Empowering Students

Knowledge Collection Social Innovation
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My name is Ronan O Dalaigh,

I am from Dublin Ireland, and I want to tell you about my college society.

The Raising And Giving society (RAG) is a student run society in Dublin City University. Our vision is to see an engaged, able and empowered student body that are active in shaping the future of Ireland.

Myself and a friend started the society in September 2011 and our aim of empowering students has really shaped our year.

Firstly I want to tell you a little about me and then I will explain our society, what we have done so far and what is next!

So, I come from a poor, working-class area of Dublin and I have a lot of views and opinions on everything, from society to politics to the environment. In Ireland people generally don’t discuss major worldwide issues, which is a pity becuase our youth are so intelligent! I’m studying a business degree through the medium of the Irish language. I love the Irish language and culture and it makes me angry and sad that our indigenous language is not our primary one. Someday I believe it will be revived and I hope I live to see that day. I have strong values and I love reading inspiring quotes. Two quotes that I have built my values on are; 1. Consider it the greatest sin, to prefer life to honour, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living for. 2. May the best years of your life be the ones that you are living now. I think that a lack of honour and conviction are one of the biggest problems in Irish society today, something that is very evident in our government! I also think that one should constantly be trying to grow and improve as a human being, always staying open minded, ready to accept that your ideas or opinions may be wrong but also be strong enough to fight for something knowing that you might be wrong but hoping that you will learn. Learning should never stop.

It is with these values that I founded my social initiative. It is one which aims to give Irish students a wake up call. THE WORLD IS NOT OK! Things need fixing and it is us that needs to fix them. We need to become more socially aware, more economically aware, we need to wake up! This is what we want to achieve, we want to wkae people up, show them the issues in the world that need to be dealt with and then give them the skills to go and fix the problem, grasp the oppurtunity or address the need.

Our motto is, Engage, Equip, Empower. This is how we work. We engage students, for example we ran a Boxing fundraiser in the college, students trained and then fought each other, We raised over €6000 euro and we made people aware of who we are and our aims. We tought the boxers how to fundraise money and we welcomed them into the society, we equiped them. This year, we empower!

Today we have over 500 members, in a university of 10’000. We have a large following and we are ready to take our plan to the next stage.

We are going to launch community initiatives that will be led by students and use the money we raised to invest in them.

In this new academic semester we are going to take things to the next level. Now that people are aware of us they will listen to our campaigns, they will take note of what we have to say and hopefully they will get involved.

Ireland is full of people making a difference in society and we are making links with these people and organistaions, we are learning and developing as we go.

Within ten years we aim to have a RAG society in every Irish third level education institution and a national organisation directing strategy and implementation.

Long live the dream of changing the world, heres to the future!

2

Share your ryde?

Hey Ronan!

This mission report would do great as a Share your ryde mission, as it is the one in which you introduce yourself to the community. So with your permission I’d like to move it into that group (it will have a different link in case you will want to tweet/ facebook share it)

Is that ok?

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That’s no problem Noemi :slight_smile:

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That’s no problem Noemi :slight_smile:

5

Social innovation?

Or even Spotlight: social innovation. Do you consider yourself as a social innovator?

Whatever you choose to call your initiative, it seems great - as is your fighting spirit, in the true Irish tradition. My questions:

  1. do you think the financial crisis played a role in spurring young Irish to action? How was it in the times of the Celtic Tiger?
  2. you write "Ireland is full of people making a difference in society and we are making links with these people and organisations". How would you describe these people? What issues do they care about and act upon? How? Do they have meeting places or infrastructure to coordinate? 
Wherever you decide to file your mission, you were awarded 150 reputation to start with :-)
6

Yeah of course I’m a social innovator.

Let me answer your questions.

  1. Firstly, I dont think the majority of young Irish people have been spurred in to action. They are currently very dissillusioned with society. The Celtic Tiger promoted an ideal that places value on material wealth and the Irish people subscribed to that ideal. That ideal failed completely and as such it has been hard for the youth to deal with this. Our political and economic system failed us totally and we have not yet found our identity (I could talk for a very long time about Irish identity, our past, our language and other historic factors such as the colonisation but I will stick to the topic). Also, the youth are not being engaged by our social system and as such they are not engaging with society. There are a lot of young Irish people who have strong opinions and ideas but the majority do not act upon them.

This is a very complex dynamic!

  1. The people making a difference are passionate, friendly, they enjoy the simple things in life and they enjoy meeting new people, they are kind-hearted, however, they are not professionals and they often require a lot of advice and guidance in order to make their projects or ideas a success. They act upon local issues. They identify local needs or problems and they come up with solutions to solve or ease the problem. Only lately is the infrastructure emerging to connect and support these individuals, examples include socialentrepreneurs.ie who run networking events and are working to develop a structured network. Social Entrepreneurs Ireland are another organisation, they are a philanthropic body that offer substantial financial and advisory support to ten projects/individuals a year, they also have a youth project called Wave Change, of which I am a part.

Feel free to challenge any of that or ask me further questions :slight_smile:

Rónán.

7

Yeah of course I’m a social innovator.

Let me answer your questions.

  1. Firstly, I dont think the majority of young Irish people have been spurred in to action. They are currently very dissillusioned with society. The Celtic Tiger promoted an ideal that places value on material wealth and the Irish people subscribed to that ideal. That ideal failed completely and as such it has been hard for the youth to deal with this. Our political and economic system failed us totally and we have not yet found our identity (I could talk for a very long time about Irish identity, our past, our language and other historic factors such as the colonisation but I will stick to the topic). Also, the youth are not being engaged by our social system and as such they are not engaging with society. There are a lot of young Irish people who have strong opinions and ideas but the majority do not act upon them.

This is a very complex dynamic!

  1. The people making a difference are passionate, friendly, they enjoy the simple things in life and they enjoy meeting new people, they are kind-hearted, however, they are not professionals and they often require a lot of advice and guidance in order to make their projects or ideas a success. They act upon local issues. They identify local needs or problems and they come up with solutions to solve or ease the problem. Only lately is the infrastructure emerging to connect and support these individuals, examples include socialentrepreneurs.ie who run networking events and are working to develop a structured network. Social Entrepreneurs Ireland are another organisation, they are a philanthropic body that offer substantial financial and advisory support to ten projects/individuals a year, they also have a youth project called Wave Change, of which I am a part.

Feel free to challenge any of that or ask me further questions :slight_smile:

Rónán.

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Challenge? I love it!

Actually, Ronan, I really like the way you frame the issue. I am not  familiar with Ireland anymore (I used to come a lot, and I had a bit of a crush on the whole island - I even taught myself to play and appreciate Irish music - but that was in the late 80s and early 90s, before the Celtic Tiger) but your description seems to apply to many other places in Europe. Many people are losing faith in affluence as both a system of values and a realistic goal in life; many are frustrated or restless, but not so many can see a way to action. Those who do tend to be just like you say.

It is quite interesting to me that you would be both in Wave Change and in RAG. I am curious: is this you preparing for your next move in the form of a social enterprise or is RAG itself a social enterprise? From your description it looks more like a social initiative, as you yourself define it. I can clearly see the social element, the enterprise element not as clearly.

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The RAG Model.

It’s true, I think that a change in peoples values is happening, although not on a conscious level. It’s great to hear that you’re familiar with Irish culture, I am doing a business degree through the medium of Irish and my history, language, arts, tradition and sense of identity are all very important to me.

Let me explain the RAG model to you as I think it will add to the discussion.

RAG started in Dublin City University, a friend and I started it and we launched in September 2011. Our vision is to see an engaged, able and empowered student body that are active in shaping the future of Ireland.

Our model follows our motto, ‘engage, equip, empower.’ Firstly RAG is a very strong brand in Ireland, we have a membership of 500 students in DCU and we are regarded as a very popular society. It was important to us to engage the entire student body, if we had of called ourselves the ‘Lets develop a social conscience society’ we would not have gotten as much attention and involvement. This is the ‘engage’ step of our process, we engage the student body with large-scale fundraisers and awareness campaigns. And more importantly, we aim to get students involved in tackling social issues who would not have gotten involved if it were not for RAG. It’s about waking students up to the problems in our society!

For example, last year we held a white collar boxing event where we trained 30 students how to box and then they fought in a ring. The boxers were tought how to fundraise and the ticketed event itself raised over €6000. We regard this as engagement, upwards of 400 students attended the event and they all got an insight in to how RAG works, we promoted volunteering opportunities to them and we signed some of them up to the society.

The next stage of ‘equipment’ is about giving the students the skills that they need to make a difference in society. We currently have over 50 active monthly volunteers volunteering with local community projects that we have partnered with. An example being The Aisling project, which is safe environment for young, at risk children to do their homework and have a hot meal. Other students are involved with event/campaign organising, PR, marketing and  a lot more. The aim is to teach these students about how to run a social project/initiative/enterprise (a very loose term that is yet to be defined).

In the final stage of empowerment we are aiming to use the money we have fundraised (10k so far with an aim of 25k by May 2012) to invest in sustainable social enterprises that students come up with and run themselves.

We are still learning ourselves but we are making steady and good progress. Two days ago our first sister society launched in University of Limerick. Soon we will be launching the national organisation and we aim to have a RAG society in every Irish university within 3 years.

SO! Are we an initiative or WHAT :slight_smile: Firstly, I have some big goals that I want to achieve later on in life and RAG is part of that, however, RAG MUST be sustainable and it must be able to flourish without me or anyone constant. RAG is a social enterprise, it is enterprising because it is taking a new approach to a problem that is not being tackled.

Hope that helps, I’m enjoying this so feel free to chalenge and/or ask more :slight_smile:

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Enterprise = revenues

You say  RAG is a social enterprise. In my understanding, that would mean sales, commercial activity, and risk capital. I don’t think, say, Oxfam is a social enterprise in the strict sense. How are you incorporated? British have CICs (Community Interest Companies) . What’s the approach in Ireland?

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Registered Charity

That’s a good question and it’s something we’re still looking in to.

The usual approach is to become a registered charity, however, within the university we are registered as a society. We plan to expand in to other universities and the other RAGs will all be regulated and registered by their university, different universities have different rules and regulations. The national organisation will be a registered charity.

Do CIC’s get tax breaks and/or other benefits? What is the difference between a CIC and a charity in the UK?

12

Hi Ronan,

first things first,

Hi Ronan,

first things first, ‘Dia dhuit a chara, is Eirineach mise freisin, bí ullamh’. “There are wolves these seely sheep among!”

I have a lot to say to you, I can see you are in the right place heart-wise, next is to get headwise about what and how to do what you are setting about. I support your work and I will give you as much support as I can. My particular brand of support is in assessment of the situation, its needs and how to surmount the difficulties faced.

To consider the question of revenues, it can’t be ignored, but at the same time the legal aspects around social enterprise in Ireland have not been cleared up. I suggest you contact Noreen of Winset, the Irish Socail Enterprise society before their funding and activities wrap up in May. She will be able to help you and there are courses there in the main Ws (and the odd H) of these issues. {I mean the Whats and Hows and so on}. Noreen has a good heart and you being in Dublin will be useful to you as the regional remit of their funding means they have to focus on the Dublin Meath region and can’t help people like me outside of that area. One course, in how to write a business plan for a social enterprise, starts in March. You can request details from Noreen here:

Noreen Keegan Kavanagh- WINSENT

Tel:  00353 1 4145777  Fax: 00353 1 4145799   e-mail: noreen@winsent.eu   Web: www.winsent.eu

I realise that getting a lot of information at once can be quite daunting…especially if you’ve had a morning coffee or two ;~) Still, time is of the essence, getting to graps with that as a reality will change the way you live your life. In this country people are unaware of the tidal nature of our shared time here, if you hope to make an effect you will have to focus and use the contacts and the support offered to you, make the connections, the rest will happen, don’t let time escape you, whether using it to achieve the ten thousand things, or to clear your mind and relax, integrate awareness and breathe, remember to focus your awareness, its a relaxed thing when you get the hang of it. Get as much feedback from like-minds as possible. Do not be afraid to be strong and lead where that is the appropriate thing to do, but remember that water, though percieved as weak, is the greatest strength, its persistence wears the rock away, and so when time and place calls for it- go with the flow, follow, take advice and criticism reflectively and see from multiple angles. This will help.

To the issue of what you are trying to do I have some few issues to address. The European Union is currently devising budgetary plans to createe a knowledge and innovation economy in Europe. In what you are trying to do you have the chance to get the drop on a student connective body that spreads awareness. In the next five years the newcomers on this scene will be full of pre-ordained agendas. This puts your teams movement into a very good position. At present the Irish universities are run as disparate private enterprises, education industries of a kind, and so they are set within a very specific context - one of competition. It is against the competitive context, divisive in nature, to form connectives and so your work is to overcome the contextual setting. The students are all in university to learn and share skills, devise solutions, create wholesome careers and lives for their futures and so on. granted a lot of people get lost en route with aspects such as RAG Week (one reason I question the name of your organization).

People do not understand the nature of change, order and complexity in social and organizational interaction. Objective information exchange is the key. Inthis process information is taken in, modified according to environment/experience/context, and given out again. By this process all forms of human endevour develop their cultures, information systems, organizations etc. The student body is no different. It is interesting to note that the function of concentration, whether individual or collective, is the organization of the information that is the subject of focus. In a bunch of mathmaticians the function of the collective concentration is to organize the abstract entities into complex structures that approximate a certain modality of existence. In some very interesting tests it hasbeen proven that the ability to maintain concentration over the course of a very very long questionaire perfectly correlates with the highest achievers in the math section of that questionaire. Do you see what this means? It means that the one who can concentrate for long enough will naturally be the best at math. Math is the organization of absrtact symbols, packets of informatio, that assemble into structures approximately, sometimes exactly, the nature of reality.

What I’m saying here in relevance to the student body is that it doesn’t make rational sense to cut down the nodes of possible information exchange within a learning system such as a network of national universities. by competing with one another they shut down their capacity to save on mental energy, two heads are better than one! The competition between universities is up at the higher level of the institution, as a result of this the student body suffers. It is in the shared interest of the student body to form their own organization via a national connective students union and club/society structure that operates at the level of information exchange rather than the locational ‘on campus’.

For example, as part of the juggling soc. in NUIG I saw that they paid a pro-juggler 600€ to fly in, teach, perform and leave the next day. The jugglin soc. in Cork said they’d have loved him to come along, as did many in the Dublin Universities. If the funds had been collectively leveraged the use of that money could have gone so much further for everyone and instead of having one or two such learning experiences per year the student body could have collectively self-facilitated with a full annual programme of events without spending extra money but rather by organizing their spending. I am sure this applies to the AV society, the dance soc, , etc,etc,etc, any crew with a shared value system obviously share interest in what benefits them as a group. This is only one very concrete and pertinent example. Of course there are so many more, research and development, the publishing of research papers, better R&D , patent forming and so on all will be spurred on by increasing the rates of information exchange in a collective system…i.e a fancy way of describing what you are working on.

I agree Ronan, we are a disenfranchised generation. Our wealth has been pinched from under our noses by our own parentage…nationally speaking. adhering to the politically metaphoric it can be said that our guide and ruler, the father, has lived in usury of the son. It is time to change that, never loosing sight that we are working toward providing a better future for those coming after us. My battery is about to run out and so I have to cut this short. I will be meeting Noreen in Dublin for cofee next week, perhaps you would like to join us?

All the best friend,

Éiimhín

13

Dia is muire duit Éiimhín, is iontach an rud a fheiceáil go bhfuil Éireannaigh eile ar an suíomh seo!

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I’ve met Noreen numerous times, she’s great!

In reagrds to funding we are currently working toward getting subsantial funding form various sources. I don’t want to mention where exactly as nothing is definte yet.

You said a lot there and I’d love to meet up for coffee to chat about it more.

Rónán.

085 1632732

14

Bonjour,

Est-ce que vous avez

Bonjour,

Est-ce que vous avez trouvé le soutien en réalisent votre projet social , je parle ici du pouvoir public et de l’administration de l’université ?

15

Beaucoup de soutiens!

Hi Jamel,

Yes we have recieved a lot of support from the university and from the student body. My university is very supportive of enterprise. They have nominated us to represent the university in the renowned SIFE international social enterprise competition.

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Some more info about RAG…?

Hello Ronan,

thank you for sharing your entrepreneurial experience and I am glad that I see that students think and work on social ventures!! When I was a student I used to be in AIESEC at University of Pireaus, but it wasn’t very popular for students to be part in associations (except of political parties) and students were thinking that it is not so “cool” to be occupied in making a change :slight_smile: Anyways, I think that this depends as well on the university and its students.

Before asking you some questions about RAG I would like to share some of my thoughts about your report.

First of all, I like the fact that you are into revitalising Irish language because I think that it is an amazing language and I support keeping our traditions and remembering our roots!

You talked about honour and conviction that your government lacks, I come from Greece and I feel the same… moreover people lose their faith in affluence (as Alberto has already mentioned before) and they don’t have something to rely on if the goverment is not present and valid. I agree that it is US who need to do something about changing and I am happy that we have already realised it and we are on a process of engaging others!

Now, I would like to ask you in which way RAG is helping the others students? Do you provide any kind of workshops and events about social innovation and entrepreneurship? Do you advice and consult with students’ start ups? Or you support them by being part of a broad student network? I am very curious about these, as I am also working in a global social entreprise, Hub (Hub Vienna)

Thank you

Chara :slight_smile:

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Hey Chara,

Really good to

Hey Chara,

Really good to hear from you :slight_smile:

The Vienna Hub sound like a really cool project. Is it similar to the Sandbox network?

In regards to helping students, we do it on different levels, depending on the student. Some students just want to help out in the community and for these students we facilitate volunteering opportunities with local social projects. For those students who have an interest in launching their own social initaitive we are aiming to pair them with a mentor, in the form of a successful social entrepreneur, and invest capital in their idea, as long as it is viable and sustainable.

It is true that a lot of students don’t think it is cool to volunteer or to have a passion for social change and this is what we are really trying to tackle, that is why we run really cool events and campaigns. We want to be the most popular, forward-thinking and successful society on campus.

Because we are still a very young organisation we are still working on the practicalities of getting our model to work and we are learning as we go. 

Our goal is to have the biggest non-political student organisation in Ireland with a national network of students and to offer structured mentorship, training programmes and financial capital to students with the potential to launch a viable social enterprise in the local community of their university.

Rónán

 
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thank you for further explanation

Hello Ronan,

thank you for explaining better your project. It sounds really cool and I think that if motivate as you seem you are join the team you are going to achieve great things!

The Hub Network is not exactly like the Sandbox. Sandbox is exclusively focusing on young entrepreneurship in all the industries, but Hubs are focusing on Social entrepreneurship in all ages! Do you consider to join with your project any of these communities in order to gain more awareness and contacts? I think it will be a good idea if you later on would like to scale it more :slight_smile:

Are you planning any newer event with RAG?

Looking forward your news

cheers

Chara

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Future Events

Hey Chara,

Thanks you for your good-will and support :slight_smile:

I am not aware of a Dublin hub, is there plans to create one?

A Sandbox hub is being launched in Dublin on April 19th and I will be applying, I think Sandbox is amazing and I would love to be a part of it.

We do plan on scaling and expanding our model and we are making links with wider European organisations and movements. I think Sandbox could really help us scale and develop.

The next big event we have planned is a family fun day for the staff of our university, their children and the local community. We want to develop the sense of community and camaraderie between the university and our local community and we feel this is will be an effective way to do that. We will be aiming to get students of the university to volunteer their time and efforts, to put on shows and run other activities. We will also be pursuing sponsorship and using all available resources in order to make the day very successful and also to raise a substantial amount of funds. It will be held in late April of this year.

Rónán.

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I like your idea!!

Hello Ronan,

I don’t know if there is a plan of opening a HUB in Dublin but you can check online what’s going on and how a HUB really works.

I really like your idea for the family fun day and I think that is going to be something very sucessful because its not adressing directly the students and it empowers the community feeling you want to create. I see that you are creating a big impact in your environment and I am happy about it.

As I am a communication and social media “type”, how do you actually do your communication around RAG and its events ?

Looking fw to hearing soon from you :slight_smile: