Throughout 2012, the danone.communities blog has eagerly shared the latest developments in our own projects, news from the world of social business, and the ideas that make social business so compelling.

Here are just a few of the year’s highlights as mentioned on our blog:

At the beginning of the year, Fortune Magazine named Muhammad Yunus as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, alongside Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Perhaps not by coincidence, it was Bangladeshi Nazia Zebin who won the project grant in our Social Business Youngsters competition on Facebook. A 24-years-old student, Nazia is committed to promoting access to culture for everyone in Bangladesh, including rural residents. In May, she traveled to Paris for the Global Communities Meeting, where she met experts from the social business community who had come to work together and imagine the solutions and initiatives of the future.  

Our midyear highlight is always June 28: Social Business Day, celebrating the people who practice social business around the world. Here in Paris, danone.communities held a conference to give them a voice and to continue our mission of raising awareness of social business.

During the 2012 edition of Global Communities Meeting in Paris, danone.communities has initiated a new meeting, before the conference with Pr. Yunus. This special meeting was called Experts Workshops Meeting.

Since its creation in 2007, danone.communities has been evolving in a partnership’s galaxy and has never walked alone. Indeed, Grameen Danone Foods Ltd, the 1rst project, originally started thanks to its partners: Grameen Bank. Without the Grameen Bank’s knowledge and expertise, Danone would have met much more difficulties to enter this new territory. Moreover, without the support of Care Bangladesh, it would have been much harder to settle up again the door-to-door sales network in 2008, after the milk crisis.

With years and with projects, the partners’ network got wider and today it gathers about 50 partners, for 10 projects. At danone.communities, we know that all these partners are experts of specific topics: micro-distribution, finance, social impact…

While designing the Global Communities Meeting 2012, the danone.communities team has decided to gather more experts in the same place to make emerge learnings and knowledge to share and spread good practices or things to avoid for a social business project.

Now you all know the Global Social Business Summit 2012, it’s time to enter its program and to focus on a presentation format that was not used last year. This new format is Pecha Kucha, from the sound of the Japanese term “chit chat”.

Pecha Kucha was born in 2003 in Tokyo, Japan when young designers and architects organized events to share their projects, the Pecha Kucha Nights. As they were too much talkative (like anybody dealing with a Power Point presentation), they defined a very sharp format: 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The presentation last almost 7 minutes and is mostly made of images and people just have to talk along the images.

Global Social Business Summit has inserted this format into its 3 days meetings with international experts. It promises beautiful speeches and very fun and interactive moments.

More information here http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

Two Pecha Kucha presentations.

New period for Social Business ! 3 new episodes will animate our calendars for the next 3 months.

Episode 1 : LH Forum, which we have already discussed on this blog. LH Forum, held on 13 and 14 September at Le Havre is an event organized by PlaNet Finance to launch the Positive and Responsible Economy movement. It will accommodate many micro-finance experts to for two days, to make them work on the new challenges of the world that is coming. There is still time for you to sign up right here: http://www.lhforum.com/registrations/new
In addition, if you are a student and have less than 25 years, the registration is free for you. In a word, go for it!

On June 28th, 2012 the third Worldwide Social Business Day took place in many places in the world. For example, In Dhaka (Bangladesh), the Yunus Centre organized a large celebration with 2 days of workshops and conferences and in Wiesbaden (Germany), the Grameen Creative Lab organized a informal event to share social business ideas. 

In Paris, we chose to give voice to social business makers. As Emmanuel Marchant, danone.communities GM, said in the introduction of the evening, Professor Yunus is an amazing entrepreneur, who inspired a lot of people to join the social business movement, giving them a lot of energy to dream and build a world without poverty. To Emmanuel, social business makers are "heroes", trying to make the world a better place thanks to an entrepreneurial initiative. This evening was dedicated to better undestand why and how they decided to get involved in such a difficult journey. 

We started by listening to testimonies from 4 changemakers with complémentary points of view: 

As you may know, Thursday will be a very specific day: in the world, all social business entrepreneurs and all people that are committed in changing the world will symbolically gather to celebrate social business. This is Social Business Day.

Why the date “28^th of June” has been chosen? Because this is Muhammad Yunus’ birthday !  Created in 2010, the Social Business day is a unique occasion to connect people all over the world, around innovation, empowerment, social entrepreneurship and others creative topics.

For the 2012 edition, the Yunus Centre organizes 2 days conference in Dhaka with great speakers like Pr. Yunus, of course, his friend from NASA Ron Garan, Eric Lesueur from Veolia Water (see here the Facebook page of their project) and many people that work at creating social impact on local communities. Please, find the program of the Yunus Centre celebration here.

From the blog Down To Earth, with the report of Usbek & Rica.

The main event of the Global Communities Meeting Tour hosted by danone.communities took place in Paris last Tuesday. Here is an account of this special day, packed with ideas and enthusiasm.

On Tuesday 15^th May, at la Mutualité in Paris, danone.communities hosted a very special event for social business. An event that resonated as an anniversary for danone.communities, which is celebrating 5 years of existence in 2012, in particular with a grand tour: the Global Communities Meeting Tour, which was launched on 8^th February and will end in November at the Global Social Business Summit in Vienna. An international tour, all year round, with numerous partners, to reach as many people as possible and promote social business. Tuesday’s function at la Mutualité was one of the major events of this tour: first, an entire day gathered over 200 social business experts to co-create in workshops. Then, a large-scale conference welcomed over 2000 attendees including, among others, Prof. Muhammad Yunus and Franck Riboud. Here is the story of that special day.

Getting to work

Gaetan De Lagarde is a Danoner. He is a production engineer and team leader in the packaging plant Villecomtal since early 2012. He also participated in the project Lemateki as head of production MossTekki sticks, which are produced at the plant.
He was one of our guests-reporters from the 2012 edition of our GCM in Paris. We have entrusted the task ... to take this day to do an immersion in the social business, and to tell this adventure. Here is his article.
 

Gaetan, having a conversation with another reporter, from the magazine Usbek&Rica.

Last 15th May was our annual celebration to social business. Each year, we are happy to gather all members of the social business community whose ambition is to share and learn about innovation, social entrepreneurship and community engagement.

For the 2012 edition, the big conference settled at La Maison de la Mutualité in Paris. We were 1 500 people and more than 360 tweets were sent during the show. More than 10 people went on stage to share their project, hard working or engagement, dedicated to social business.

At the end, Muhammad Yunus and Franck Riboud closed the show together and an impressive market place opened its doors, until midnight to make this unique moment last.

For a complete wrap-up, visit the Blog Down To Earth.

We were more than 500 to welcome Pr. Muhammad Yunus on stage, Thursday night, for the closing speech of the 1rst day of the Global Social Business Summit 2011, in Vienna, Austria. Members of the danone.communities team were part of this international meeting, to attend and animate Focus Group, to share experiences and feelings about social business, to meet people from all around the world, committed to the same objective: create, promote and support social business.  

Many things will be written, in a very detailed way, and we’re just going to share some cool twitter messages.