One can say it was almost an accident how this event came together. The organizing members (four of us) met for the first time at another social event. When The Blue Sweater came up in the conversation, we all realized that we wanted to do something with it: whether to talk about the book, spread the word about Acumen Fund, or simply throw an event for young business professionals. Once we got the ball rolling, we pulled the event together very quickly. Luckily, all of us had expertise in different areas necessary for organizing the event. One of us is an event space owner with a good network, another is a strong administrator, the third is an IT technician, and the fourth is a corporate training professional. Putting all that expertise together, the event planning went pretty smoothly, though we only had one month to plan.
For the session itself, we focused on talking about the book and talking about Acumen Fund rather than coming up with a specific action plan or fundraising. In the first part, we used The World Café method to share our thoughts and findings from the book. World Café is a participative process which enables participants to have creative conversations and come up with new ideas or actions for a given theme, while sitting café-style around small tables. During this session, we divided the participants into small groups and asked them to discuss three questions:
1) What part of the book made the strongest impression on you?
2) Are there parts of the book that you have questions or disagree?
3) How would you contribute to Acumen Fund?
Participants moved to different tables as the questions changed, and big sheets of paper on each table were soon filled with notes and drawings representing everyone’s thoughts and ideas. But most of all, everyone just enjoyed the conversation very much.
After this first session, we asked each group to come up with questions for Acumen members, then we connected Tokyo and the New York Acumen office by Skype video chat. Ms. Wei Wei Hsing and Ms. Eriko Yagi kindly joined our discussion from NY, and we shot them many questions that varied from Acumen’s tools for measuring social and financial impact to the backgrounds of Acumen staff. This was the part the participants felt most was valuable. We were all so excited to actually talk with Acumen staff members.
We had a small reception after the main program, but everyone felt there wasn’t enough time, so we stayed and continued chatting until late at night! Though the group was relatively small, the energy in the room was tremendous. In Japan, the meaning of social entrepreneurship is not yet common knowledge, but that night, each of us went home feeling that we can definitely spread the word to help make it common knowledge.
Kiyo Sasaki is a volunteer who aspires to start a Japan for Acumen chapter. The Blue Sweater launched in Japan last year, as the book’s Japanese editor Tatsunari Takano described in a blog post earlier this summer. On July 9, 2010, a group of volunteers in Tokyo organized the first Blue Sweater book discussion in the city. To learn more about Acumen Fund in Japan, join the Japan for Acumen Fund group on Acumen Fund’s online community.
