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Today, the Telegraph-Journal launches a new feature called A Better New Brunswick. We have reached out to community leaders around the province and asked them two key questions: How would you create a better New Brunswick? Secondly, where do we start? This is the debut column in this series, written by Saint John’s Greg Hemmings, president of Hemmings House.
Q: How do we create a better New Brunswick?
A: I see a better New Brunswick being built in an environment where our community supports the initiatives of grassroots, entrepreneurial-based movements that aim to create a healthy and prosperous province.
Five years ago I embarked on a journey that reshaped my perspective of how our province can achieve positive social change as a result of citizen-led initiatives. I have worked on a few documentaries that have followed grassroots visionaries and community influencers who have created movements that caused transformational change in our province.
This journey began with a trip to Caracas, Venezuela where my Hemmings House film crew joined the leadership of the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra as we explored (and documented) the life changing music education program called El Sistema. This organization brings almost a million high-risk children from the barrios and the streets of Caracas into centres where they learn classical music every day after school for free. El Sistema is not only producing some of the world’s top classical musicians, it is empowering children to live high quality lives.
The New Brunswick Youth Orchestra leaders were inspired and used the filmed content that we gathered to explain the opportunity to community leaders when they returned to New Brunswick. A movement was born. Within three months enough money was raised from the private and public sectors to start a similar program. Today there are over 700 of our province’s neediest children being empowered with music every single day after school for free, just like in Venezuela.
This is an excellent case study of what a small group of people with a vision can accomplish if they attract influencers from the community who share similar values, and are working towards collective goals. Once our elected officials see that a citizen-led community movement has gained momentum toward achieving an outcome of common good for our province, then it is much easier for them to jump in and support the initiatives. This ‘collective impact’ method is considerably faster and more effective than just waiting, or even lobbying for change.
Another citizen-led movement that we have recently documented for CBC follows a very similar path as Sistema, but instead of music for at-risk children, its goal is to re-introduce computer coding and technology into the K-12 curricula.
The Code Kids movement started in the summer of 2013. We followed a group of tech leaders as they explored the education system in Estonia and Finland, two countries that have successfully integrated coding technology and the arts into all facets of their curricula. We filmed as much information as possible and brought it back to New Brunswick for the tech leaders to use as education materials in order to drum up support. Immediately the tech community jumped on board, and teachers, students, and bureaucrats put their hands up to get involved. Yet another movement was born.
Only 12 months later, Premier David Alward announced the formation of an apolitical initiative called Brilliant Labs, which was borrowed from the Estonian blueprint. Brilliant Labs will support and fund educators who are interested in integrating technology into their classrooms. This initiative will change the way students learn and aims to give our children the skills needed to create a strong and healthy economy of tomorrow.
Code Kids is another great case study of how a few passionate citizens can contribute to significant change if they are in a supportive environment that nurtures free thought and celebrates entrepreneurial out-of-the-box thinking.
The two initiatives that I just wrote about just happen to be social causes that are not motivated by profit. But what if we also nurtured a culture of social entrepreneurship where citizens are encouraged to get together, identify challenges that need to be solved, create movements and businesses that aim to help solve those challenges? These movement-based initiatives and enterprises would continuously work towards making our province a better and more sustainable place to live.
Q: What is the first step?
A: The first step to move towards a citizen-led, movement-based province is to start the conversation. We must make an effort to talk to family, friends, colleagues and community influencers about the movements that should be created in order to add value and make productive change to our ever-evolving culture, infrastructure and economy.
These movements must be solutions-based. Once this becomes a part of our daily conversation, innovative businesses and not-for-profits will emerge and will continually work to support the needs of the movement towards a better New Brunswick.
Greg Hemmings is president of Hemmings House, and is a video and documentary filmmaker. He lives in Saint John.
