Green Lab Founder, Andrew Gregson, spent the last week in June 2018 participating in a 5 day workshop in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia in partnerhip with Westminster University, The British Council and University of Malaysia. The intensive trans- and multi-disciplinary five-day workshop was funded by the ‘British Council Researcher Links’, designed to foster an ecosystem for developing resilient social enterprise through entrepreneurial learning.
Over 40 participants from the UK, Europe, US and Asia converged in Kota Kinabalu to take part in the project. Over the five days, small teams traveled to : Kundasang (agro-tourism), Keningau (livestock tourism), Kota Maradu – Teringai (banana plantation), Kuala Penyu (emerging industry), Tambunan (mulberry plantation) with a view to understanding rural needs, potential for social entrepreneurship and to establish local projects.
Mentors and coaches meet at the start of the week for briefings
Green Lab’s role was to act as a mentor to ‘Team Banana’ (our self nominated name given our project location, and love of the local Sabah banana). Team Banana traveled to the ‘Teringai, Beach and Cafe lodge’; exploring a banana plantation, local community and social ecosystem, building a social context and understanding of the landscape, listening to the needs of the rural community and creating a proposal for social entreprenuership.
Teringai Beach and Cafe Lodge
Coastal location
Visiting local communities
Getting to know the landscape
Listening to residents
Working as a team
Our final proposal and pitch focused on improving local environmental conditions; removing plastics from beaches, edcuation workshops for schools, recycling waste materials and encouraging local communities to self initiate and lead activities. Of the five proposals from the competing teams, presented for peer review at the end of the week, Green Lab and our Team Banana won: our small pot of prize funding will initiate a research project and implement the start of our social entreprenuership.
Team Banana – winning team at Malaysia SITEL 2018
To close the week, we spent Friday morning cleaning a beach at UMS (University Malaysia, Sabah) – sadly the local community disgard a large proportion of plastics into the sea, which accumulate on a beautiful adjacent sandy retreat.
We’d like to thank the SITEL team at Westminister for organising the workshop, their organisational skills and the inspiring team made the project possible. Green Lab is very much looking forward to making our ‘Team Banana’ project come to life.
For more background on the SITEL project visit the Westminster Application page.