-
Rik Berbé – unleashing organisational energy
“I like to work in cafes,” says Energy8 partner Rik Berbé, “and this place, The Hub, feels like a café”. Perched on two beanbags on a platform just below the ceiling, we have a bird’s-eye view of the entrepreneurs working in the large, airy communal room.
In fact, it was while Rik was taking part in a ‘World Café’ exercise – an alternative discussion form that mimics the café situation – that he met Hub Amsterdam co-initiator Tatiana Glad. That was in Vienna at a conference four years ago. When he later met a second member of the Hub team, it became obvious that it was time to join.
“It gives me a great network and new contacts,” says Rik, who lives with his partner and three children in Drenthe and comes to Amsterdam weekly to work from The Hub. A trained coach and former management consultant, he finds that the new centre for social entrepreneurs in Westerstraat in the city’s trendy Jordaan district makes a good base from which to talk with clients in the Randstad.
Dialogue is at the centre of Rik’s work with Energy8. The company has researched and developed its own method for ‘unleashing organisational energy’. Clients’ employees fill in a short web survey that Rik and his partner Mario Brouwer process. The result is colourful one-sheet ‘organisation self-portrait’, based on eight archetypical identities, which jump-starts a dialogue.
“People forget about the tool very fast and go into action. We’ve discovered it’s best for us not to give advice based on the survey but to just facilitate collective thinking.”
Eight archetypes
The simple, practical approach appeals to clients, says Rik who is familiar with complex models from his Groningen University economics studies.“Energy8’s tool helps organisation to become aware of what’s driving the organisation and the people and to see if there’s a good alignment between them. At this time, particularly, it helps organisations come back to basics, really looking at what you are and how you develop step-by-step instead of changing the whole thing.”
The approach is catching on, attracting interest from places as diverse as Finland, Mexico and India. Rik and Mario are under pressure to make it available quickly. “People are asking for guidelines on how to facilitate the process. We’re now entering a new phase: looking for partners in other countries,” says Rik, recently returned from negotiating with partners in Romania.
His dream – to put Energy8 into the world – is beginning to come true. This summer has even seen the publication in the Netherlands of ‘Energie in organisaties’ (Dutch for ‘Energy in Organisations’), a book co-authored by Rik, Mario and Christel Koerhuis.
Want to know more? Take a look at www.energy8.eu.
-
Blanca Vergara – empowering women
Dressed smartly in a white jacket, floral patterned skirt and hazardously high-heeled shocking pink shoes, Blanca Vergara looks surprisingly at ease on a grey beanbag.
You wouldn’t expect to find her here just above sustainable bamboo floor level in this T-shirt-and-blue-jeans space for social entrepreneurs in Westerstraat, Amsterdam.
Yet the laidback Hub fits with her new millennium brand of women’s liberation. “This place reminds me that some men do get it: there’s more to life than competition and climbing up the hierarchy. Hierarchy and rank don’t feature here,” says Blanca.
Empowering women and liberating them from the ill-conceived desire to be like men in order to fit into ‘the system’ is what Blanca is all about. Describing herself as a ‘Wonder Woman Maker’, she helps organisations to unleash the power of their women, and coaches women professionals to find their passion and realise their own true potential.
“As women, we’re trained to see the things we’re bad at. I want to help women realise what it is that they’re fantastic at,” she says.
Women work wonders
A member of The Hub since January 2009, she holds coaching sessions with clients in the Hub’s studio room. Women need to recognise the unique qualities they have to create success through collaboration, she says. There’s never been a better time to do it than now – with the current economic crisis showing that the old system doesn’t work. ‘Women Work Wonders’ is her belief, as well as the title of her newly published ‘transformational manual for 21st century women’, available free at www.blancavergara.com.Born in Mexico City, the “youngest and smallest” in a family of Aztec, Spanish, English origin, her mother was a poet, her father an engineer. Blanca learned early to speak up and to bridge different worlds. She took an engineering degree and made a career in IT, rising up the ranks in the corporate world until, feeling “like a Ferrari carrying cement”, she stepped out to set up her own business.
Her dreams: to do more writing, coaching and public speaking – all of it designed to “wake up more women”. For relaxation, she turns to poetry and painting – often depicting trees, another of her great loves in life. She’s also an avid video fan, regularly posting on YouTube.
-
Rima – inspiring style
Rima Freeman is a fashion redesigner and, since January 2009, a Hub Amsterdam host. From Cambridge, Massachussetts, USA, she grew up between Harvard and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a testing ground for new ideas.
“They used to try out their new concepts on us as students,” said Rima.
Her grandfather helped design the Coke can but was appalled when he saw it become part of a trend towards a throw-away society. “He’s definitely been a source of inspiration for me,” said Rima. “I also feel that I have to try and put things right again.”She’s been doing that for years by recycling and remixing clothes. And now she’s joined The Hub as a host, purely by chance. “A friend invited me, pointing out that everyone speaks English here,” said Rima. At first she wasn’t too keen – “I can be quite anti-social” – but then she came again, to a party, had a great time and ended up helping with tiling on the floor and doing the dishes. She was spotted as exactly the type of roll-up-your-sleeves person to join the hosting team. “I actually found this amazing place because I did the dishes,” she laughs.
Staying young and up-to-date
The Hub has given her a youthful perspective on life:“It’s given me a really nice confidence that I’m not falling behind in any way. When you’re in a socially innovative environment you just learn more. You’re more awake and you’re more conscious and you’re more interested. It’s not like being at university or any of those kinds of things. We’re building a community – and it helps my business because I get encouraged to see what I do differently. It definitely works for me this place does. I’m learning how to make a better business here.”
With another Hubber, Carmen of the company Rambler, she’s working to teach youngsters how to make their own clothes and “how to love what they already have”. She also advises adults and remakes unsold clothes from small companies so they can resell them. But although she’s known as ‘the clothes person’, her passion is really about people:
Be inspired!
“With Remix I really want people to be inspired – whether they can sew or not – just to see different. When you make a skirt into a shirt and people figure it out something clicks…I like what I do because it incites conversation, makes people think differently about their outsides which definitely affects their insides and it makes people smile. It’s not just about clothes – it’s a philosophy of ‘stop shopping’. It’s about appreciating what you have.”Her dream: to work for bigger companies – like Target in America and H&M – and to have a team of fashion designers and innovators who can really turn the fashion world around. “I want to take the snobbery out of it and make people see that recycling clothes isn’t just for fun, it’s also about creating a whole new style, your own personal style”.
What Rima also said:
• “I’m also pissed off with ‘green’ clothing. I’m sorry, I’m not paying 250 euros for a pair of pants just because they didn’t kill a tree. That pisses me off. It’s like I will rather go to a second hand store, get something that wasn’t produced in a green way but at least it’s getting another life.”
• “The psychology of shopping is: you’re going to continue to buy the same thing over and over again whether you like it or not because you’re trained to see it.”First published May 2009
-
Tatiana – co-creating a vibrant community
It all started – as so many good things do – with a friendly chat. Tatiana a member of The Hub in Islington, London, wanted a similar community in her new home city of Amsterdam. She talked with friend Moran, just back from establishing The Hub in Johannesburg, South Africa, about opening a Hub together in the Netherlands. They invited others to join their conversation, with surprising results:
“We actually spent a year and a half hosting conversations, building community events, questioning, kind of co-creating the business plan with people,” said Tatiana. “We saw that there was a conversation happening in Rotterdam that was grounding and one here in Amsterdam and that it wasn’t going to be the same Hub. At some point the communities were quite clear about that.”
Chance meetings, good timing
Rotterdam opened first. Finding a location for the Amsterdam Hub took a little longer. “We looked at many places and it was just a combination here of timing, funding and of the location meeting all the criteria on a wish list that we did a year and a half ago somewhere in a park: that we’re part of a larger eco-system both in the community and in this house, the Westerhuis.”
It was another conversation that led to The Hub’s current location in the Westerhuis, formerly an old school. “I actually heard about this building from my hairdresser so it’s really funny – a series of circumstances led us into the building for a tour and we didn’t even know about this space. It was all completely by accident,” said Tatiana.New phase
After a lot of work converting the space, The Amsterdam Hub opened around November 2008. “Now we’re at six months and it feels like a new phase is being born… we’re moving from more reactive operations – the nitty gritty of how to figure out the printer, how to get certain things in. It feels like there’s more ownership among the members themselves and like the hosting team is becoming more of a team and moving from just basic space management to some of the more interesting projects like community development, programming and so on.”
“We’re getting known externally quite well and so bigger questions of substance are coming to the forefront now. Not so much about the individual enterprises here but things like ‘what is social innovation?’, ‘what is the impact on this city?’, ‘who’s working on issues of health, clean technology?’,” said Tatiana. She sees it as the next stage of growth to cultivate The Hub’s capacity to respond to those issues – partly by attract more diversity of social entrepreneurs.Unlikely combinations, visible impact
Tatiana: “I envision a really vibrant community where there are really unlikely combinations of people. Like, what happens if a historian meets someone working on clean technology, meets a storyteller, meets somebody who makes shoes, meets one of the street kids that Rambler works with?”
She’d like The Hub to have a “visible impact” in the city of Amsterdam within a year or two, to do projects together with the city council, for The Hub to be recognised as a source of energy, inspiration, cross-cultural diversity and new solutions.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the Mayor dropped by for lunch and said like: ‘all right, so we have this issue, what does The Hub think?’ I’d like us to have some projects that use our collaborative talent.”
One small local initiative is already under way. But Tatiania’s story also has a global side to it. (She herself is an international mix of Dutch-Croatian origin, brought up in Belgium and Canada and has lived in the UK and Switzerland). The Hubs form a network internationally and Tatiana is a member of the interim board of the newly formed Hub World, the global services entity co-founded by the first group of Hubs and guardian of the Hub network’s values. “The Hubs tend to be quite independent, grassroots, bottom-up. There are many expressions of interest for new Hubs and we have to think of how to keep the DNA, the grassroots and the ‘home-made’ aspect but accelerate the process and help people learn to do it easier and perhaps better.”
First published May 2009
