MY FAVORITE IMPACT CASE
Vladimir Smirnov: School of Positive Habits at the Lifestyle Foundation. How can we raise people who will be socially responsible? We can only starting from a young age. School of Positive Habits is developed for 1–4 forms, a case of 9 lessons, where children discuss the topics of mercy, compassion, helping their neighbor, helping the environment, and animals. The program also intended for high school students, 9-10 forms, who then conduct the same lessons in their school. Such a synergy turns out. Part of this program is also designed for preschoolers, when children 5–6 years old are told what is good and what is bad. These are just values common to humanity. It would be great to have these in every country, in every region, in every school. Tens of thousands of children have already complete the program training, in two or three regions there are centers organized at pedagogical institutes of higher education that train future teachers, seminars are held, there a methodological center operates. I have a dream that this will be in every school in the country.
Smirnov also speaks about the problems that hinder to build a dialogue today: "The social and charitable community itself has often bad, ‘unprofessional’ attitude to business. People who save other people seem to be somewhere near angels and cherubs. The social block, the social sphere does not work loyally enough with business and potentially involved people."
But for all that, according to business representatives, this distance can be covered. "I perceive the commercial and social elements as two components of a single whole, like Yin-Yang, which should always be a whole," Alexey Ryzhkov says. – And today we see when companies or projects do not combine these two components they suffer without each other. When these two components are combined with each other, there is that integrated whole that should be."
Alexey Ryzhkov
Perhaps the only thing on which all stakeholders are unanimous is that the "transition to the side of good" for business and society as a whole is inevitable. "You’re somewhere in America, come to a decent party and say "I’m doing business." "What kind of social activity do you do?" – «None» – "Okay. Are you doing something interesting? Maybe you’re saving nature or doing something to make it different?" – "I do nothing." You will be invited to business meetings, but not to good society. It should be by itself. It was once fashionable, today it has become mandatory. At least this «fashion» should appear in our country, so that it is inconvenient to do nothing," Vladimir Smirnov says, founder of the Blagosfera Center for the Development of Social and Cultural Projects and Charity.
Alexey Ryzhkov is, also confident in the inevitability of a paradigm shift. "We are experiencing a civilizational crisis. And in order to emerge victorious from it, we need to review all our activities regarding impact, the impact we have on the world as a whole. We shall formulate these criteria of impact, to understand that we cannot address important issues using local approach. We cannot build our local well-being or our local happiness without solving common problems. I believe that in this logic and in the logic of ‘victory’ over the challenges and threats that we face, we must move to a new format of activity as a whole: business, government activities, all individual people, and all market players."
Prepared by Maria Krieger
Экспертные статьи / Expert Publications