Tāiki e! attended the Social Enterprise World Forum 2022 in Brisbane, Australia last week - taking the aroha economy global. The SEWF drew together a crowd of 2,600 community leaders and sector professionals representing 93 countries who joined the social impact forum both online and in-person in Brisbane.
Two of our rangatahi from Tāiki e! Next Gen, Maria Wynne and Fiona Tate Walker were keynote speakers at the final plenary session of the SEWF Youth Conference, held on the first day of the conference. Along with Nick Pearce from HoMie, our rangatahi spoke of issues relating to young leaders championing community impact, social inclusion, youth employment and intergenerational collective action. There was a overwhelming sense of needing to amplify the voices of young people within community decision-making frameworks and to recognise the diverse and unique perspectives, experiences and ideas that young people bring to the table.
Key themes from SEWF included indigenous social enterprise, the climate emergency, social procurement and the global economic climate. We were fortunate to hear from some incredible indigenous women including Laura Thompson, founder at Clothing the Gaps in Australia, as well as inspiring Māori climate activist India Miro Logan-Riley from Action Station. Their kōrero was courageous, authentic and powerful.
Over two days, 100+ speakers, 55 sessions and countless cups of coffee, the Forum called for bold thinking, bold action, innovation, design methods and a much greater appetite for experimentation with systems change. Embracing failure was repeated many times with several social entrepreneurs sharing their blind spots, vulnerabilities, failures, but more importantly, the learnings from failure – a reminder to everyone that meaningful change won’t happen as a result of incremental changes to the status quo and bold change can only happen when we allow people to experiment and get it wrong. Formulating the funding structures to enable that experimentation is critical.
The Forum enabled us to lift our eyes up across the global landscape to see what many community champions and leaders are doing around the world. There is a treasure trove of amazing people doing extraordinary things. It also highlighted to us that the work we are doing at Tāiki e! is incredibly unique and affirms our approach in building and designing from deeply rooted indigenous philosophies. A key stand out from the Forum is the affirmation that social enterprise and economies at large have much to learn from indigenous people, wisdom and frameworks.
Thank you to the home people and our hosts for holding space for us to think critically and reflect deeply.
Haumi e, hui e, Tāiki e!