How We Phink! It

Reboot Safety is a traveling think tank rapidly prototyping community solutions and supporting the power of every individual's contribution to safe, prosperous communities.

By viewing tech and society through a myriad of critical lenses, Reboot Safety builds tools and solutions that create safe and prosperous communities by organizing civic hackathons to address issues of violence.

As a Global Catalyst, we were happy to partner with the Reboot Safety team and participate in their Toronto Hackathon.

Learn more at: http://rebootsafety.tech

The United Nations estimates about 370 Million Indigenous People are living in over 70 countries. With their sovereignty protected by treaty laws after centuries of colonization, Indigenous peoples still struggle with suppression and poverty. Many communities are unacknowledged, mistreated, and exploited by surrounding governments.

Mother Earth Trust in an International Organization, representing over 15 Indigenous Nations managing over $4BB USD of Natural Capital Assets covering 1.5MM Hectares of land.

As a Global Catalyst, working with the Mother Earth Trust, we looked at approaches on how to mobilize the Earth Dollar with digital currency and blockchain technology to help Indigenous nations reclaim their own sovereignty by managing their own money supply to develop their economies.

Integrating with community level government and nation heads, the Earth Dollar acts as both a currency, and a social narrative of how a Living Economy which inherits the values of Indigenous Peoples works to free its people while preserving the planet.

Learn more at: www.earthdollar.org, www.worldbasicincome.com

The Phinklife Institute was founded in Kenyasi, Ghana as a program to validate and evaluate talent and passion, and social entrepreneurship with an integrated community-based approach to mobilize social impact.

As a Global Catalyst, we explore how community based learning, and practices for developing talent, passion and social entrepreneurship can empower youth communities. Our goal is to equip leaders with the mentor networks, skills and environment to move forward social progress.

The Phinklife Institute has launched as an independent social educational enterprise that focuses on next generation of social entrepreneurs in Africa and Diaspora.

Learn more at: http://www.phinklifeinstitute.com/

With over 6500 Korean-centered convenience stores in the Greater Toronto Area, the industry as a whole has begun shrinking and developed a poor public image known for its distribution of tobacco and unhealthy junk products. Aging immigrant owners are stressed with pressures from big-box and online retail.

As a Global Catalyst, we developed an integrated approach, business model, a collective user experience and a prototype mobile application to bring together convenient stores, local suppliers and supply chains, and local communities to create a vibrant urban community ecosystem. Uncovering the core values of the Korean community, we designed a support strategy to bridge the legacy gap.

Nearly 70% of the global workforce grinds through life like a job. We're a confused social generation beginning to question that life isn't working as promised.

The Epic Hero is a framework that integrates timeless success principles in simple ways that systematically helps you achieve sustainable results incredibly fast. It is adapted in a program that includes facilitated sessions through workshops, speaker series, camps and collaborative dialogues.

As a Global Catalyst, we engage youth communities and organizations in co-creative and collaborative efforts to integrate into community, education and leadership programs. By empowering youth, we create the skills and networks to design new social systems that thrive and operate out of higher values.

Learn more at: http://www.EpicHero.co

Change makers have a burning desire inside them to make a difference. Whether it stems from an injustice, a sheer force of will, or a pure stroke of insight to make a difference, and whether it is outside or inside an organization, we asked a question: "Is there something in common with successful change makers?" The answer was clear, loud and shared among the community: Passion.

Passion enables the change maker to keep doing the things they do to make the world a better place where others might think they are foolish and even crazy.

As a Global Catalyst, we developed and launched Start-up Storyboard, an open-sourced toolkit that brings together different techniques to harness passion that lead to sustainable and successful change. It starts from finding clarity of purpose, to defining a compelling vision and synergy with others, to the realization of change with different tools that lead to inspired action.

Learn more at: www.startupstoryboard.com

In Canada, there are currently over 1 million visits to the Food Bank each year, and this number is steadily increasing. For every one person that visits, there is one unheard person suffering from hunger. Hunger stems from poverty. The informal economy is often characterized by unreliable income sources, which is a contributor to hunger and poverty. A food bank is a source to alleviate these challenges.

The Food Bank model has on-going challenges to be self-sustainable given: A donations approach to support a steady growing demand of users and an open endless door to feed the hungry.

As a Global Catalyst, the Food Banksy project aims to create a thrivability food-bank model, in a form of a 'turn-key' solution that aligns to the current food bank operational model. A solution that can be successfully applied and repeated in any local food bank, preserving a local context by harnessing the power of its surrounding community, and scaled globally to transform hunger and poverty into a vehicle to empower passion, happiness and fulfillment.

Featured at: www.acumen.org/blog/the-food-banksy-project/

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While speaking to University students about passion, it became clear that students wanted an Internship that gave exposure to real life experience, but not grunt work. Experience that related to telling a meaningful story to land the next career opportunity. A supportive environment that helps them discover and explore new skills. Doing something important by connecting passion to purpose and experience.

As Global Catalysts, we designed a HR Intern program, exploring passion within hiring and work practices, while considering the narratives and constraints of the traditional workplace ecosystem.

The 8-week program enabled interns to discover and align their values, develop leadership and communication acumen, and through an exploratory skills project-framework, create meaningful experiences and relationships while contributing their efforts to move daily operational tasks.

The Internship cohort successfully took their development and co-created a networking event: Infusion Networking, bringing over 50 professionals to connect their ideas around people's passion while helping to facilitate rapid deeper connections.

In the University and College system, through conversation after conversation, we found that students of this generation find it difficult to find a direction. Some even identify that they are living someone else's dreams and expectations. They are surrounded by a system based on grades, entitlements, and an "All or Nothing Hunger Games" style of competition.

Years later, feeling the pressure of an expensive student debt, students are finding that they are filled with theory and unable to connect it with real world experience. Graduation is no more than "paying your dues" to get a job, where anxiety settles in as they try to connect experiences that might be applicable and valuable for their first employer.

As a Global Catalyst, we helped to launch Cloud-Atlas, a student run body, in collaboration with our framework of human potential development, that help students navigate the Post-Secondary Academic system as an ecosystem for purpose, passion and the exploration of the human journey. By leveraging other student clubs and groups, students will have the opportunity to learn and apply success principles to develop a fulfilling and meaningful life-academic integrated experience.

As a Global Catalyst, we began developing a methodology and organizational system that aligns human-passion and purpose to the organizational values and mission. It is a system that shifts top-down control and command decision making into resonate thought leadership throughout the organization. A system that builds the flow of work around trust and relationships. It turns business ecosystems into fully engaging and thriving environments connected to purpose and meaning that maximizes creative output through inspired action.

We realize that business organizational structures can act as platform for passion. It's not just about being good and doing good, but rather being great and doing great.

What is like-heartedness? It is that feeling of instant rapport, a 'soul-mate' connection, the feeling as if we have already known each other and are meant to be together to do something important in this life.

It's not about some perfect romantic match, rather something more simple that is connected to building meaningful, high trust relationships. Let it be between friends, colleagues, family or co-workers.

As Global Catalysts, we created the Opportunity Playground as an experiment to demonstrate the power of insight, innovation, and collaboration when like-hearted people are put in the same space.

Partnering with an innovative furniture agency, we co-created a small 1000 sq.ft co-sharing work space where like-hearted individuals would come together, share their ideas and cross collaborate by applying their own passions and realizing their dreams through entrepreneurship. The framework brought together 5 tenants, connected professional networks, and demonstrated as a sustainable business model.

What if clouds are like dreams, and to make them real, you need to grab it and pull it into reality. It is about imagination and making it real through action. By reaching out into the community, it became clear that even given the best solutions to achieve any dreams, many people are not even consciously aware that it could be a reality.

Dreams and Passion to many are no more than a fable, and no more than what we tell each other to keep us motivated to continue living out our ordinary lives. From that perspective, those that look at people who do achieve their dreams and live their passion, get passed off as being lucky and something that can't be attained. What emerges is a social awareness challenge that we wanted to address in a meaningful, fun and inspiration way.

In line with Mental Health Awareness week, it is a message of hope and passion that we want to share. It is a shift away from how depression hurts to the hopes and dreams of thinking about possibilities. Depression is a reality. So is Passion. And we know that Passion is a part of the simple remedy. It is the sanity and the truth we want to share for the well-being of our mental health. We launched a campaign in Toronto that focused on giving away dream balloons to make a visual impact; that if your dreams and passions are important, it is something you have to hold onto and not let go.

On that day, we touched over 1300 lives, sending a message that fulfilling your dreams and passions is a way to improve mental health and overall well-being.

In 2012, a global challenge is set out by the World Economic Forum around how the vulnerabilities of how high disengagement amongst organizations are a threat to a potential collapse of businesses. That would lead to an economic disaster. Armed with the Internet, and a mindset of openness and transparency, companies are on the brink of failing; where 'dirty laundry' could be aired at any time, by any one, and there is no more fear, threats, policies, legal papers or incentives that could guarantee its livelihood.

Being good and doing good is no longer wishful thinking, but a reality that is coming at organizational leaders at full speed.

We know that passion is a way, and if passion and purpose are instilled in the people of the organization, in alignment with the organization mission and values, it would lead to economic prosperity.

So working with many thought leaders and creative change-makers, is a co-created idea around an online creative micro-volunteerism platform, Ripple, that enables employees to discover their life purpose and passion and realize them by connecting to local volunteering opportunities. Measuring and consolidating the impact, it feeds back to the organization and reports positive metrics toward the corporate triple bottom line to improve both employee and customer perspectives and expectations. Passion is not about improving employee engagement, it is about employee hyper-engagement. A full expression of human potential and creativity. Win-Win-Win.

Employee-Communities Businesses. Organizations and businesses are natural ecosystems that can be tapped into. People can be enabled to start the process of discovering, exploring and pursuing their dreams and passions in a massive way, while immediately creating positive social impact that would make the world a better place. In alignment with a business organization, will also make for a better business.