Flourishing Business Community
Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #19
Using the Canvas to Inspire Commitment to Systemic Change with Fyodor Ovchinnikov and Perpetua Ng’ang’a
| Date: Tuesday, March 11 |
| 15h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EST, 15h00 BST, 16h00 CET, 00h00 JST To convert UTC to your timezone, click here |
| Duration: 1 hour |
| Registration: Required via Eventbrite at bit.ly/SFF19-Register |
For our nineteenth monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Fyodor Ovchinnikov Co-founder and Director of the Evolutionary Futures Lab, based in California, USA, and Perpetua Ng’ang’a from SAYDS (Systems Acumen for Youth-led Development Solutions), based in Kenya.
The Evolutionary Futures Lab enables learning and collective action for systems transformation through educational programs, collaborative funding, and strategic community-centered initiatives. In addition to leading the lab, Fyodor is Adjunct Faculty at the University of San Francisco Masagung Graduate School of Management (MiM 610: Managing Under Uncertainty, Volatility, and Complexity), serves on the Advisory Board of the United Nations Association of the USA, San Francisco Chapter and on the Board of Directors of Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative where he also teaches and mentors founders of community-centered social enterprises. Spread across regions, sectors, and formats (such as participatory process design, education, and advocacy), Fyodor’s work is grounded in a conceptually coherent quest for understanding the transformation of complex social systems in the face of our planetary crisis and is strategically focused on the quality of the intention behind initiatives he chooses to support.
Perpetua is a Development Economist and Systems Leader with experience in youth capacity building, advocacy, and expanding access to education opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds. She serves as the Vice President & Head of Partnerships at Systems Acumen for Youth-Led Development Solutions (SAYDS), a Kenyan organization that equips youth with systems thinking skills to create and implement effective solutions for lasting social change. She is also a member of the Practice Council of the Evolutionary Funding Collaboratory, a collaborative funding program of the Evolutionary Futures Lab. As a pioneering member of Minerva University, she embarked on a unique educational journey that led her to live and study in seven countries over four years (USA, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Germany, Argentina, and the UK), immersing herself in diverse projects focused on education, development, marketing, and community engagement. Driven by a passion for social and economic justice, she is a firm believer in the transformative power of education as a key instrument for self-actualization, poverty alleviation, and societal transformation. Her work is strategically focused on leveraging systems thinking to enhance educational access, empower youth, and foster impactful, community-driven solutions.
The Evolutionary Futures Lab has been using the Flourishing Business Canvas to support place-based systems entrepreneurs since 2017. Perpetua and Fyodor met in 2018 when she came as a participant in the systemic track of the Gooddler Youth Social Impact Accelerator that the Evolutionary Futures Lab designed for the Gooddler Foundation in Silicon Valley. A student at Minerva University at the time, Perpetua, along with her team, was working on redesigning investment practices in Africa to benefit local communities radically more than conventional practices that primarily benefited foreign investors.
Using the Flourishing Business Canvas was a great way to talk about systems change in general along with key concepts and practices of the field. For example, shifting from customer segments to actors and stakeholders and from value propositions to value co-creation and value co-destruction. These shifts allowed Fyodor to guide participants through issue-centered systems mapping and bring affected stakeholders (not just those who bring value to the organization) into design conversations.
A few years later, Perpetua reached out to Fyodor and told him that after graduating from Minerva University she started working in systems change with one of her university professors and was now Vice-President of Systems Acumen for Youth-led Development Solutions (SAYDS), a systems change organization in Kenya. Since then Perpetua and Fyodor have worked together on the Thought Leadership for Systems Transformation program, and they both serve on the Practice Council of the Evolutionary Funding Collaboratory. With the Flourishing Business Model Canvas being at the roots of this long-lasting allyship, friendship, and history of co-creation, Perpetua and Fyodor are happy to share the context and some highlighted insights from their work with the canvas.
During their talk Fyodor and Perpetua will highlight:
- The unique value of the Flourishing Business Canvas for systems change initiatives
- Reorganizing business models and their alignment with Flourishing Business Canvas
- Perpetua’s experience with the canvas and its influence on her journey
- Evolutionary Futures Lab’s process for working with the canvas and Fyodor’s experience as course designer and instructor
- The role of transformative sensing in design
- Flourishing Enterprise Community as a supportive ecosystem for Flourishing Business Model Design Practice
- What does the Evolutionary Futures Lab and SAYDS hope to gain from participating in the Flourishing Business Community?
- What can the Evolutionary Futures Lab and SAYDS offer to the community?
At the end of their talk Fyodor and Perpetua will take questions from members of the community.
After the event, a video of the talk plus slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.