On November 12, 2018, well-known social entrepreneurs and experienced philanthropists Gor Nahapetyan, Jioulnar Asfari and Ruben Vardanyan answered this questions at the press conference, dedicated to presentation of the “Map of Changemakers in the Social Sphere — SoChain” at TASS in Moscow.
Social leaders have a particular mindset: they see opportunities where others see problems. They are active and non-indifferent people who change the social environment professionally and fill the institution’s niches that are still missing. But who leaders of social changemaking are, and what are the results of their activity? The answers to these questions are far from being known to everyone in Russia.In order to implement and contribute the importance of this efforts for society, a lot of work had been carried out, which became the basis of the SoChain research. The SoChain map is based on 333 interviews with changemakers, who are solving social problems of the country on a daily basis.
These includes not only participants of the press conference and people known throughout the Russia, such as Nyta Federmesser, Chulpan Khamatova, Mitya Aleshkovsky, Natalia Sindeeva, and others (maybe not so well-known, but not less respected). SoChain research (Map of Changemakers in Russia) came as a result, prepared in the partnership by ANO Social Innovation Support Center SOL’, “Friends” Charitable Foundation and Moscow Skolkovo School of Management.
The survey was conducted by “snowball” method: at the beginning 79 people, recommended by the partnership team, were interviewed. All of them, for their part, recommended other leaders of social changes in depth interviews. Many of named leaders also had been questioned and suggested other estimable candidates.
«Since we are infrastructure players, our task is to understand what is happening, so to say, ‘to map the terrain', — Jioulnar Asfari, Executive Director of SOL’ Center says. — We wanted to create a ‘battlefield map’, an operation field. Since we have been working in this area for some time, we started the issue from the project leaders: people are carriers of ideas, and this is the only way to come to the point.
That is how we decided to roll the ‘snowball’ on this ‘battlefield’, from one person to another. The cutting off allowed us to understand what drives people, how they live, what they are short on.
For our opinion,SoChain project will be useful to anyone, who wants to solve the problems on the systemic way.We put it as the first brick in building the changemakers community. Then everyone can proceed in their own direction, according to their core competence».
Map of Changemakers in Russia in Numbers
333 interviews with leaders from 31 country’s regions
20 trips throughout Russia
45 Skype interviews
2924 recommendations, during which 1486 unique leaders from 188 cities were nominated (65 regions)
1459 social oriented organizations and projectsmore than 3000 hours of data analysis.
LINK TO THE RESEARCH http://soc-chain.ru/