One thousand pounds
for
your best
ideas!
SOCIAL
INNOVATIONS
Is yours a
new, imaginative and feasible idea or project for improving
the quality of
life? If so (or if you know of such a scheme, or have a
newspaper cutting
about a likely project) please submit it, in less than
1,000 words, to our new online GLOBAL IDEAS
BANK, created with the help of Flemming Funch and the
New Civilization
Network, which already contains
several thousand best ideas submitted by members of the public worldwide,
and which offers a total
of 1,000 pounds (UK Sterling) in awards (annually, with a deadline of June
1st) for the best non-technological ideas or projects sent
in.
Supporters of the Institute for Social Inventions include Lord
Young of Dartington, Sir
Peter Parker, Edward de Bono, Tony Buzan and Anita
Roddick. The deadline for the awards is
June 1st each year. There is no
entry form. Entries can be sent by snail mail,
fax or e-mail. Besides money
awards, the winners receive a framed certificate, quite a lot of
media
publicity worldwide, help where possible with implementing their
schemes,
and publication not only online but in book form, in an annual compendium
of social innovations and
in its Encyclopaedia of Social Innovations, The
Book of Visions.
Some of the
best social innovations that the Institute
for Social Inventions has helped
to promote over the last ten
years:
- The Natural Death
Centre, which helps families
looking after a person who is dying at
home. It also advises on
inexpensive, green,
family-organised
funerals. It gives legal advice about burial in
gardens and on farms,
and has set up an Association of Nature Reserve
Burial Grouds (for woodland
burials where a tree is planted for each grave
instead of having
headstones).
- A
Hippocratic Oath for Scientists, Engineers and
Executives, similar
to the Hippocratic Oath for Doctors and signed by
40 Nobel Prize Winners
and University Vice-Chancellors.
- An
East
Europe Constitution Design Forum, assisting the new
democracies in
Eastern and Central Europe to design electoral systems that
will help avoid
ethnic turmoil and civil war.
- The Council for
Posterity, which
attempts
to represent the interests of future generations, including a
Declaration
of Rights.
- The
London Poetry Marathon, which
encourages
people to get sponsored by friends and relatives for the charity of their
choice, to learn a poem by heart
and to recite it on stage at the Marathon, held each year on the third
Sunday in October
- The
ApprenticeMaster
Alliance, based on a San Francisco model, which links
apprentices with
masters, male or female, who have a skill to
teach.
The
Institute for Social Inventions, a non-profit
organisation, also runs social invention workshops
in schools, has
a
network of 400 members and subscribers around the world (subscriptions
cost
17 pounds by credit card, by phone or fax) and has acted as the model
for similar institutes
in Sweden, West Germany, Holland and
Russia.
The Institute for
Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road,
London NW2 6AA, UK (tel [int. 44]
(0)181 208 2853; fax [int. 44] (0)181 452
6434; e-mail:
rhino@dial.pipex.com).