Robin as mentor and friend
I am honoured to have known Robin as my mentor and friend.
I first met Robin when I was at the Young Foundation in 2011 working on a research project on social innovation cases in Asia and Africa. The first time I met him, I remember we had booked our meeting room for 1 hour -- we ended up talking for more than 3 hours about Gandhi and Hind Swaraj among other things.
Robin constantly encouraged me to write about Korea and the learnings from Korea. Seoul City was going through an interesting civic history then. A civil activist from South Korea who was a great champion of co-operation and popular democracy, Wonsoon Park, won the Seoul City mayoral by-election in 2011. Robin had met Wonsoon Park the previous year through a connection with Geoff Mulgan at the Young Foundation and Social Innovation Exchange.
Wonsoon Park was a human rights lawyer turned “social designer”, a leading civil society leader in Korea who had set up various organisations such as People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), a watchdog organisation that led democratic and human rights reform in Korea since the 1990s, Beautiful Foundation, a foundation that changed the giving culture in Korea, Beautiful Store, an organisation focused on recycling and re-use, and Hope Institute, a civic think tank that focused on social innovation.
Robin visited Korea during the exhilarating mayoral campaign period and delivered a keynote on social innovation and social economy at Asia NGO Innovation Summit (organised by the Hope Institute). He met with various co-operators from Sungmisan village (urban co-operative community in Seoul City), and also met with Wonsoon Park in his campaign trail during his visit to Korea.
This was the start of many more inspirations and relationships that Robin would have with the South Korean social economy/social innovation movement. With the new “social innovation” mayor in Seoul City and also with the enactment of Basic Law on Cooperatives at the national level, there was huge interest in Korea to connect with the social economy practitioners in Europe. Robin met with many Korean co-operators, policymakers, researchers who came on research visits to the UK.
Robin always listened. And regardless of whom he spoke with, he had the same passion and warmth that made people completely at ease (regardless of the language barrier). He always had a little notebook where he jotted down ideas and comments, picking up little details and sharing common “aha” moments.
When a group of Korean policymakers and researchers came to visit UK to learn more about social economy in the UK and the co-operative movement, we went on a bus journey to the Mid-counties Co-operative with Robin. Robin sat with each person during the 2-hour bus journey and devoted time to get to know every single person in the bus – their work, thoughts and what they hoped to learn. When the bus driver asked where we were going, he explained in detail about the co-operative movement in the UK and why where we were going that day was so meaningful. The bus driver became part of the study visit group.
Robin constantly emphasised the need for learning exchanges between different places. He was always interested in what people do and how things work in different contexts. He wanted to learn about how the social economy was developing in South Korea and Asia. Inspired by Robin, my friend Jungwon Kim, Kwansoo Ahn and I set up SPREAD-I (spread ideas, innovation, inspiration) platform, a media platform that disseminates cases, practices, methods, research on social innovation across borders. We were inspired by Robin’s thoughts on “spreading social innovation” – he thought the word “scaling” was a 20th century word that didn’t capture the organic/formative nature of social innovation.
His experience and wisdom seemed large and our efforts insignificant, but he always had time to listen to us over a pot of tea. We always shared tea in a teapot --Robin didn’t like individualised teabags, he loved the shared experience of drinking tea and eating food together. For us, Robin was like a teapot that held our dreams and helped us weave our ideas together. “One and a half billion pounds Fair Trade... no one planned that at all. Suddenly the idea caught the imaginations. Once you have a project that has magnetism, then others join, support and do it in their own way. You start linking together. I think it’s hard not to collaborate... Charisma of a project is more important than the charismatic leader.” Robin used to say.
Robin always encouraged us to write, create more content and share them with others. He mentored and encouraged us throughout our documentary research project on co-operative education and housing, which we compiled into a media project - “The Mutual Future”. With Robin, we imagined the adjacent utopia that exists. He showed us the possibility of a cooperative future not through our shared conversations but also through his actions (He was involved in setting up a community village shop in his hometown.) His words and action continue to live on.
I received the news about Robin's death when I was delivering a social innovation workshop in Colombia/Chile. Louise, Tricia (my colleagues whom I met at the Young Foundation) and I shared a poem that Robin once recited to us. We asked the students to select a poem and read the poem together as a group. The wavelength of the room changed immediately.
Robin continues to live in us all, in our ideas, dreams and what connects us as human beings.