How DreamSpace Academy started
Origin statementThree decades of civil war left a deep mark on Sri Lanka’s socio-economic and environmental ecosystems.
Wherever there is conflict in the global South, the international aid organisations are there, and much of that work mattered. But the imported solutions, from policies to products to programmes, were not sustainably solving these fundamental challenges. Too often they were designed without the people who knew the problem.
DreamSpace Academy was founded in Batticaloa on 30 September 2018, by Aravinth Panch and Kishoth Navaretnarajah.
The problem was solutions that did not fit, not aid itself. Money and knowledge from outside still help: grant funding is one of the three sources that pay for our work today.
The story starts in Batticaloa, but the purpose, mission and vision below do not name a place. They have to stay true wherever the work runs.
What we believe
BeliefThe people closest to a challenge are the ones best placed to solve it.
Local knowledge is often not enough, and the tools, capital and expertise a solution needs may come from anywhere. A solution that is locally owned can be adapted when conditions change, and defended when they get hard.
The people closest to a challenge usually have the insight. What they most often lack is the capability: the skill, tools, networks, capital, permission and standing that turn insight into a solution.
In short, the person solving the problem has to be local. The tools, money and expertise can come from anywhere.
Research on grassroots innovation makes a similar point. It describes empathetic innovation: a trained local person solving a problem that is not their own[47].
We hold this as a belief. We have not measured it.
Purpose: what we are for
PurposeTo put the capability to solve local challenges into local hands, and the conditions that keep it there.
| Word | What it means | What it does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | Skill, plus the tools, contacts, money and permission to use it, a problem worth solving, and enough standing to be listened to. | Not “capacity building”, and not “self-reliance”. |
| Local | Local to wherever the work is happening. It describes a person’s link to a place, not one particular place. | Not another word for Batticaloa. The purpose has to stay true in other places too. |
| The conditions | What surrounds the people doing the work: tools, contacts, money, institutions, the flow of knowledge, and the people who keep all of these going. | Not a claim that those conditions already exist, or that they are enough. |
The purpose does not say how, for whom or where. It does not mention making, a makerspace or technology, so that it stays true wherever the work runs.
We do not solve the challenges ourselves. We put the capability into local hands, and the community solves them.
Definition: what we are
DefinitionDreamSpace Academy is a non-profit social enterprise that co-creates an ecosystem to tackle local challenges through education, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Each part of the definition answers a question.
| Part | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| a non-profit social enterprise | What kind of organisation are we? This is our legal form and how we are organised. |
| co-creates | How do we work? Together with the community, in everything we do, not only at one step. |
| an ecosystem | What do we build? A network of people, places, tools and support. We build the ecosystem; we are not the ecosystem. |
| to tackle local challenges | What is the ecosystem for? |
| through education, innovation and entrepreneurship | How does the work happen? Through these three, which we call our pillars. |
Social enterprise describes how we are organised. It does not say how the work is paid for. We do not claim to be independent of grants, and do not call ourselves dependent on them either.
The work is paid for from three sources. We rank none of them above the others, because we have never measured the share each one provides. See how the work is funded.
In 2019, a co-founder’s keynote described DreamSpace Academy as a community innovation centre in Sri Lanka, set up to tackle socio-economic and environmental challenges. Today we describe our work as building an ecosystem rather than running a centre.
Mission: what we do
MissionCo-creating with underserved communities the capability to keep solving their own challenges, through education, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Underserved says who the work is with. It is about access, not about where someone lives, and we check it one barrier at a time:
- distance from schools, classes and other services
- language
- disability
- income
- gender
- displacement
It is not a label given to a whole district.
Keep means the capability has to last. A community should be able to go on solving its own problems after a programme has ended.
The community solves its own challenges. We do not solve them for it.
Vision: where the work is heading
VisionCommunities solving their own challenges.
The goal: one hundred local challenges solved by local people, by 2050.
DreamSpace Academy is building a self-sustaining ecosystem where local and international changemakers co-learn, co-innovate and co-produce.
A local challenge counts as solved when all three of these are true:
- The problem came from the community.
- A real user who is not on the project team has tested the solution.
- Somebody depends on the outcome.
The DreamSpace Lifecycle uses the same test. The goal adds a number and a date.
We do not yet publish a count of challenges solved towards the goal. We will start once there is a starting figure (a baseline) to count from. Our past figures count candidates and participants, not solved challenges.
Values and standards
We have eight values, grouped under three ideas.
Agency
Locally rooted. Co-creation. The route is theirs to choose. Radical inclusion.
Honesty
Openness about the work. Transparency about the organisation.
What the work is for
Peace and regeneration.
Most values come with a standard: a way of working that someone outside DreamSpace Academy can check.
| Standard | What it commits us to |
|---|---|
| Nothing about the community without the community | Local partners in every part of the work. Measures of progress are agreed with the people they describe. |
| Build the capability, not the dependency | We design programmes so that the capability stays locally after they end. |
| Meet people where they are | People are placed by what they can show they can do, not by their age. Where the basics are missing, the basics come first. |
| A changemaker’s route is theirs to choose | There are many routes, not one. Leaving for study, a job or something else is not a failure. |
| Open by default | Open hardware, open protocols, open publication, open networks. |
| Hands-on, and finish the thing | The completion standard described under assessment. |
| Bridge both ways | Bring the world in; take local work out. |
What we will not claim
Promising people a livelihood and not delivering it does real harm in a place recovering from war: research has found that raised hopes that are not met can feed new grievances[68].
- We do not claim that this pathway produces lasting income. There is good evidence that entrepreneurship helps economies grow. There is no such evidence yet that a rural route from making to starting a venture does the same, or how often. That unproven claim would be our own, not the research field’s.
- We report failures and partial results alongside successes, so that we do not show only the work that survived.
- We report results that came through the founders’ own contacts separately from those that came through open intake. Mixing the two makes any success rate look higher than it is, and useless to anybody else.
- We do not describe ourselves as independent of funding until we have measured the share that comes from earned revenue.
- Every claim about facts points to a source. Where a figure is our own statement rather than a count we have worked out, we say so.
Two values, peace and regeneration, have no standard of practice yet. We leave the gap open rather than making one up.
For peace there is one proposal: publish grant criteria in advance, give every unsuccessful applicant a written reason, and publish where the people selected come from and how they were referred. It is being considered and has not been adopted. Regeneration has no proposal at all.
Category: the kind of organisation
CategoryDreamSpace Academy is an Innovation & Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Builder for sustainable development.
We build the ecosystem; we are not the ecosystem itself. The category does not name a way of working, although a lot of our work is done by making things.
The MakerSpace is something separate. It is a makerspace design that we offer to local partners as a social franchise (a partner runs it locally under a shared name and shared standards). It is one of the places the programmes can run. See the MakerSpace’s own pages.
We have not yet measured most of what the ecosystem produces. So far we can show what has been built, not yet what has come out of it. We are setting up the follow-up that will show this.
Tagline: Co-Creating The Dreams
TaglineCo-Creating The Dreams
The Dreams are the futures that become possible for a community when its people, knowledge, culture and opportunity come together. They are collective, they change over time, and they are never a fixed list. At DreamSpace, new dreams become imaginable.
The Dreams belong to the community, but each person finds their own route. Someone who takes a job instead of starting a venture, goes into research, or leaves entirely has not failed them.