Sheffield’s Opus Network is the very ideal of a CAN - making media, doing business and connecting to a planet of ideas

Taken from our founder Indra Adnan’s book The Politics of Waking Up, we are fond of invoking the Indonesian term “ada” - which means, essentially, “it’s there”. By this we mean the idea that there is so much social and cultural innovation taking place, beyond the bright lights of the usual definitions of creativity, that it’s often enough just to point it out, and celebrate the structures that have been built.

A great example is a social enterprise that came to our attention last week, based in Sheffield, called Opus. They describe themselves this way:

Opus is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in Sheffield, established in 2008. Our projects include Now Then Magazine, Festival of Debate, Opus Distribution and UBI Lab Network.

Opus works to contribute upstream solutions to complex system problems. We do this through strategic partnerships, engaging arts and culture, research, identifying leverage points and co-creation. We incubate and deploy services, projects, platforms, decentralised networks and movements proportionate to the challenges ahead.

Opus is multidisciplinary, cross-sector and adaptive, working across hyper-local, regional, national and international contexts. We work with citizens, communities, neighbourhoods, business, voluntary groups, cities, campaigns, research institutions, infrastructure organisations and governments to address the entangled ecological, social, economic, political and cultural crisis we collectively face.

We recognise that this is a long-term and systemic approach to social change. There are no easy fixes and few quick wins, so we spend our time and energy creating the space – whether that’s a platform, a network or something else – for new ideas to emerge and develop.

Opus reaches more than 150,000 people a year through live events, broadcasting and publishing in Sheffield and beyond.

What we love about this mix is that it really expresses the wide range of functions that we identify in CANs (citizen action or community agency networks), and which we are mapping out in our Planet A incubators.

Sheffield is the context. Such a defined community deserves its own. media offering, reflecting the agenda of the place; a convivial, ideas-led festival; a commercial promo distribution business, necessary for the livelihood of small cultural enterprises; and an attempt to take global leadership of a visionary economic policy like UBI, being tested in Sheffield (the very idea of cosmolocalism - see our blog tomorrow).