Make a Sustainable Place to Play in the City

We've been working hard, for a while now, on a new idea. It's called The Children's Scrappy News Service. This is the first makeshift news service run by kids for kids taking on the world's biggest problems and solving them with design-thinking and scrappy skills. Every episode takes on a new problem to be solved such as: Why is there no place to play? How do your grandparents cross the road? Why do prices always go up and never come down? Do you know how to swim? Kids take on problems they face where they live and invite adults into the newsroom to chat about solutions. Kid anchors cut to kid field reporters who are on the streets finding solutions by spendng the afternoon with hero sustainable entrepreneurs. We love being scrappy. In fact we love it so much that we created a pilot for our TV show. Being scrappy means creating something out of nothing and changing the world in whatever way, whatever style you can.

Once we'd made our large-scale TV format we then wondered how we could ensure kids anywhere could start their own Children's Scrappy News Service. We thought about what moves us - design-thinking, solving problems, recycling, repurposing, problem-solving, upcycling, tinkering - and so we made five handmade scrapbooks out of once-loved-things. We used dried palm leaves for the cover of one, recycled cardboard for another, plastic woven shoe laces to tie everything together. Our marvelous design team made screen prints for the pages (because we were determined it should all be made by hand). Then came the bigger challenge. We'd made gorgeous books, but could we make 1,000 of each that were each orginal in their own way?

We made recycled scrappy backpacks for our kid reporters, five scrapbooks for every child, a team of 35 people spent 40 days in rural India building newsrooms with kids, learning how to find and research stories, write scripts, use cameras and finally make their own shows. 

It was an amazing journey. We had overhwelming demand from more kids than we could handle. Over 5,000 kids wanted to be a part of it. And even-more demand for our handmade books. We wanted to make recycling mean something. And we did. We made it mean scrappy news. Come visit us when you come to India. There'll be a Children's Scrappy Newsroom somewhere nearby and we'd love to invite you into the studio.