Future Here Now: Innovation Requires Inclusion
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Hey there. This month, we’re highlighting how the requirements of innovation are changing , and how all of us, no matter what you do, have to learn to leverage the change we don’t always notice to make anything new - anything that actually solves the problems we care about.
Because we have to be aware of new opportunities to be able to innovate, I’m giving a discount on new Change Maker - paid - subscriptions. If you’re not a Change Maker, you can subscribe this week at 25% off! And if you want to give a subscription, or get subscriptions for your team, you get a whopping 25% off that, too.
All Change Maker subscriptions get three posts per week, plus Office Hours, the Change Maker’s Workbook and other discounts and invitations. So don’t delay - these offers won’t last long.
I was more than 50 years old when I learned that the people who invented the free school lunch program that I used growing up were… the Black Panthers. A mysterious group that I had been taught to be afraid of, almost from the cradle, without knowing why.
The Black Panthers looked at their community, understood that some of their children were not getting food and thus could not concentrate in school, and figured out how to feed them. The new Department of Education noted and expanded that solution nationwide – even as other parts of the federal government tried to exterminate them.
A white kid in Ohio got to eat lunch affordably, daily, because a militant Black organization in Oakland, Californiafigured out that poor children needed reliable food access if they were going to learn.
When people who have been left out, overlooked, blocked and discriminated against finally get a chance to bring what they’ve learned to the front, we all benefit. We benefit culturally and morally. And we benefit economically.
Because their insight allows them to create something the rest of us didn’t see.
Detroit is growing again, thanks to immigrants
I have lived almost all of my life in the Midwestern U.S. We take it as a given that our metro areas don’t grow. Individuals cities might grow as residential preferences change, but the metros stay the same overall. If a metro population changes by a sliver of a percent, that is Big News.
Detroit grew by 1.2% 2010 to 2023.
Detroit. The city many of us thought was a total goner in 2010.
The difference? Immigration from outside the U.S.
And the benefits aren’t just about numbers. They’re also about resilience. This article is worth a read.
Who can bring peace? The women.
Most of us learned early on that we needed Experts and Leaders to make anything change.
But sometimes the Experts and Leaders show loud and clear that they can’t do that at all.
When that happens, I’ve seen over the years that one of the best places to look for impactful solutions are the people who have been most left out of the current power structure, who are the most vulnerable to the damage. Instead of being ignorant, like we too often assumed, they prove time and again to know exactly what needs to happen.
This story from Colombia makes that clear. I’m looking forward to the book.
When you can’t find employees, rethink what “employable” looks like
Long ago, we could afford to leave big groups of people out of the workforce, and assume that only people who fit a certain profile had the capacity to do certain jobs.
We’ve seen that start to fall apart all over, especially in the trades, where women are gradually establishing themselves in historically male-dominated jobs.
But humankind, in all of our range of capabilities and strengths, can do a whole lot more than our old leaders thought. We just need to fit the job to the person, not try to squash every human into a narrow box.
Consider: how might a welder on the Autism spectrum do as good, or better than a neurotypical person?