This fable was the basis of a small group discussion at yesterday’s morning session at the Opportunity Collaboration, a meeting on global poverty alleviation that I am blogging from this week. At the end of our discussion, our moderator turned to Leah Barker, who heads CHOICE Humanitarian, an organization that works “to end extreme poverty and improve quality of life through a bottom-up, self-developing village-centered approach.” The moderator asked Leah if she had a real-life story that was similar to the fable. (CHOICE Humanitarian works with poor, remote rural villages in Kenya, Nepal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Mexico – villages that might be like the one in Stone Soup.)

Leah shared a beautiful story that was a perfect match with this fable and also spoke to the power and importance of community decision-making. Leah and her team had come to Tamaula, an impoverished village in central Mexico. They asked the villagers what CHOICE Humanitarian could help them build that could start the village on a path out of extreme poverty. The villagers were insistent that what they needed first was a church. This posed a dilemma to the CHOICE Humanitarian team who were not in the practice of starting with church-building to help a community break out of poverty; the organization had no religious affiliation. But more important was CHOICE Humanitarian’s conviction that the community must make the choice of what’s best for the community.

The church was built and became a gathering place for the entire village and a catalyst for many more new projects, including a health clinic, an online learning system for the children, and a goat cheese factory. The village is now growing and thriving, so much so that the many of the men who had left to seek jobs can now find employment in the community. When asked what they are most proud of, the villagers reply that they are most proud of the church. They knew best.

Read the Stone Soup fable.

Read a related post, “An Innovative and Financially Sustainable Nonprofit Model.”

What concerns me about both of these policy and practice changes is what they exemplify in our culture. We have moved to a place where the acceptable narrative and the normative expectation is to readily accept nullifying contracts and denying access to education for immigrants as the law of the land, while positioning the use of discretion in the most egregious deportation cases as progress. I see this shift and the anti-immigrant trend line it advances as deeply damaging to social innovation, social justice, and civil society. Three areas in particular raise concern me: limiting opportunity for contribution, increasing social inequities that exacerbate already intractable problems, and damaging our national ethos, thus diminishing our expectations.

Limiting Opportunity for Contribution

With an estimated 12 million undocumented Americans, a meaningful percentage of our nation’s workforce, consumer base, community members, and students live in the shadows. These people can’t fully participate in the life of our communities and can’t take advantage of opportunities, and this severely limits their ability to contribute. This lack of opportunity not only damages the lives of undocumented individuals and communities, but—and this is my focus here—it damages us all. The solutions to vexing problems do not live only with the select few, the experts, or those in positions of power. Imagination, creative approaches, and innovation come from everyone who has the license to imagine and—as importantly—the freedom to share their ideas and voice. The more punitive our laws, and the more criminalized and isolating the narrative becomes, the more we limit participation in solutions ideation and dissemination of what we discovered. This challenge plays out across education and employment levels, class, and geography, and applies to challenges such as attracting talent, filling gaps in stakeholder feedback, and finding seats at the solutions table for communities experiencing the disparity.

Increasing Social Inequities that Exacerbate Already Intractable Problems

As we codify into law and meld into culture policies and practices that limit access to education, employment, housing, medical care, safety, training, financial, and contractual protections, we expand virtually every problem social entrepreneurs seek to solve.

• Crippling poverty is sucking the vitality out of our cities and rural communities—let’s limit employment options, financial protections, and basic financial services!

• An obesity and chronic disease epidemic is stealing future workforce strength and increasing per capita spending for health—let’s reduce access to all but emergency care!

• We are concerned about an increasing achievement and innovation gap— let’s cut off access to education and training!

The list could go on and on.

As exaggerated as this sounds, this set of counterintuitive and counter-productive choices are exactly what “immigrants as criminals” and “let’s make it really tough on them here” frames perpetuate.

Damaging Our National Ethos Diminishes Our Expectations

Worst of all, yet hardest to see, is the toll that accepting this dehumanizing narrative takes on our sense of identity and national character. We operate as social innovators in a country deeply connected to the core ideas of “rule of law,” “innocent until proven guilty,” “freedom and opportunity,” “by-the-boot-straps success” and the “virtue of competition in free markets.” With a lack of nuance and a blind eye to unforeseen consequences, each of these concepts can become a cliché, can be taken to damaging extremes, and can perpetuate injustices, but they are also powerful concepts that support a nation committed to innovation, and to increased liberty and justice. What happens to our moral certitude as a nation based upon the rule of law when we codify that legal contracts with undocumented people are null? How comfortable are we with innocent until proven guilty when we ask law enforcement to question our immigration status at traffic stops? How firmly can we stand on our foundation of freedom and opportunity when young adults who have lived nearly their entire life in this country or have served in its military cannot pursue a college education? How confident are we with the truth that with hard work and the open competition of the free market, anyone can succeed, when our discourse of fear shouts, “Keep them out, they are taking our jobs!”? Beyond individual injustices, and the opportunity and direct costs to society of this cognitive disconnect, there is a significant cost to our culture that over time limits our perspective and steals our optimism.

So, what should we do to counter this costly incivility?

Speak out. Social entrepreneurs (particularly those not directly engaged in immigration reform) need to voice concern and highlight the costs to our society.  How does keeping millions in the shadows impact your field, your work, your organization, and your community? We have the privilege of voice and of professional and community networks—we must use them. Allowing a narrative of fear, vitriol, and dehumanization to go unchallenged helps it to gain legitimacy. Let’s not allow it.

Recommit to Lazarus. Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty proclaims, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” For millions, this declaration offered hope and stood for “world-wide welcome.” This poem speaks to an ethos that is still true for most Americans—the belief that we are a society free of “ancient pomp” and ready to offer equity, opportunity, and freedom to our fellow human beings so they can “breathe free.” Let’s remind ourselves of this anthem and act upon it in our local communities to arrest the advance of Arizona-like policies and the spread of a frame counter to the closely held values of freedom and opportunity.

Demand comprehensive reform. Our immigration system is broken and cries out for comprehensive reform. Removing 12 million from the shadows, creating clear paths to citizenship, and fully engaging the potential of immigrants to contribute to and benefit our society is both a moral and practical imperative. We can and must hold all of our elected leaders and—during this campaign year—every candidate of every party accountable to address this concern. We must let our leaders know comprehensive immigration reform is a priority for diverse innovators and leaders, and not a cynical bargaining chip for a percentage of the Latino vote.

Together, we can all breathe free.

Eric Friedenwald-Fishman is the creative director/president of Metropolitan Group, a leading social marketing firm with offices in Chicago, Portland, OR, San Francisco and Washington, DC. He is the co-author of Marketing That Matters (Berrett & Koehler), which has been translated into six languages; the primary author of MG’s Public Will Building Framework: An Approach for Sustainable Social Change; and co-author of MG’s article “Relevance, Relationships and Results: Eight Principles for Effective Multicultural Communication.”

The restaurant is called Friends, and it is owned by the nonprofit Mith Samlanh.The profits from the restaurant go toward running an orphanage and school for street children. The benefits are two-fold: the profits earned support the NGO; and the youth they serve get valuable job training. Mith Samlanh runs many other businesses the same way, including an upscale restaurant, Romdeng, a clothing shop, a nail salon, and a moped repair shop. What is remarkable is that not only are these businesses successful, they also seem to be on the edge of local trends.

During lunch, Friends Restaurant was completely full with people from all corners of the world. I went to Romdeng that evening and found a similar story. The clothing shop, Friends & Stuff, carries fashionable clothing designed and made by former street youth. I purchased a grey slip dress that was tied into a knot on each shoulder and silk-screened with an updated Cambodian design in bright yellow.

After clothes shopping, I stopped in an inviting, pink-colored nail salon called Daughters. While getting my nails painted, I read posters on the walls that gave information on child prostitution in Phnom Penh. With a sinking feeling, I realized the person giving me a pedicure had escaped from prostitution and was going through Daughters’ training program for a job in salon services. Daughters is such an upbeat and cheerful place, it is hard to imagine what these girls had to go through to get here. 

Mith Samlanh (www.streetfriends.org) and Daughters (www.daughtersofcambodia.org) are respected pioneers in a growing trend in Phnom Penh: nonprofits that support themselves by providing vocational training to the youth they serve. I am happy to say that the trend seems to be taking off and walking around the city. You will find many businesses that are created to fund nonprofits and provide training. It seems to be part of the accepted social fabric. The businesses are not only supporting fantastic causes, but the products and services they offer are surprisingly good.  The concierge at Raffles, a luxury hotel, recommends Romdeng to their guests. They don’t bother to mention that it is run by former street youth. They just say, “The Khmer cuisine is excellent there.”

Sometimes you go looking for the story, and sometimes the story finds you. I came to Cambodia to do a story on their exceptional ability to provide HIV/AIDS treatment and I will write that story. But first I had to share this incredible story of social entrepreneurship giving street youth a brighter future.

“There’s something really remarkably accidental about so many of the discoveries that we make,” conference curator and PopTech Executive Director Andrew Zolli said during the conference, called Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures and Improbable Breakthroughs.  “...But what happens when we don’t let failure happen, when we keep systems that are minimally functional in place? What has to die so the right things can live? How do we kill it?”

To underscore the importance of answering those questions in social innovation, Zolli shared the story of a massive failure of a United Nations led project in the 1950s and ‘60s to bring clean water to Bangladesh. “[The U.N.] went out and dug 500,000 wells ... but once built, nobody tested them, and it turned out that 40 percent of them were polluted with arsenic, making for the largest mass-poisoning in human history,” Zolli said. But it wasn’t just the intervention that went awry, he said. The solution—to test the wells and paint the spigots of clean ones green and polluted ones red—also failed. What happened? “Almost immediately,” Zolli said, “there was the perception in villages with red spigots that because the wells were tainted, the girls were tainted. Suddenly, many of them became unmarriageable and there was a spike in the sex trade.” Added Zolli, “We tried to solve the water problem and we created an urban prostitution problem. We did exactly the opposite of what we intended. These kinds of stories sit very heavy in our hearts but they also remind us of the enormous complexity of the problems that we are trying to solve in the world.”

Expounding on that theme, Kevin Starr, founder and director of the Mulago Foundation, said the nonprofit advocacy community sometimes deludes itself about the impact it’s having on social problem-solving. (Overly wordy, self-important and confusing mission statements, he said, are just one symptom of this behavior.)

Starr, who coaches nonprofits on how to be more effective, said he uses three questions to determine whether a nonprofit is doing the job. Do its leaders know clearly what it is trying to accomplish? “If you could only measure one thing to know if you fulfilled your mission, what would it be?” Starr asked. Do nonprofits measure the right things to determine success and do they measure them well enough? “Measuring well means taking an honest stab at understanding what change you’re creating,” he said. Is it needed? Does it work like it is supposed to? Will it get to those who need it and enough of those who do? Will people use it immediately?

Starr named three high-profile, nonprofit failures: One Laptop Per Child, the Lifestraw and PlayPumps.

In the case of the laptops, Starr said, each was made well enough but ended up costing families living on $2 a day an estimated $400 each. “If you’re a $2-a-day family, are you really going to let your kid take the most expensive thing in the household to school every day?” he asked conferees. “This was nuts,” he said—and not needed. “Where we work, there’s not a digital divide,” he said. “There’s a pencil divide. Schools are falling down and teachers don’t show up.”

In the case of the Lifestraw, Starr said, the device proved to be an excellent water filter but it cost too much and took too long to use, discouraging widespread adoption by villagers. The one study available on usage rates showed that only 13 percent of the people even claimed that they ever used it, Starr said.

PlayPumps—a simple merry-go-round that doubled as a water pump to bring clean water into villages across Africa—also missed the mark, Starr said. “This was so seductive and so wrong,” he said. “Twenty million dollars later, the party’s over and we still don’t have any idea of how many of these things are still spinning,” he said. “A lot of them broke down and there were some areas where kids would have had to push this for more than 24 hours a day to keep the water tank full” and that wasn’t happening. “We have depressing footage of women trudging in a circle,” Starr said. “This was a bad idea.” Starr said in each case, do-gooders were oblivious to on-the-ground challenges to actual usage. Accurate impact measurement, early on, could have averted some of the problems, he said. “We need to do a lot more of that.”

Another PopTech speaker on the subject, Ned Breslin, CEO of Water for People, said a lot of nonprofits and NGOs aren’t just wrong about the impact they’re having. They also sometimes mislead donors about their effectiveness. “Many will tell you that everything is good” after you donate money to clean water projects in Africa, regardless of what’s really happening on the ground, Breslin said. “They’ll show you happy kids drinking clean water, laughing,” he said. “They’ll tell you everything is good. They’ll give you a report and a picture. They’ll say, ‘Here are receipts that prove we spent your money well.’ .. But the problem? What happens when we foreigners leave, when the new water system has to run for a while? Is the system still working over time? Are girls who had to carry water from the river all day now attending school, instead? Is water still flowing?”

More often than not, Breslin said, families that had been helped with new wells now need to go back to rivers to get their water, thanks to a proliferation of broken well heads and pumps. “...Sustainability to our organization is not how many hand pumps you put in, nor how many beneficiaries we helped last year, nor how many microfinace loans we make,” he told conferees. “It is this: is the water still flowing? Africa is littered with broken technology, broken dreams and broken promises. We’ve got to turn that around and move to different outcomes.”

Want to change the world? “Push the nonprofit sector and NGOs to do better,” Breslin said.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series covering the new mass philanthropy movement. She also is publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new group blog about the use of digital media for social change, and teaches social media in advocacy at New York University. An award-winning journalist and author, Ms. Stepanek’s new book, Swarms, about the evolution of cause-wired groups, is due out early next year..

In spite of shouldering a disproportionate burden of the continent’s poverty and facing barriers to education, financial services, resources and property rights—the story about African women and girls is not only about vulnerabilities, but also about their agency.

Already, women and girls are at the helm of micro and macro activities that keep African economies churning—collecting water, planting and harvesting crops, as well as buying and selling goods. They spend about 70 percent of their unpaid time caring for family members and keeping the current labor force fed, clothed and healthy. In Africa, agriculture accounts for 24 percent of GDP and is the predominant source of livelihood for millions. Women produce up to 80 percent of all basic food products. Yet, they receive only 10 percent of credit given to farmers and less than 1 percent of total loans to agriculture.

Clearly much more needs to be done to harness women’s energy and skills and bring their capabilities to the forefront of economic agendas. It starts with education and empowerment.

The multiplier effects of educating girls and women are pervasive and transcend generations. One of our partners, Camfed, has demonstrated that educating girls sets in motion a virtuous cycle of change within families and communities. Camfed’s results show an educated African girl will be less likely to get HIV/AIDS, more likely to earn 10-20 percent more income, and have a smaller and healthier family. Perhaps the greatest evidence of the power of girls’ education is their philanthropic investment in other children. Former Camfed-supported girls have galvanized action to support the education of nearly 120,000 vulnerable children. They have contributed to whole communities through their independence, leadership, and status as role models for other girls and women.

Women are contributing to Africa’s growth surge. We cannot afford to overlook their potential and agency. Investing in them will significantly propel Africa towards a more sustainable economic and social future.

Reeta Roy is president and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a private, independent foundation based in Toronto. Its global mandate is to enable people living in poverty, particularly youth, to improve their lives and the lives of their families and communities by expanding their access to microfinance and education.

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Florida’s governor signed legislation last week aimed at curtailing how much state and local governments can do to regulate foundations and their diversity practices.

Drafted with help from the Alliance for Charitable Reform, the law prohibits Florida government officials from requiring that foundations disclose the race, religion, gender, income level, sexual orientation, or certain other characteristics of their employees and board members, as well as those of their grant recipients.

Foundations that are supposed to be all about diverse practices are opposed to sharing the proof behind their hiring and grantmaking outcomes that would reflect that. What’s the point of developing diversity policies if you don’t track your progress? Foundation president Emmett Carson asserts that “the new law calls into question what had heretofore been accepted about the virtue and value of transparency as promoted by key organizations that set standards for foundations: the Council on Foundations, Foundation Center, and Independent Sector.”

• For example, the Council on Foundations, which represents about 2,000 foundations, states: “In carrying out their philanthropic activities, our members embrace both the letter and spirit of the law. Our members seek diversity and inclusiveness in order to reflect the communities they serve and to ensure that a range of perspectives contribute to the common good and the development of their mission in a changing society.”
• Similarly, the Foundation Center, a research organization that collects information on grant makers, states: “Transparency and accountability are key to earning the public trust.”
• And Independent Sector, which represents charities and foundations, advises “open and timely sharing of financial, governance, and program information.”

If Emmett’s right that these “words lose all meaning unless these organizations speak forcefully to the dangers inherent in the Florida law,” then where are the voices of the Council on Foundations, Foundation Center, and Independent Sector in speaking out against this legislation? To be clear, I agree with Emmett that “government should not be in the business of deciding who sits on foundation boards or which nonprofit organizations receive grants based on demographics.” But we have to also realize that:

…the idea that government is prohibited from requesting diversity data as it relates to board composition, staffing, and nonprofit grantees undermines the promise that foundations have made to the American public that they are committed to diversity, inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency in their operations.

There’s no way that it’s beneficial for foundations to spend their time trying to figure out how to avoid being transparent about diversity. Indeed, officials at the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy (NCRP) say the Florida law “takes institutional philanthropy in the wrong direction” and that the grantmakers involved in the advocacy to get this law passed could have spent that time and human capital on issues of real concern to the nonprofit sector.

This law and efforts to pass it demonstrate that foundation priorities are misguided and myopic. There are high resource and opportunity costs associated with the law’s passage – time, money and human capital that could have been spent in better ways was instead squandered to promote this irrelevant legislative effort. Grantmakers who funded this effort could, for example, have boosted grantees’ operational reserves or expanded programs to serve those most disadvantaged in our communities. Funder associations could have spent their time educating their members about how to better meet community needs, lobbying for better financial regulation to protect foundation assets from future threats or building member capacity. This is particularly relevant because foundation assets have taken a serious hit and continue to feel the effects of the recession. Protecting philanthropic assets would seem to be a significantly higher priority than preemptively blocking sunshine legislation.

What’s becoming clearer to me is that all foundations are not created equal, and many of them could care less about being accountable to walk their diversity talk. But for the foundation leaders that truly do care about diversity in their profession, the Florida legislation should come as a huge slap in the face. Especially for people like David Waldman, Vice President of Human Resources and Administration for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), who recently shared his experiences with RWJF to change ”the culture of the Foundation to make diversity much more a part of the fabric of who we are as a working community”:

Whatever we have done, successful or not, we have not let our intentional focus on diversity diminish. It has remained unwavering through leadership transitions, high-profile attention to other work, and other potential distractions. We never stopped paying attention. We may not have done things in the “right order” (we just published our broad-based diversity statement on our website this year), but we have created a culture where diversity is part of the ongoing discussion at all levels of our work.

High profile infrastructure groups like the Council on Foundations, Foundation Center, and Independent Sector have been encouraging foundations to adopt diversity policies and statements for years now. RWJF is just one example of an organization that’s heeded its advice. So why aren’t these organizations speaking out about this nonsense going down in Florida? Why did the reputable members of the Florida Philanthropic Network like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bank of America, Wachovia, and the Jesse Ball duPont Fund attach their names to this harmful advocacy effort?

I’ve got more questions than answers to what’s happening in philanthropy these days. For now, what we have is an ill-advised piece of legislation with no public opposition to it from within the philanthropic community save for foundation watchdog NCRP and the fearless Emmett Carson.

But then, Orson Aguilar, executive director of the Greenlining Institute, a California group that has backed legislation in the state to compel foundations to disclose information about their diversity practices, may have put it best.

“They must be really ashamed of their diversity practices if they have gone a step forward in creating regulation that basically gives them the right to discriminate.”

  Rosetta Thurman is a writer, speaker, professor and consultant working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofits, leadership and social change at rosettathurman.com

Young people’s voices are critical to our global dialogue. As the G-20 leaders gather to map out strategies for global economic recovery, I hope they seriously consider the recommendations made by youth leaders. Why? Because the world’s youth population—1.1 billion young people ages 15 to 25—is the largest in history. Eighty-five percent of them live in developing countries. Their voices count as they will face the consequences of our actions today.

We should not lose sight of the opportunities presented by this “youth-bulge”. The global financial crisis has compounded the challenges in many developing countries. Unemployment rates in Africa increased and disproportionately affected youth.  The sheer numbers of young people entering the workforce mean that they will play a pivotal role in enabling sustainable economic recovery. For this to happen, we must invest in their potential.

When we listen to youth from developing countries talk about what they need to succeed in today’s global economy, they point to market-relevant skills, access to financial services and technology, and opportunities to contribute to their communities. Many of them are already economically active. Education, entrepreneurship and employment of youth will spur economic growth and social progress. Investment in these areas should be addressed by our G-20 leaders in the plans for global economic recovery and poverty reduction.

It’s terrific that young people are engaged in discussions at the G-20 Summit. I hope that world leaders are inspired and motivated by the ideas, experiences and leadership of these young people. Youth are shaping today’s global economy. They want to contribute to the future they will inherit.

Reeta Roy is president and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a private, independent foundation based in Toronto. Its global mandate is to enable people living in poverty, particularly youth, to improve their lives – and the lives of their families and communities – by expanding their access to microfinance and education.

According to Eli Pariser, a cofounder and former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, data aggregators like Google have started using increasingly sophisticated filters to decide what information we consume online—and these new levels of data-filtering, along with the growth of social networks that aggregate like-minded souls—are threatening civic engagement. The filtering, he told people attending this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, is starting to keep us from being exposed to a fast-growing amount of information and ideas—and chiefly, viewpoints that may differ from our own.

For example, Pariser says, Google now uses 57 different personalization filters to customize what we see on the Web, even if we aren’t logged in. That makes it harder for us to see news and information that Google’s algorithms suggest might bore us or upset us. And that’s not all, says Pariser. Often these “filter bubbles” are keeping information from us without our specific permission—or worse, without our knowledge. Facebook also customizes content, using information on the links people click to customize the news that appears in their personal feed. [Pariser, a progressive, says he has tried hard to add conservatives to his Facebook feed but their feeds and links keep getting blocked from his page by Facebook’s personalization algorithms.]

“What you see on your screen may be very different from what the person sitting next to you sees,” Pariser told the gathering of more than 600 social change advocates, social entrepreneurs and open-government activists. “...We really need to get away from that silly idea that (computer) code doesn’t care about anything.”

To be sure, data segmentation isn’t new. But these new filter bubbles differ from what we’ve seen before, and in three ways, Pariser says. First, the degree of personalization is higher. You’re no longer simply being grouped with a bunch of people who read The Nation. The personalization is more selective than that: you’re now alone in your bubble. Second, filter bubbles are invisible. You don’t realize they exist. And third, you don’t choose the filter. It chooses you. “As the face of curation of what we see and consume online changes from a person to a machine, we need to start questioning the values of these filtering devices and get the power back to make these decisions for ourselves,” Pariser says. “The filter bubble may be good for consumers but it’s bad for democracy.”

Other assertions made by presenters:

There is racial segregation on the Web, even among trending topics on Twitter. According to data visualization experts Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, the thousands of hashtags being used to collate and segment different conversations by topic also may be keeping many people out of the short-messaging site’s most popular and/or important conversations. Example: Two of the top-trending topics over the recent Memorial Day weekend—#cookout and #oilspill—were starkly segmented along racial lines. Viegas said the #cookout conversation was attended mostly by blacks and #oilspill, mostly by whites during the same period. “Hashtags are the bumper stickers of the 21st Century,” said Wattenberg. Added Viegas: “On many topics, it’s a heterogeneous crowd, but there’s a whole other chunk of topics where race divides people. We need to be aware that even online, we can be immersing ourselves in conversations that are segregated in ways that might be worrisome.”

We are not using the social media tools we have to solve problems so much as we are using them to socialize with like-minded people about these problems. It’s time to get more active offline, said Clay Johnson, the director of Sunlight Labs and cofounder of the online political strategy firm, Blue State Digital. Social entrepreneurs and activists need to focus less on using social media to build email lists and focus more on getting people active offline solving social problems, he said. He cited the online social network, Momsrising.org, as a good example of a social network that is highly civically engaged, using government data on health, education and economic trends to create a “Moms Score” to help catalyze offline protests and social change.

We must work harder to break out of our self-imposed (or machine-imposed) comfort zones if we’re to affect social change. “We are too focused on climbing the hierarchy ladder in our workplaces and social networks online, and not focused enough on dismantling these hierarchies, which is where the true power lies,” said Deanna Zandt, a social media consultant and author of Share This! a book about social networking. “We’re living like fish right now,” she said. “We don’t know we’re wet. We’re taking our perception that the Net is a wonderful meritocracy but that’s not true. We need to interrupt this pattern of thinking immediately.” Zandt urged conferees to shatter their comfort zones to start making the Net a more hospitable place for civic engagement. “We have to work harder at civic engagement online,” she said. Zandt, who is white, shared her own experience of finding herself in an unexpected discussion on Twitter about race in America after she spoke out against an action last summer by Philadelphia’s Valley Club to ban black children from swimming in its pool. “This was completely outrageous, I got really angry about it and signed petitions and all of that, but what was more interesting was what happened in the days following that,” Zandt said. “People started sharing on Twitter about the first time they’d been discriminated against as children and this blew me away. I wouldn’t have found myself in a group of people of color, sharing stories about discrimination without Twitter” and without “stepping out.”

Stop enabling the status quo. John Perry Barlow, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 20-year-old nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, told the gathering that he stands by his earlier statement, made many years ago, that “the Internet is the most powerful event since the capture of fire.” Its power cuts both ways. Barlow said there is massive power in the hands of individuals, thanks to the Web, but this is power that Establishment groups also can use to try to destabilize opposition. Most people, he said, still don’t know how to use the Web to organize and affect social change. But they are learning, he said. “We have to stop expecting the government to shower us with things it can no longer deliver,” he said, “and start running this country and our institutions (including companies) the same way the Internet is run, from the edges.”

What do you think? Does the surge of online social networks and corporate use of Net filters to segment consumers make it harder for people to engage civically with one another—in or out of the workplace? Let us hear from you.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Another girl, Lekum, had begun selling coffee beans.  “I learned to check the market before I sell anything.  I asked each vendor how much they would pay for coffee.  I found a way to get quality beans from my town to the venders by motorbike.”

Both girls have long left school.  What they earn either helps their families and younger siblings or is reinvested in their business.  Each girl got her start through a community-based youth savings program set up by PLAN International to serve vulnerable youth in West Africa.
 
What’s impressive is that these savings and loans associations are run entirely by young people, after a short period of training.  Quite simply, a group of up to twenty meets weekly. Each person saves amounts as small as 20 to 40 cents. After a few weeks, the accumulated funds are made available to group members as loans ranging from $5 to $12. Each group sets its own rules about interest rates and repayment terms.  At the end of year, the group “cashes out.”  Members receive their savings plus a percentage of interest earned on repaid loans.
 
In West Africa, close to half of the population is under the age of 25.  Many young people, particularly girls, are unable to complete even the six years of primary education. Options for out-of-school, marginalized youth are dim.  Employment opportunities are limited to low-paying, unskilled work and sometimes dangerous work. Young girls often work as domestic help or in restaurants and bars where there are high instances of abuse. 

These savings groups represent an innovation beyond providing marginalized young people with a safe place to save money.  They are channels to deliver life skills training including financial literacy and health information as well as build self-confidence.  For these adolescents, this was first time they had an opportunity to learn to save, manage money and develop new skills.

What makes this program unique and exciting is that young people play a critical role in the design, management and evaluation of the program.  Both Lekum and Fatimah were not only members of savings groups, but also of the national youth advisory council that PLAN formed to guide the program.

Based on learnings from a pilot program, we are working with Plan to scale up the program in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Niger to serve 70,000 youth over 4 years.  As one participant told us, “This project must go beyond us.  We must spread this knowledge.”

Reeta Roy is president and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a private, independent foundation based in Toronto. Its global mandate is to enable people living in poverty, particularly youth, to improve their lives – and the lives of their families and communities – by expanding their access to microfinance and education.

What a difference a year makes. Despite the global economic slowdown—and perhaps partly because of it—this new “women’s movement” appears to be packing some serious heat at this week’s Clinton Global Initiative. There are seven agenda sessions on the need to invest more in women and girls, including one this afternoon on human trafficking. Celebrities, CEOs, and new-wave “philanthrocapitalists” are using much of their networking time to talk about the “girl effect” and to call on the world’s largest corporations to invest in women’s empowerment, on stage and off.

One of today’s highlights was a hard-hitting panel on the need for businesses to invest more of their profits to give women more of a voice on social problem-solving. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs—whose 10,000 Women project is working to give that many women in developing countries business degrees so they can join the world of commerce— and Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, agreed that more must be done. “I don’t think people should see this as giving a special advantage to girls and women,” Zoellick said. “It’s frankly just trying to help them catch up.” But when pressed by moderator Diane Sawyer to discuss which efforts to empower women haven’t worked yet, Zainab Salbi, the chief executive of Women for Women International, said cultural barriers have been among the toughest to break. She said it has been hard to convince fathers in Africa and other parts of the world to abandon the tradition of dowries and planned marriages; Edna Adan, founder of a hospital in her native Somalia that bears her name, said the practice of genital cutting persists in many areas of Africa. Adan said “we are not reaching undereducated women” as much as will be required to end this practice and that “the gift of knowledge” is needed to wipe out many cultural traditions that now keep women down.

When Sawyer asked panelists how CGI attendees may best help women who live in fear to stand up for themselves, Salbi argued that most women, as survivors of rape, civil war, and economic devastation, already are standing up for themselves “because they must, for their children.” As important as money, she said, is input. CGI attendees doing work in Africa and around the world, she said, need to start doing more to include women in their decision-making about aid and educational improvements. Salbi shared the story of a woman from the Congo, who had been raped and lost a leg to rebels, but who, with the help of Salbi’s organization, now runs a business that is making a profit. “She doesn’t feel sorry for herself and she is determined to keep going. I find it amazing that the only group of people (women) who are not fighting and are not burning and not raping, and the only group of people who are actually keeping life going in the midst of wars, are not being heard and not being included at the (international) decision-making table,” Salbi said.

At one point during the panel, Salbi challenged Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, to invest more dollars into job creation for women and girls. Tillerson insisted that “funding is not the issue.” Big business, he said, will need to feel more confident that its dollars will have an impact and get to those most in need. Salbi responded that until women are part of the decision-making process about how those dollars are spent, many programs won’t be as successful as they could be. “Are women part of your decision-making?” she challenged Tillerson. “Are we accountable as women for measuring the impact of these programs? Has business been making us so? We have been giving good speeches [about the need to empower women] but are you actually doing this when it comes to investing in these programs?”

Melanne Verveer, who runs the new Office for Global Women’s Issues in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, concluded that “what has really changed in the last, recent years, is the way that the business community has come and joined this fight. It’s not in the greatest numbers yet but I think that is changing because the business community realizes it’s in its interest…No country can prosper if it leaves half of its people (women) behind.”

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.