Cleaning myself, cleaning the world

“Oh and of course as part of the job you will also have to clean homes and offices too”, Tolu said, his twinkling eyes examining me. Mhm. Interesting. We were sitting in his office after my job interview to do the communications and marketing at Zenith Cleaners, which had turned into a 2-hour long conversation.

A six month dive into expressive change

Social change work is slow, and we’ve all heard stories of well-intentioned people burning out as they scramble to improve this big old world of ours. But what if this were different? In the fall of 2013, the McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS) was fortunate to work with Organization Unbound to re-imagine the way we think about and engage in social change. With the guidance of our […]

Hot off the press!

Check out our feature article in the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review- “Social Innovation From the Inside Out”. In it we explore the concept and practice of ‘inscaping’ and highlight three organizations that we’ve learned tons from over the years: Santropol Roulant, Southwest Baltimore Charter School, and PLAN. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

I am a cleaner

So when we clean a school, we are not just cleaning the hallways and the bathrooms but if they permit us, there is a possibility of cleaning their system of education. When we clean a church, our intention is to introduce cleaning as a spiritual practice. When we clean for a real estate developer, we can work with them to […]

Wanted/Recherche: Two Montreal-area learning partners

Organization Unbound is seeking to enter into a learning partnership with two Montreal-area organizations to better understand the experiences organizations have as they begin to engage with the practice of Expressive Change. What we learn from these learning partnerships will feed the development of a self-guided curriculum on Expressive change. Interested/Intéressé?

Podcast: A conversation with Sushrut and Tolu

In this podcast, we speak with Sushrut Munje and Tolu Ilesanmi about their experiments in transforming the underbelly of the cleaning industry. We met Sushrut last year at a workshop we gave in Mumbai a few months after he launched his new cleaning business Hammer & Mop. Recently he re-connected to see if we could […]

Cleaning for a change

It took courage to start a cleaning company when Ronke and I did. I was an MBA student at McGill, having worked as a star banker at GT Bank, an elite Nigerian bank, and in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. Being slightly rebellious, I proceeded partly because being a cleaner was contrary to everything my society expected of me. The clients, friends and associates who have engaged with us have had a sense that there was something different […]

What if an art gallery was itself a work of art?

“Is it possible that creativity in arts organisations not be limited to the gallery space?”

Anne Bertrand has been flirting with this question for as many years as I have known her. When we first met almost a decade ago, she was asking it from a place of frustration. She had spent several years working for an artist-run organization and was feeling quite disheartened as a result. How can it be, she would say to me in exasperation, that […]

How to occupy democracy

When the civil rights movement abandoned its focus on nurturing personal, individual relationships and instead resorted to broad principles and detached theorising, it lost its power. It became coopted, removed from the people who otherwise held it accountable with the gentle discipline that is required in being true and kind to one’s friends.

I suspect that this aspect is where grand nation-building projects, based on the most beautiful of ideals, stumble.

The experience of Inter Pares

I just finished reading a really interesting paper written by the staff of Inter Pares, an organization that I’ve drawn much inspiration from over the past several years. Founded in the early 1970s as a way for Canadians to support social justice organizing abroad, Inter Pares has always been strongly influenced by feminist thought. Yet in its early years, it was hierarchically structured and […]