This last few weeks, we’ve been mainly exploring the idea of ‘symbiosis’.

It’s all part of an exploration into nature to find a way to accelerate sustainable innovation.

Symbiosis is defined as the intimate living together of two or more kinds of organisms, especially if such association is of mutual advantage.

In human terms, it’s called collaboration, teamwork, co-operation. Putting the interests of others above your own.

We’re part of an emerging mission to build a symbiotic, or collaborative ecosystem that enables us to accelerate pace of change in sustainable innovation. To do more together than we could ever do on our own.

As we’ve started the next phase of this exciting journey, I’ve captured a few of our random twitterings below….and a nice piece from Dan in Costa Rica on his noticings blog

Watch this space for more news but in the meantime, here’s to the great big ‘we’!

Awe from The Pipeline Project on Vimeo.

This is something we mashed up last year. It’s not prescriptive or exhaustive but starts to express what matters to us, ideas and people we respect and admire in the work we are trying to do.
Grab yourself a cup of tea, put your headphones on and take a 10 min break.

We’d love to know your thoughts.

This is a short tale of how one good thing can hopefully lead to another. And another, and another again.

It starts with Neil Perkin at Only Dead Fish who today announced that he’s heading to Tanzania in Africa for the first time in November with the The Great Football Giveaway – a charity that aims to get sports equipment direct into the hands (or feet) of some of the world’s most disadvantaged kids.

In a nutshell, Neil is getting a team or two together to give footballs to kids who don’t have very much at all. Just watch the film, and you’ll see the power it can have on these kids – it’s amazing, inspirational stuff.

We wrote a post earlier this year on how the World Cup wasn’t doing much for the continent that hosted it. I was born in Africa, and lived there as a kid, and was really frustrated that marketeers amongst others weren’t seeing the bigger picture. So this got us really excited – here’s a way to do something about it. Right now.

We want to do our bit to help Neil on his mission. And to hopefully give someone else a chance to go and experience the joy, energy and optimism that sits alongside the poverty, illness, war, famine and depressing lack of opportunities. In short to experience something completely different.

We need to iron out details with Neil but the idea is to get a conversation going that finds someone who’s never been to Africa and then backs them to get out there in November as part of the team.

Maybe someone who’s recently graduated and can’t get work or someone who’s out of work right now but would be really excited and motivated to be on the team.

We’ll chuck £500 in to get them flights. We don’t want anything in return other than for them to create some kind of record about their trip – to capture a sense of what these kids lives consist of, the highs and the lows and bring to life the impact of the charity.

So, there’s the next step in the chain. A big part of the Pipeline Project is about backing people to do new things that have a positive social impact. So watch this space for more news and details on how it’s going to work. And if you want to get involved either to head out there, or as part of the team backing them up at this end, just let us know.

Jambo bwana