you already have an idea of what it could look like for a specific example in a specific city that as i understand you're saying given that the system you're working on the procurement system at the municipal level is invisible for many citizens so it's not so easy to get people excited about it as it as in the case for example of incredible edible when people can touch it and eat and grow their own food in the city so would you then be looking for citizen sector organizations like this one's who would be connecting the cause and case by case so if it's an environmental topic on in the procurement then somebody for on the environmental side or maybe you could describe us briefly an average profile of your community member that you would like to excite for city markets

approach yeah i think i think this is this is this is just going to be difficult also to understand that right now communities have a lot of really urgent priorities and one of the most important lessons i've learned out of out of really studying community organizing over the last year and revisiting that question is you cannot approach a community and say here's what i want you to do or here is here's what i want you to even think about it needs to it needs to emerge as a priority in the community much like and i think that's where rosanne has shown so much wisdom in allowing brownsville to find its own story she wasn't telling them that they should tackle housing first or that they need to kind of take care of homelessness she was letting the community find their voice and their priorities and i think in a similar way i think as urgent as i think the changes that we're bringing about we need to it's my job to anchor this in issues people care about and right now the issues people are going to be caring about is local services is local resilience meaning strengthening the kind of community assets the organizations that have been helping one another and that have been helping the community to live through the challenges behind and immediately ahead of them so what help can we provide to serve them so i think we are probably going to find that angle through helping organizations in the community rather than citizens directly as a first step and then through those organizations hopefully we can show the opportunity and begin to put this on the agenda and and you know took rosanne eight years to get to a point where the community had articulated what they need and what they want and i think we need to i need to accept for myself that it may well take a decade for communities to build and develop their position as to what they're demanding what their needs are and what the issues are and to put this into the into the list of priorities they're working through i think the biggest mistake i can make here is to put pressure to try to rush this this this would be really really a challenge i think the best thing i can do is respectfully begin to look for ways in which the knowledge we've developed can help others right now in fulfilling their priorities sasha

we wish you all the best in this exciting exploration and journey thank you so much for sharing the wealth of wisdom from the examples you have identified today and as we are approaching the end of this episode let me briefly summarize our discussion so we have seen the following what all of the cases we mentioned today have in common is that in the end it is that people social entrepreneur set out to help who are both becoming the experts but also take charge in holding government accountable the people of browns will supervise the public services they get people with rare diseases in romania supervise the implementation of laws and policies and so do the recyclers in peru each social entrepreneur that we talked to described it aha moment when their activism stepped from speaking for these groups to letting them speak a really critical moment in which empowered people to confront it in relations with government and this has been the second episode of season two of the ashoka systems change podcast we hope you enjoyed it and if you did please subscribe to this series and recommend it to your friends and colleagues interested in how to bring about systemic changes to make the world a better place for all