Meg Pagani ‘Recipes for social impact’

Melanie Rayment  00:00

This podcast is recorded in Australia on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I wish to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging, and give thanks to the knowledge they have shared. Hello and welcome to Moments of Change. My name is Melanie Rayment, and I’m a social designer based in Sydney, Australia and currently a Director at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. Moments of Change is a podcast dedicated to exploring the moments that we learn from as we seek to design and cultivate positive social change. In this first episode, I speak with Meg Pagani, founder and CEO of ImpactOn. We cover the challenges of being a purpose-led founder, discuss how Impacton is democratizing solution patterns – or recipes, as Meg calls them – and asks you to join her new plight in bringing forth the hard-learned lessons in fighting COVID-19 in her homeland of Italy. Impacton is a tech for good startup that analyzes and spreads proven impact projects for communities to adopt and re-implement anywhere that’s needed. I’ve been following Meg’s career for about six years now. Her determination and energy have always amazed me. She has been working at the crossroads of technology, sustainable development and impact investing, setting up and leading impact-driven initiatives between Europe, Latin America, the US and now Portugal. She has been named one of Forbes Europe’s 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in 2018 and has been a World Economic Forum Global Shapers member since 2016. I hope you enjoy this first episode of Moments of Change. Welcome to Moments of Change – actually, the first episode of Moments of Change. I’m sorry it’s not under better circumstances due to the coronavirus, and we’ll touch on that a little bit later. But I wanted to ask you, can you please describe your current role and Impacton and how you seeking to create positive social change?

Meg Pagani  02:23

Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here as host and guest together with you for this first episode. The circumstances are not very easy, but definitely the best ones to talk about social change and what all of us – every single one of us – can do in front of the things we want to change in the world. I think that everything is an invite and every situation is an invite. So maybe this is one that is more collective than others. And I am the founder and currently the CEO of ImpactOn. It’s a social business and organization that selects proven impact projects that are working and have proven their impact somewhere in the world, and then we help them translating their formula or their DNA or recipe, as I say – you know, very Italian of me – for being adopted, adapted especially, and then diffused in other locations. Some people call it decentralized scaling, some people call it in turning projects into movements, but it definitely covers what we do at Impacton.

Melanie  03:32

Following your journey, I suspect for maybe about six or seven years now, can you tell me: how has your view of your purpose evolved over your career?

Meg  03:43

That is very interesting as a question, because I feel that it’s specifically in the last six years I had started and ended several lives or perspectives on social impact, social justice. I’ve been, as you know, involved with the refugee crisis. I was in Chile, for tech for good. Now, more into the service providers space for social change and behavioral change. I would say that two are the main things that come to mind when you ask me that question. One is sometimes, as the ones that are in the social innovation or social change space, we sometimes forget about ourselves a lot. And I think that that perspective has shifted a lot in the past years, for several reasons. First of all, because I am an ex-athlete, so as an ex professional volleyball player, I have a very big tank of energy. And on top of that, I’m Italian – and you’ve met me, I’m a very tall giraffe, so I think my tank is particularly big. And I think that, over the years, I somehow benefited from the type of lifestyle and health that I had over the years and I was one of those that, as many others, would enjoy very much to be in the front lines of the things we wanted to change, but not necessarily in the front lines for ourselves.

And I’m not saying that it’s a zero-sum game between the two. What I’m saying is that, particularly after being involved with a refugee crisis, I understood that it’s a very important lesson to learn for anyone that wants to create change elsewhere. In the same way we are in the front lines for the causes, or the challenges or the crisis that we want to help, we need to be in the front lines for ourselves as well. Way too many people, especially in the humanitarian aid sector, I would say, where things are somehow always amplified, always enhanced, because life and death are polarizing in those environments compared to maybe the simpler sometimes social entrepreneurship sector in other places of the world. And I would say that that is the perspective – one of the two perspectives – that most shifted for me. I started actually learning about something that is called extreme caregiving syndrome. It’s not a pathology, but it does exist as a behavioral pattern where whoever is too attached to caregiving – or to give or protect or do for others, etc – it is a form of projection of our own insecurities and our need to somehow find realities that we feel depend on us so we can confirm our own value. And don’t get me wrong, I do think and I know enough about psychology today to know that we all human beings have something to heal or understand or learn for us, our own life journey. But I find that in the social impact space, there is a particularly high – of course – empathy and sensitivity for the suffering of others, but not enough awareness of what is the healthiest way to approach that.

Melanie  07:17

You were saying that you were going on that journey about self care, really, and I think a lot of founders of organizations in this space really, really suffer from that, that need to continue to be conscious of self care. And so what have you learned in that for yourself that you could share with others?

Meg  07:46

So I definitely learned about the importance of this weird the thing called weekends, from time to time. I’m not taking it lightly and I’m not saying that life, to be perfect, should be nine to five and Monday to Friday. Don’t get me wrong. But we do have, especially founders, this very sharp awareness that there is always something that we could do to push our vision forward. There is always one more conversation we can have, one more article we can read, one more notepad we can fill with ideas. And it’s all very good, but in everything, there is a high and a low. Creativity, like breath, needs contraction and expansion. If it’s only expansion or only contraction, depending on how you want to see extreme work represented, an organism cannot live without pulse, and pulse like music, like [8:50] **breathing**, it’s done and made of notes and pauses of rhythms. And for myself, you know, I always make this joke about this weird thing called weekends because it’s true. I mean, even in a volleyball career, you don’t have weekends, because on weekends you have the most important part – one of the most important parts of the week, right? You have the match. So I think that it’s funny how sports sometimes can leave you super healthy in your lifestyle, but, at the same time, maybe completely non-wired for weekends as well.

So I did learn to take pauses, I did learn to take them whenever I actually feel like. Sometimes over the past two years, I had my pause day – completely pause day, maybe surfing, maybe nature, maybe reading on Wednesday, for example. It gives you an odd pleasure to know that everybody else is having their Wednesday as usual, and you’re taking your weekend. Taking pauses was definitely one of the most important ones, and nutrition as well. And we tend to forget that what we feed our body with, we’re feeding our second brain and our brain, ultimately, [10:02] **you know with** activity. I mean, it all sounds maybe a little bit of a cliché, but also more of a holistic approach to my lifestyle is something that changed incredibly. And again, athletes are good at pushing the limits. But we’re also trained – and I’m very thankful for all my very patient coaches for that – to be careful and to understand the holistic nature of our body and our mind. We’re taught that performance is made of many different pieces that align in harmony, not just of one thing that works very well.

Melanie  10:40

So if I turn to now Impacton, I recently saw when I was researching before the show your TEDx in Milano on scale versus diffusion, and I know it’s something that we’ve spoken about many times over the years: how do you adapt Impacton’s blueprints to different contexts? And I know you use the word ‘recipe’, which I love, and it’s a great metaphor that evokes very specific things in someone’s mind about how that will adapt and adopt in different spaces. Could you explain a little bit more about the techniques you use to adapt those blueprints to quite vastly different contexts?

Meg  11:28

Yes, absolutely. It’s funny you mentioned the TEDx; I was very, very nervous that day. I never spoken on my work in Italian before. I actually did some false friends that day in my own language.

Melanie  11:45

Well, you couldn’t tell. It was amazing.

Meg  11:47

Thank you. And so about Impacton and what we call the blueprints technique. So Impacton was really originated by acknowledging – when we acknowledge and particularly in my case, myself, when I was in the north of Greece in the refugee crisis period and involved in there – about the fact that way too many times we have incredibly effective, impactful solutions and projects that either don’t want to take the road of what we call centralized scaling, or scaling as usual, if you want – so, maximize profits, minimize cost and reach as high as you can, however you can – or not even the franchising, either because the founder does not want to change his role of active social change maker into an international manager. It might sound [12:47]**better**, but I did actually have social entrepreneurs tell me, ‘We don’t want to do franchising because we’re not the right people to say to someone in the other part of the world how to do things or that they should use our name. We want something different.’

Melanie  13:01

Absolutely.

Meg  13:02

And normally, the other option is really just focusing on doing what you do as well as you can and as effectively as you are doing it. And the solutions sometimes are lost forever – and not lost forever necessarily because they’re not known; sometimes the problem is exactly that they get awarded, or they get a lot of publicity, but they still don’t have the means for their knowledge or their recipe or their DNA to be passed on to others, and not necessarily in an open source way. So Impacton really builds around that, about okay, how can an organization be a bridge, a translation platform or system where, as a system, information flows in, it’s elaborated in a specific way – I’m going to get to that in a second – and gets out on the other side in a way that is not informative anymore. You know, in design, any information – and in strategy of information, we know that it’s completely different to present a project to be known or present a project to be done. And it’s completely different to present a project to be done for its performance and qualities and impact or to present a project to be not only done not as an instruction – you’re not handing a manual, you’re not saying to someone, ‘You should do this’; you’re saying to someone, ‘Hey, that bottle needs to get on the shelf, and in Italy we did it with the right hand, and it took us three seconds and it cost $1. In Australia, you might want to use the left hand and maybe take a little bit more time because of XYZ.’ So the outcome is the thing. It’s what we call an outcome-oriented strategy or guidelines.

That strategy of transition of information is normally something that the originators don’t have. It’s normal. They’re great at being social change leaders, but they’re not necessarily great at repackaging their information for someone that has completely different lenses. Probably a similar heart, probably a similar mission in life to contribute to the improvement and the betterment of life of others. Probably similar resources or similar passions, be it plastic, be it climate change, be it whatever. But different ways of cooking that recipe, and maybe even an enriching way of cooking the recipe if that recipe is handed in a way that enables and creates that space for both top-down guidance – you know, [15:37]**hence** advice, this is how we did it originally – but also bottom-up adoption and adaptation of that recipe so everybody can cook the recipe in their own way, in their own kitchen, with their own tools, and share the learnings. This is really what Impacton is about.

Melanie  16:11

It’s so interesting. I’ve been involved in similar things where we’ve had to adapt and adopt models from different systemic contexts, and it’s always struck me about: how do you find that recipe card of understanding all of the levers in that particular context and that system that are at play – whether it’s the politics of that place, all of the relationships that interact from different institutions and the health of those relationships, the value flows that are in and around that, the funding flows, and even the sort of community needs that differ because of their own different histories and culture? And I like the recipe card, because I always liken it to sort of turning dials on an equalizer, that you need to be able to figure out which ones I need to dial up in this space and which ones I need to dial down. Can you talk a little bit more specifically about how does that work and how do you understand that context, because I know that you support people in the exchange of those blueprints, but how do you then go into that system or that community and figure those things out with people?

Meg  17:18

So we generally don’t and the reason why we don’t then I’m going to explain now is because exactly of the reasons you said recently.

Melanie  17:28

Yeah, right.

Meg  17:29

We do create a support. So when we started this, of course, we knew about every other attempt or not I’m not I don’t know about every other attempt, but yes about his strategies or the approaches that exist today in the industry of you know, multiplying what works. We definitely haven’t invented it, definitely not; it’s been thousands of years it exists. You know, we want to spread what works. You mentioned coronavirus. The first natural thought that we have in front of a challenge is that, ‘Great, who solved this before?’ and the problem arises just when the information is not that available or easy to access. So in our case, we have taken a decision when the team was in Argentina in Latin America, we did some more hands-on work, because we want them to understand the mechanisms, but the mission was always trying to create that space for, as I said, emergence. If we would go to every single replication inquiry place and work with these local communities, for sure, we have the skills, we have the experience, we have done in before in this organization and in the previous ones that we belong to or supported. But there is always something that – you said perfectly – there is social norms or hidden patterns in a specific culture that you normally are not able to detect as easily. You’re not able to imagine as easily. And even the best intentions, and I think we both have experience in this space, sometimes you – maybe not you and I – can end up disrupting local structures or local patterns in a way that in the moment in which you are, maybe it’s not that visible, but then it becomes more visible – about a cause and effect ripple, if you want, that we triggered, even unconsciously.

I think sometimes we understand our story, as one says, looking backwards, right? And I think the reason why we have decided not to be an organization that is hired necessarily always to be on the ground and helping these local communities all over the world, it’s because I when I was growing up in Italy and it was in 1994, when I was creating a mess in my primary school because we’re doing poetry instead of speaking of the Balkans war and involving better the migrant children, the fact that I did have a touch of social justice call already. But I also had a very strong personal struggle resonating with the social justice opportunities I had in front of me or around me, which were primarily Catholic or church driven. And I was raised in a family that was very spiritual, but also very open culturally. Or there were international cooperation, also pretty faith driven where, again, it’s us who goes somewhere and teach others or do things with others in a way that we think it’s better. Especially back then, when I was a kid, we didn’t have the knowledge of systemic design or co-creation or human centered design that we have today. So definitely back then I sort of created these barriers that I said, ‘I’d rather not do that, because it does not align with my values. I want to find ways for sharing knowledge so that other people can learn in a way that is accessible for them to navigate and to transform their own reality.’

And I think it also ties a little bit to my passion of personal transformation; there is no collective transformation and change if we don’t have a personal one first. And sometimes, again, psychologically it’s proven that when we want to have different trainings around the world around one project, after some years when you do the impact measurement or impact assessment, you figured out the empowerment levels or the commitment levels or the accountability levels that you were expecting – because people were trained about these projects – they’re just not there, because you sat down 10, 15, 20, whatever number of people and you told them how things are done. It does not enable reality of emergence or of certain behaviors. So I wanted and still am very much in the journey of exploring how can we build systems where we’re not needed to then take communities by the hand and [22:20]**those things will necessarily bear with them.**

Melanie  22:22

Okay, so Meg, you have a particular moment of change that you brought today that you wish to share with us. Can you tell us a little bit about that story from Argentina?

Meg  22:31

Yes, for sure. So I lived in Argentina for about two years and a half. I went there right after being involved with a refugee crisis. And one of the first things that happened when I was there and thinking about these open projects for diffusion of solutions or best practices – and today it’s called Impacton, but back then was a pro bono sabbatical project idea. I start being told by a few friends of friends and whatever, the community that I was forming there, that really needed to sit down with Padre Mariano and with Lucas Recalde – both of them named to me over and over again. And these two people – Padre Mariano is a priest, and Lucas Recalde is an ex rugby player of 50 something years old; he will forgive me for it if he will ever listen to this interview for not remembering the date.

Melanie  23:31

I think that’s okay.

Meg  23:33

Thank you for your support. My memory has really abandoned me. Ex rugby player, event planner, manager of an agency, father of three – beautiful family – and he was working with Padre Mariano, with this priest, in the worst neighborhood of the Cordoba province, the one where – as in many other places – poverty mixes with drugs, dealers and cocaine etc, and the most vulnerable are used to prevent the system from going down and everything that goes from there, literally anything you can imagine. It’s what in urban assessment they call the purple or the red zones. It’s beyond red, actually, in Spanish it’s called. And the story, that moment of change for me, was when I sat down with these two people. They were working together, and I sit down with them. They don’t necessarily represent the social leaders or social entrepreneurs that people mostly are expecting or imagining in their minds or having as archetypes of the leaders that will talk to us from the stage of some international impact conference.

And I’m sitting down with them and listening to both of them. Not only was I incredibly moved by what they were and they are building there, but Lucas Recalde in particular then became, I would say, our first client. Maybe he’s just as crazy as we are. But he came up with this recipe or this project where he found ways to use plastic – but non-recyclable plastic, which is the plastic that is the hardest use because normally either we just leave it in the land or the ocean or we burn it. So non-recyclable plastic then comes out of the ocean, of the rivers or landfill. And to use an open source mechanical press, so it does not require a lot of strength, because it’s mechanical, and it’s open source, so there is no patent. His organization, Tres Construcciones, employs women and children – not children, sorry, youth, so over 18, but coming out of drugs or criminality – and employs them to build these houses, because the plastic is pressed into building models. These building models are used to build even two-floors houses that then are decorated, sometimes in extremely beautiful ways. This technique or methodology has been tested by Engineers Without Borders, is policy ready, it has all the certifications for isolation and safety. So it’s literally a house, but at a third or a fourth of the cost. And on top of that, he creates a local economy. It’s incredible.

And as I’m speaking and getting to know Lucas Recalde, I remember him telling me this phrase, which was: ‘I always knew that I wanted to contribute to my surroundings, my local reality. And I got awards, I got awarded by the government, I got awarded by international foundations, but I’m a social leader. I’m not an international manager and some days I would go home back to my family thinking this could change the world. But also knowing that I will never be able to do that. Because this is a project that will never trade the profits that are necessary for this to happen in every city that needs this.’ He actually told me, there are about 60,000 cities in the world that needs this. Any city that is above – I don’t remember what he said, but it’s like 7000 people, has plastic that is non-recyclable and could be turned into houses. And how am I going to go over the planet with 60,000 towns, even if everybody needs this? And then he told me, ‘When I met you, I understood that I don’t have to do that for this that I have created to change the world. And maybe as entrepreneurs – and as Padre Mariano, teachers – we do not need to scale together with our projects. We do not scale together with our heritage.’

And somehow that all came together as a second moment of change – or maybe it was very long one that concluded two or three weeks ago – when this young lady from Nigeria contacted us, started the replication of the tool. The projects are autonomous, they’re on the platform. Whoever wants to start replicating a project can start interacting with our very initial form of artificial intelligence chatbot that basically uses natural conversation techniques for them – anyone – to start figuring out if they can start with the validation of the project on the ground, what are the things that they want to adapt, if they have everything they need, if they don’t, how they can get started – you know, all of these autonomously. And so the lady started the process, so, of course, the team got a notification. When she finished the process, normally we have a conversation with every replicator that is wanting to replicate a project that is a social enterprise because there are agreements to sign, of course, with originators, and we facilitate that. Even if everything’s on the tool, we really want to touch base. And this lady tells us a story about she got the funding from the university, she got the team of young students, she got the permission, etc, etc to do this project on plastic and then she started Googling the project.

Normally we’re used to having replicators coming maybe from the audiences of our originators, but not necessarily that organically – doesn’t happen that often. And in this case, it was a huge moment of change for me because she said, ‘I Googled “non-recyclable plastic project” and your project came out and it was in English and I was very surprised because it said the origin was Argentina. I normally was used to finding projects where I then would have to contact the creator or the entrepreneur and hope to hear back.’ And she asked me, ‘Does Lucas speak English?’ And I told her, ‘Lucas barely speak his own language; he would have not been able to answer you even if he wanted to.’ And that was a huge moment of change for me because this lady now has everything she needs. Of course, she can get in touch with Lucas, we can also mediate their conversation if they want for translations that are probably going to be necessary. But the project is ready to be taken on and relived somewhere else. And in this case, it is in Nigeria with a few hundred students that can learn building houses for others.

Melanie  30:44

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that really shows the power of the platform that you’ve built and the purpose behind it in being able to sort of democratize these recipe cards – these blueprints, as you call them – across the world, and to allow empowerment of people all around the world and changemakers all around the world to take up these and bring them into their communities themselves. Meg, we’re coming closer to the end, and I really wanted to talk to you this week, because I know that you are launching a campaign in response to the coronavirus. I know Italy has been hit with devastating consequences, and it must be so difficult for you and others – friends and family and loved ones – right now. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit about this campaign and what you’re hoping to do in terms of collecting those patterns for people at high risk?

Meg  31:47

Yes, definitely. This is a very moving week. Actually, right now I’m in Lisbon. It’s about 10pm. Tomorrow, I might get up to the news that we have the first signs of flattening the curve in Italy or that it’s still not happening. And you know, it’s funny because I think this virus coming from the east, coming first to Italy, a country – again, nobody speaks Italian in the world; why should they? But at the same time so much of the best practices that communities came up with – to respond, to prevent, to help each other with the mistakes that Italians did; I am committed to try to support other countries not to do or at least other communities in other countries not to do, including the denial, including thinking it’s just a flu. We as Italians, we did mistakes there, which is evidently creating incredible costs. But everything that communities came up with was in Italian and I realized that maybe also a little bit as a catharsis or a coping mechanism. I’m worried for my own family and my own friends, but very powerless, really; I’m just as far from Italy than from Argentina at the moment, because flights are interrupted. There is nothing I can do but to serve. Right?

Back to what we said at the beginning. In these moments, you realize there’s only two ways to deal with anything. And the two ways all depend on your own grounding. You can decide to serve others because that’s your calling, and your calling must include to serve in a healthy way – so not imposing yourself on others, not trying to be a hero when you’re not having yourself back first.  Or shutting down. There are a lot of people that are just shutting down and taking care of themselves. And it’s fine. It’s healthier to do whatever you want to do than do anything else. There is not a better or a wrong in this. We need right now very focused mothers that are just at home with their kids and don’t help anybody, it’s fine. It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.

But in my own personality and in my own calling, I have decided to try to be a bridge. I’ve said, okay, I read every day about how the civic workers have taken over a university and decided to use fabric waste from the hospitals to create protection equipment for the doctors, because there are a lot of first helpers and nurses and doctors that are dying because they’re too exposed to the virus and, because of the insane rhythm of work, their defenses are down. And in the moment in which their tools are not there anymore, they’re the first to go.

For example, another one that is very moving for me. The people that are dying from coronavirus, die [34:53] **lucid**. It’s not a disease that takes you asleep or – you’re losing, you’re awake and you know for days that you’re going. And for those days, you don’t have your phone on you. You don’t have any way to contact your family for a healthy goodbye. So, for example, there is a very good friend of mine – social media [35:19]**almost seems to answer** in Italy that decided to do a campaign to collect iPads and mini iPads to give to these hospitals for their terminal patients, when they understand then that they’re going, to call their families. The ripple effect of something as simple as this – even if the dying ones would be only 10, the ripple effect of having a healthy goodbye is something that our cultures sometimes incredibly underestimate. And it’s just as simple as a mobilization for people to make sure to have some easy-to-manage with big gloves devices – which is not a smartphone – around in the hospitals for these people to go goodbye with dignity and honoring the love that they have for their dear ones.

Or, again, the elderly that are healthy and fit in retirement homes, they’re alone. And not that many people are thinking that even if they cannot visit, they can go to the windows. They can go to the windows with a cell phone and call a landline and just see their parents or their elders from outside if their countries do not have any particular quarantine, ‘you must be home or it’s illegal’ or whatever restriction, and so on, so on. There are thousands of these. How to save and help the freelancers and the creators, how to support your local restaurants or cafeteria.

And so ‘Apart but United’ is really the translation of what Italians created in the first place, which was **’Distanti ma Uniti’**. Again, Apart but United because we need for this virus to be apart, to face the xenophobia that we have in our own culture that with something like this gets so enhanced. I have friends from Korea or from Asia from other countries that were treated in inhumane ways these days because of [37:14]**theoretically** what they represent, but really they’re not representing any of it. And so ‘apart’ because the physical social distance is necessary for our own safety and the safety of our dear ones; even if you don’t have the virus, we might be carrying it. But ‘united’ because I think that you know, there is this phrase that sometimes we find maybe when aliens or when an external force will come ‘we will unite as one, as one country, the planet.’ And maybe it’s not going to come from the sky. Maybe it’s coming in a way that we didn’t imagine, but it is potentially uniting us. It is potentially bringing to the knees even the most powerful of our countries, the most powerful in our societies. The second person to die in Portugal was the CEO of a big international bank.

This virus is of course terrifying and of course it’s taking lives that we would have never wanted to be gone. But in every single moment of crisis, and maybe Italian Renaissance could be an example as many others, we have the possibility to turn to our creative powers, to serve others or to serve ourselves or to reinvent or to allow a breakthrough to come to us. And this is really what this campaign is about: sharing the best practices, but not just for serving others; sharing best practices to make sure that this transition, this intense calling for a transformation of our economy and our society can be accepting that maybe we can reinvent, and that freedom will take an ending of old identities, of old ways of doing things or old ways of thinking about what’s normal. But the only way is forward.

Melanie  39:17

It’s such an unprecedented time at the moment and it’s such an opportunity for us to shift our way of living and just to really rally around communities. That’s what I love about hearing your stories from Italy is that really community-centered nature of how people are coming together to be human in these moments, to help each other in these moments and to support each other. Meg, thank you so much for coming on to Moments of Change, especially given the difficult circumstances at the moment. I know that you’ve been working all hours in the last couple of weeks because of this – more than normal. How can people continue to learn more about your campaign and, of course, Impacton? Where can they follow these?

Meg  40:14

So definitely on social media. We use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, we have a newsletter with bulletins of projects that goes out regularly. The best way to learn about the campaign is definitely looking at impacton.org.

Melanie  40:32

Great. I’ll put that in the show notes.

Meg  40:36

Thank you so much. And definitely there is going to be a dedicated feed for the campaign is going to be @apartbutunited. Also there’s going to be a hashtag, so the two channels are going to be working on this. You’re going to find more projects, of course, on the Impacton feed but @apartbutunited is going to be starting with coronavirus. Coronavirus will fade away – we hope sooner than later – and we’ll see what to do with this concept, either continuing under other open source and community driven things or letting it fade away together with the virus and create something else. But for now, definitely those are the channels where people can follow this.

Melanie  41:20

The very best to you and the people that you love, friends and family and, of course, the rest of Italy. Thank you so much, and best wishes.

Meg  41:30

My pleasure.

Melanie  41:32

So there you have it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you would like to be a part of the conversation or the community, hop on over to ThisisHCD.com where you can request to join the Slack community and help shape future episodes, connect with other designers around the world, and join the newsletter where you can win books and get updates. Subscribe to content on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and listen to any of our other podcasts, such as Getting Started in Design and Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion; Power of 10 with Andy Polaine; Decoding Culture with Dr John Curran; ProdPod with Adrienne Tan; EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck; Moments of Change with myself, Melanie Rayment; and Talking Shop, our community podcast. So there you have it.