The Social Labs Revolution

Our most ferocious challenge today is to avoid the reactionary tendency to go to war with our problems.

Labs, whatever their focus, must put inquiry—and not just advocacy—at the heart of their activities.

Finally, for social labs to actually have impact, they must be systemic in orientation, aiming to address social issues at their root cause.

In doing so, we are creating a space for people to connect to their deeper calling for change, for a better state of affairs.

They are, in effect, committed to shifting a system and creating social change not because they were forced to by a central authority or because they are being paid to but because they believe in the need to shift a system from its current state to a desired state.

A social lab is a gathering, a coming together of people across the silos that characterize dominant social structures in order to attend to a social challenge for as long as necessary to shift the situation.

the paradigm of the social lab lives and dies by an idea that perhaps seem quaint in this day and age—the idea that people working together can address our most profound challenges.

Instead of waiting for a shock to hit the community and then mobilizing a post-event response, the goal is to tackle challenges before they hit.

The Community Resilience Lab was born out of this approach.