Happy Birthday, IDEATE.
Six years ago today..
Six years ago, we were grimy, intense, raw, and loud. Unfiltered and unaffected by all of the usual restrictions of the human service –everything we did tasted like #Resist – the start of something completely new.
Ideate is an antidote to cookie cutter services, a response to a staid paradigm – The people we serve are much more than numbers.
The sheer passion of Ideate helped it to find an immediate audience in the marginalized and misunderstood, the Underdogs.
Large, established organizations controlled most of the service then and now. People turned to Ideate in search of an organizational personality that resonated with their own. The Underdogs wanted something meaningful for themselves that they could control.
At its heart, the origins of Ideate began with a passion to achieve something undeniably real. Ideate was and is a response to the narrow-minded, depersonalized realism of politics and socioeconomic culture. It emerged as a vehicle to address dignity and poverty, one person at a time. We committed to doing what we were told couldn’t be done for those that had never been deemed worthy to receive it.
Sometimes, the traditional way of doing something isn’t always the best option. Sometimes rules really are there to be broken. Sometimes, you have to put power into the hands of those who have never had it and make an agreement to trust one another.
Ideators prize once-in-a-lifetime experiences above everything else. We’re here to make the world more accessible. Call us ‘disruptive’ or ‘upstart’. Only when you do, acknowledge that today, just like six years ago, we’re not afraid to try something new.
Happy Birthday, dear ones.