This year, the Rockefeller Foundation will be one hundred years old. As part of the celebrations, the Foundation recently launched the Next Century Innovators Awards which seeks to identify the top 100 innovations likely to solve some of the more pressing challenges of the next century. We’re excited to announce that Means of Exchange has made the list. You can read the project profile on the Rockefeller website here, or below.

MWC2012 was my third Congress, and after nine years working in mobile-for-development I was already planning ahead. Means of Exchange was in its early stages. I’ve always been interested in local economic empowerment, and how technology could help reconnect people with local businesses, local resources and each other. Over recent years we’ve seen a breakdown of community as globalisation has strengthened its grip.

Millions of people around the world have lost jobs, homes, businesses, independence and purpose. Millions more face growing uncertainty and insecurity. Many hard working people have been hard hit. In the greater scheme of things they’re simply collateral damage in the rebalancing of a larger, broken world economic system.

Means of Exchange is all about helping people build resilience into their communities so they can buffer themselves from future shocks. We can’t remove ourselves from the world economic system entirely, but we can be more creative in how we trade, share and interact with one another. In short, we need to bring meaning back into our exchange.

Seeing my two very different “worlds of work” collide last year in Barcelona made me realise – for better or worse – how interconnected everything really is.

Today, precisely because the world is so increasingly out of balance, the sustainability regime is being quietly challenged, not from without, but from within. Among a growing number of scientists, social innovators, community leaders, nongovernmental organisations, philanthropies, governments and corporations, a new dialogue is emerging around a new idea, resilience: How to help vulnerable people, organisations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.

Having spent a large part of my career working in and around environmentalism and conservation (see an earlier post on lessons learnt in primate conservation), a reality-check of ‘sustainability’ is something I’ve had on my mind for a while. With its arch enemy – population growth – driving ever-upward, I’ve often wondered whether we’re just stalling for time or delaying the inevitable. The problem with this school of thought, of course, is that it’s considered by many to be defeatist, particularly by those in the actual business of conservation and environmental protection.

Technology allows us to stretch the limits of what’s possible – grow significantly more food per acre, or live in climates we were never meant to live in – all activities which make us feel comfortable about the world and the places we live within it. Much of this technology has become invisible. We no longer think about the innovations that allow us to grow more, or healthier, food. Or those that get electricity to our homes, or the satellites that help get cars and planes from A to B. It’s only when we don’t have access to these things that we suddenly realise how exposed and dependent we are on them. Surviving technological meltdown is the subject of a wide number of books, including the aptly-titled “When Technology Fails” by Matthew Stein.

The environmental movement (which is to all intents and purposes linked to sustainability) is around forty years old. Its birth is widely linked to the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring“, her seminal book which argued against the increasing use of pesticides in farming. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t hugely popular within the ranks of the chemical industry, but it did spur the birth of grassroots environmentalism which in turn lead to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). If pesticide use continued, Carson argued, Springs of the future would be void of bird life, amongst others (hence the title).

In another of my favourite books, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed“, Jared Diamond graphically illustrates what happens to communities and civilisations which live beyond their means. We can learn a lot from history, but today not enough of us are listening. Our world population of over seven billion is already two to three times higher than what’s sustainable and, according to the World Population Balance website, recent studies have shown that the Earth’s resources are enough to sustain only about two billion people at most European’s current standard of living. In short, we’re in trouble.

During a recent talk at Pop!Tech I highlighted two things that I thought needed to change. First, we need to get people to listen and take interest, but not in the way the wider non-profit movement has historically tried to get us to (i.e. guilt-based education). Second, we need to rethink our relationships with local business, local resources, and each other. You can watch that ten minute talk below, and find out more of what we’ll be up to on the soon-to-launch Means of Exchange website.

As I admit at the start of my talk, I have more questions than answers right now. But I do know that, with the current economic climate, conditions are better than they’ve ever been to get people to rethink their relationship with money, resources and each other. These may not directly impact the environmental or sustainability agenda, but the secondary benefit of people making better use of the human, social, financial and environmental capital around them almost certainly will.

To coincide with our first public talk at Pop!Tech earlier this month, we relaunched the website with a new look and feel, and new branding, courtesy of our good friends at Jepson+Rae. Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out additional functionality including forums, integrated news and a tools section. If you want us to keep you posted on everything happening with the project then be among the first to join our growing community.

As well as building tools to help people better connect with local resources, local businesses and each other, we’re also developing new approaches to how we inform, engage and inspire people to reconnect locally. A large part of the recent Pop!Tech talk looked at our default relationship with money, how most of us understand so little about it, and how we might use new approaches to encourage a more healthy mix of time sharing, swapping, bartering and purchasing between one another.

We were also extremely fortunate to have had the support of an incredible team at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, who helped pull together an edgy campaign around the announcement encouraging people to “rethink money”. Badges and stickers of the world’s top four currencies – with a strike-through – were handed out before and after the talk. We’re going to see how we can make wider use of these as we ramp up on public speaking in the coming months.

If we’re to succeed in sparking a major rethink in how we talk about, and promote, local economic sustainability then engaging some of the world’s leading brand and marketing thinkers will be key.

You can watch the full eleven minute talk here.