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The Living Labs Project
Santropol Roulant's Living Labs is an experiment in conscious organizing. Funded through the McConnell Foundation's Applied Dissemination program, the project is an attempt to understand just what it is that gives the Roulant its special vibrancy and to explore ways that that vibrancy might be shared with or disseminated to other organizations. Phase I involved a pilot project in which we began to reflect on these questions, internally as well as with a small set of organizational partners. During Phase II we will take what we've learned and scale it up to broaden and deepen our social impact.
So what did we learn? Our experiences are described in the Living Labs Year I Report, but here is a sample of what we discovered:
- Dissemination for us must be a two way street. We want to learn as well as teach. We want to be startled and transformed by this work.
- We want Living Labs to be intimately bound up with our daily life here - to flow from that life and to feed it. We don't want it to drain energy away from our core programs.
- We want Living Labs to spring from all levels and parts of our organization. We don't want it to be the province of just a few of us.
- We are attempting to disseminate a way of being together, not a particular set of structures or programs.
- The only way to disseminate such a thing is to re-think the nature of inter-organizational relationships. Traditional tool-based, network-based, or replication-based dissemination strategies won't do.
Many of these hopes and concerns have been addressed in Phase I. Living Labs now infuses a much greater part of the organization. Ongoing dissemination activity is increasingly integrated into our daily work. And we are clearer about what it is we're trying to disseminate.
 
Scaling up will require us to work with inter-organizational relationships in some new ways. When we think about scaling up, it is not about producing new Santropol Roulants. Nor do we think about cloning our culture, our space, or our activities. We think about entering into a wide conversation with the world, a conversation in which our energies feed and are fed by larger social change currents. In that sense, our dissemination work will reach out to any interested organization, initiative or movement. There are national and international dimensions to what we plan to do over the coming year.
At the same time, we recognize the importance of grounding everything we do in our local community and context. A core part of Phase II of Living Labs will focus on building relationships in Montreal. In particular, we see local Meals-on-Wheels organizations as an especially fruitful set of relationships to develop and a powerful level of scale to explore. As always, we are thinking about the Roulant's own development as well. When we think about scaling up we also think about scaling in. Living Labs will work from core staff to the full Roulant membership to the various organizational and community spheres that form our world. Each of these habitats is important to us. Each must enrich and be enriched by any change work we do. For us, it makes no sense to try to effect change. We can only try to live it.
The above is the introduction to a detailed summary of the Living Labs project. Click here for the entire document (in Word format).
This past year heralded a host of new friends for Santropol Roulant. We are working with the Berkana Institute as a member of an international community of organizations thinking about leadership and social change – be it through social service, the notion of a ‘trans-local’ movement, or sustainable building design. We are at the beginning of this particular voyage and can already see the value this work brings to Santropol Roulant and our members. Click here to access NewWorkSpaces, an online conversation between these organizations (called Learning Centres).
Above: The annual gathering of Learning Centers held spring 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico. The gathering brought participants from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Pakistan to dream about how we might connect our local work to cooperation on a global scale.
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