Our Social Enterprise Ambassador, Kyra Choucroun, once again rocked the boat by organising a Senior Event with the honorary presence of Charmian Love, CEO of Volans. This inspiring dinner around Lebanese cuisine was a clear evidence of the power of young ‘cognitive surplus’ in fusion with senior experience.

Charmian shared the urgent intergenerational challenge of coming up with a new concept to replace the tired frame of the term ‘sustainability’. In this context, a dozen Sandboxers went beyond the boundaries, brainstorming about innovative sustainability strategies.

Amongst the insightful comments, those from Daniel Buriticá, founder and President of the first network of young social entrepreneurs in Colombia, Recojo, who plans to expand it to the rest of the continent. The attendance of the 4 winners of a major competition organised by Emax allowed to discuss how to integrate Swedish entrepreneurship in the European eco-system.

Finally, the dinner also coincided with the introduction of Nadia Laurinci, our new management team addition, to the Sandbox family – more info about Nadia’s cool profile here : ).

Stay tuned for the next collaboration: a Sandbox party at Volans in November!

Conventionally Sandbox ambassadors are the lucky ones who write the blog posts about Sandbox events happening around the world. This time however we wanted to give you the inside perspective from two traveling sandboxers (Adbul Hakeem & Susan Su) from San Francisco, who made their way to India for our most recent meet-up’s in Bangalore!

Abdul’s Account:

“I was amazed at the energy and the distinct flavour of social responsibility in the room. Holding challenging fulltime jobs, each person was taking the extra time and initiative to make the community better!

I also had the honour of meeting Ms. Sarah Bishop, Fellowship director of Starting Bloc. Most attendees have enrolled in their fellowship program & will be traveling to various locations across the globe to learn about social entrepreneurship from world renowned experts. I have absolutely no doubt that this hub will be instrumental in redefining the space through their innovation, drive and sheer exuberance of youth!

I look forward to hearing more about their exploits and learning from them. Good luck everyone!”

Susan’s Account:

“While I’ve had a great time being a member of Sandbox for the past 3 years, an impromptu trip to Bangalore, as part of a greater stay in India, dazzled me with the real gem of the Sandbox experience – being able to travel to another Sandbox hub in a place far from, yet meeting like-minded strangers who instantly became mentors, teachers, and friends.

It was incredibly fun to meet diverse members that reflect the vibrancy of the culture around them. The event was a great inspiration for those of us from Silicon Valley, the so-called cradle of innovation, to discover the energy and intelligence that goes into building social projects and causes in particular. People like Akash, Nishant, Sanoch, Victoria, and others, left me feeling slightly embarrassed that I myself had not done more, but also thoughtful about how I could – and would – change that.

Finally, it was clear to see that for our hosts Achyutha Sharma and Vallabha Rao the event was a real labour of love and inspiration, it was the finishing touch to my Sandbox weekend. Thank you – everyone – for joining and attending. For doing all the great things you do! I can’t wait catch up with you all again the next time.”

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The success of this event is another indicator that the new ‘Global Hubs’ format within Sandbox is developing in our key innovation clusters around the world. View some more pictures from the event here.

After a successful Sandbox US-wide event in June, we set out to organize another regional event: the first Sandbox European Retreat took place last week-end in „poor, but sexy“ Berlin. Next on the map and in our agenda: an Asian Retreat! The date will be announced until the end of this year.

When a large group of people who, in most cases, never met each other before, come together to spend 72 hours which each other, one question always arises: What is our common denominator?

This question is so important, because it is the critical step to trespass mere small talk and enter a realm of real exchange and mutual understanding. There are cases, in which this question has to be answered with a sad, but true “not existent“. But not so in the case of the 25 Sandboxers that met for our first European Retreat in Berlin.

In less than 2.5 days, the Sandboxers that came together met people worth staying in touch with, listened to stories worth retelling and found passions worth sharing. Obviously, such a process can be facilitated by “icebreaker“ formats or large quantities of alcohol, but if it weren’t for a shared vision, all these teambuilding mediums would remain useless.

The participants came from Romania, Israel, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Kosovo, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands and they all had one thing in common: they love to build things. This is why we set out to brainstorm what projects Sandboxers could collaboratively work on in the future. With some truly inspiring outcomes! William McQuillan, Tobias Jaeger and Patrick Mielmann will organize a „US Venture Spa Road Trip“ through all major US Sandbox hubs (would love to elaborate on this one, but more to be announced). Others have developed a plan to buy an island close to the Philippines to host Sandbox survival camps or thought about how Sandbox could write its first community-supported magazine.

We’ll see how these projects will develop, but one thing is for sure: the level of energy was extremely high! True to the motto „work hard, party hard“ we dived into the Berlin party scene (thanks to our super friendly and cool Kreuzberg hostel, we didn’t have too long cab drives back home) and we found a productive environment at Betahaus, a local coworking space. A format that turned out to be very successful was what we call the Venture Spa, a discussion group in which all members collectively analyze one person’s biggest challenge and help her or him with advice, contacts, ideas and manpower. And this all the more because of the multitude of perspectives: designers, social entrepreneurs, artists, philosophers, educational activist, lawyers, tech specialists – all using their collective brainpower to solve the problem at hand.

Finally, I can only echo the resume of the first US Retreat: Anyone who is pessimistic about our generation should come, spend a weekend with us and see the creative and productive dynamic that these young movers and shakers have. Many more Sandbox retreats to come

Check out more photos from the retreat here.

Berlin. Our first European-wide event. September 24-26. More to come.

If you are a member and interested to join, please pre-register here and we will keep you posted.

So Sandbox Network is going new ways and is extending to Iran, helping to build bridges and fostering good relationships, openness and innovation. As a first step, our early member Hannes Gassert, currently in Iran, and local open source entrepreneur Ashkan Roshanayi are organizing the country’s first Sandbox Dinner in two weeks. Should you be in the area, then please sign up here or send us a private message to hannes@gassert.ch. And don’t forget to forward this good news from Iran whoever might be interested to come as well. If you can’t come, but there’s something you always wanted to know about isolated Iran and its innovators but never dared to ask: please do leave a comment!

Two weeks ago we spent 2.5 inspiring days with 18 amazing Sandboxers from around the world in a gorgeous house in the woods of Pennsylvania, hanging out and talking about the future.

As always at Sandbox, it’s all about the people you meet and the things you create together. We invested a lot of energy to not only bring together a group of young movers & shakers, but to select them from as many backgrounds as possible. Among the participants were a designer, a video producer, several social entrepreneurs, two fashion entrepreneurs, a student, an investment banker, a TV producer, a digital strategist, a teacher, a consultant and several entrepreneurs working on various startups. Imagine 2.5 days with these people, full of brainstorming, cooking, best practice exchange, midnight PowerPoint Karaoke sessions, BBQ at the lake, walls filled with new ideas and offline tweeting (there was no internet, to fully de-connect, however, there was an offline tweet wall for the super addicted .

We talked about our biggest accomplishments and our biggest fears. We tried to find out how other people deal with days that only have 24 hours, we exchanged books we love and created the “Venture Spa” where all members collectively analyze one person’s biggest challenge and help her and him with advice, contacts, ideas and man power. Together we incubated ideas and built friendships.

Every time I meet fellow Sandboxers anywhere in the world, I gain inspiration and motivation from their drive and passion. But spending 2.5 intimate days with this group took this to a whole new level. Anyone who is pessimistic about our generation should come, spend a weekend with us and see the creative and productive dynamic that these young leaders have. Many more Sandbox retreats to come

Check out more photos from the retreat and many thanks to Niamh and Paul for the whole organization.

For the first event in London, potential Sandboxer Michaela Wood invited Sir Paul Judge, Sandboxer Rajeeb Dey (CEO of Enternships), and Victoria Lennox (Founder of NACUE).

Inspiring and aspiring entrepreneurs, start-up enthusiasts, intrapreneurs, engineers, consultants, inventors, investors, VCs, business angels, advisers, mentors, and researchers will be there to meet and enjoy refreshing drinks and conversation. Sandboxers can book their place for 10 pounds here. The talk will be called “Democratising Entrepreneurship” and takes place on Wednesday 21 October 2009 – 6.30pm at the Royal Society in London.

We’re sure that Michaela will make this event and the whole series a success and are looking forward to seeing some other Sandboxers there!

The Sandbox community in New York met yesterday for its monthly informal dinner to share ideas over great food, this time at the yummi Indian restaurant Dhaba. In several ways this dinner was also a “welcome” (or a “welcome back”) to several members. Hong Kong based Sandboxer Sebastian Lindstrom just arrived from Africa after having toured through the continent for 2.5 months, visiting 23 NGO’s as part of his amazing What Took You So Long intiative. Sandboxer Stephen Chen, founder of GreenSoul Shoes, had just arrived a few days ago from Asia with exciting news (and wild stories ) about their new productions. The dinner also welcomed Niamh Hughes from London who just moved to the Big Apple and Vik and Ian for whom it was their first Sandbox dinner. And in some way it was also a “welcome back” for me, as I’ve just come back to this great city after spending 2.5 months working full time at Sandbox in Europe.

What probably most readers don’t know: there is an internal competition going on at Sandbox which local community within Sandbox is the most exciting one (London, San Francisco, Berlin, Zurich, Singapore and New York are at the moment at the top), but after this dinner I must say that there is no doubt that Sandbox NYC hosts some of the most exciting people in our global network. It’s good to be back!