How will you be disruptive on Women's Day?

8th March is International Women’s Day.

This year’s theme is #pressforprogress and focuses on whole communities coming together to be gender inclusive.

It is an incredible opportunity to create a level-playing for all children, youth and the community around them to play with ideas, to think about ways to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #5 – Gender Equality – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Create a new normal using the free disruptive innovation activity available in this week's e-news (Sign up on the home page if you haven't already.) 

This Ideas to Innovation Practice guides you – or give it direct to young people - through an Innovation Forecast.

The activity is set in 2030 and is based on the assumption that we have achieved all of the SDG#5 targets on gender equality.

Given that is only 12 years away, already a fresh set of perspectives start to disrupt our current status quo thinking.

Then, when you ask for ideas on how we get there, how we achieve those targets without harm to people or planet, you open the space for solutions.

Why this way? It is a gender-neutral space: all ideas count, all voices count, listening respectfully to each other matters – women, girls, men and boys are all part of the solution.

How does it have positive impact? By playing with ideas from this strategic perspective of ‘a problem solved’ each person is in a safe space to empathise with the bigger issues through the reverse engineering.

What happens next? When you connect to empathy points, you’re opening up awareness and exploration. It gives young people breathing room to be researchers within themselves and what they care about, as well as to connect to turning their solutions into reality. Often, they start with big statements – some of which have positive intent but are based on ill-informed opinions.

With this Women’s Day Innovation Forecast, you will stir up people’s thinking, whether you do it for 5 minutes or over a period of days. The more often you do it though, the better the iterative effect of refining solutions and lasering in from a high-level to what can be done in the here-and-now of a community.

This article from Anna Leach on the SDGs in 2015 is excellent, and a specific line stands out for me, “Girls should be viewed as agents of change and not as beneficiaries…”

Use the Innovation Forecast activity to empower all children as agents of change in your community, give each one of them the space to be part of the solution.

You will be building their wellbeing, as well as equipping them with the communication, collaborative and thinking skills that they need to flourish in everyday life.

#resilience #grit #wellbeing #innovators #entrepreneurs