Closing Lecture: Balancing resources for education among urban and rural communities

The closing lecture of the Human Welfare Conference 2019 was presented by Mihai Lupu, Founder of EduCab, who discussed how we can balance resources for education among urban and rural communities.

Lecture report

By Rachel Dixon, co-chair, Human Welfare Conference 2019

Mihai Lupu, of Romania, closed out this year’s conference with his talk, ‘How Can We Balance Resources for Education Between Urban and Rural Communities?’

Mihai works as an international researcher at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation (in the US) and as the co-founder of EduCaB, an organisation and methodology that seeks to build what Mihai calls ‘knowledge ecosystems’ in communities across the globe.

In his talk, Mihai focused on the role of libraries in resource-constrained communities. His organisation connects these libraries with resources and with other communities to strengthen social capital and increase sustainability. I particularly liked Mihai’s discussion of a hypothetical library in need of chairs. Normally, when a resource-constrained community has a material need, it seeks funding to buy the items that will fill it. However, EduCaB envisions a world in which we have catalogued the resources we have to maximise their flow. Instead of buying new chairs for our community, for example, we should link a community with an under-supply of chairs to one that has too many. In this way, Mihai’s work focuses on ironing out inefficiencies in the way we share resources and on harnessing the opportunities for connection that we far too often overlook.

This session was powerful in shifting our paradigm: although it is easy to conceive of ‘innovation’ as a process whereby we create something entirely new from scratch, Mihai points out that it is often better to build on what we already have, reconfiguring our resource use so that we innovate together by making the old new.