for their provocation value. The trick is not so much to demonstrate your critical faculties by picking holes in the ideas, but, as in brainstorming, more to prove your ingenuity by imagining an improvement or an entirely revamped scheme that would work.
- 'Ideas Into Action' by Clavell Blount, published by The Clair Press, London, 1962. Clavell Blount can be contacted at 36 Station Road, Thames Ditton, Surrey KT7 ONS (tel 081 398 2117).
- 'Social Inventions' by Stuart Conger, published by Information Canada, Prince Albert, 1974. Stuart Conger can be contacted at 572 Highcroft Avenue, Ottawa, Canada K1Z 5J5 (tel 613 729 4913).
- 'Social Change: the Challenge to Survival' by George Fairweather, published by General Learning Press, Morristown, N.J.07960, USA, 1972
- Membership of the Institute for Social Inventions, including discounts on books and meetings, a 'Who's Who of Social Inventors' and a journal, costs L15 p.a. (L9 concessionary rate for full-time students, hard-pressed OAPs and UB40 unemployed; L17 by Visa or Mastercard for those outside the UK). Apply to the Institute for Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).