Meeting our hero: Kate Raworth from Doughnut Economics
It’s not often in life that you get to meet your personal heroes. Earlier this year we went to Frankfurt to pick up the German Design Award for re:Mix. As we attended the Award ceremony, a lady with a red coat and her team went on stage to pick up the award for the Personality of the Year: it was Kate Raworth from Doughnut Economics, our sustainability hero.
Kate is known for her pioneering work on Doughnut Economics, a framework that challenges society to move away from our obsession with economic growth, to meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet.
As with all great ideas, the strength of the Doughnut lies in its simplicity. We want our cities, economies and organisations to be within the doughnut.
We don’t want to fall into the doughnut, that inner wall representing our social foundation. People should thrive in a system that provides great education and healthcare, without leaving anyone behind.
At the same time, we don’t want to go out of the doughnut, the outer wall representing the ecological ceiling. Whatever we do, there are natural cycles and resource constraints that we must acknowledge.
It’s a game of balance: like riding a bike or Yin and Yang, the framework asks: how can we thrive within the Doughnut?
The Doughnut can be scaled down from the global level to a country, a city or an organisation. Indeed, it is in this spirit that Kate has set up DEAL, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and Boston have taken the framework, scaled it down to their city and asked: What does it take for our city to thrive? What is the social foundation we need to offer our citizens, and what are our cities’ ecological limits?
For us at Open Funk, the Doughnut has profoundly impacted the way we’ve set our startup. How do we want to treat people working in our company, making our products? What strategies can we use to minimise the ecological impact we’re having? What ownership model can help us achieve our social and ecological goals? What forms of financing can help us get there?
If you’re new to Kate’s work, we recommend this video and her book "Doughnut Economics - 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist". Get involved with DEAL in your own community, or use this tool to apply the Doughnut to your own business.
We're proud to see that one of our re:Mix is now a case study for Kate's class on circular and regenerative design.