Opinion Blog: Education
| September 17, 2009 07:44 AM |
Back to school, back onlineIt’s back-to-school time for many countries and that means a switch from summer programs, outdoor community events, and many youth campaigns. New research out today from nfpSynergy shows that organizations who serve youth may want to be going online to reach them. The Research nfpSynergy, a leading nonprofit sector think-tank and research consultancy in the UK, “tracks a representative sample of over 1000 11-25 year olds throughout mainland Britain twice-yearly, gaining insights into their views and habits, both social and charity-related” in its Youth Engagement Monitor. The newest report, out today, focused on the use of social networking platforms by young people who are/aren’t also involved with charities. (Read the full press release here or download the Social Media data slides here.) Some of the results include:
Despite this, less than half (48%) of the 187 charities that were surveyed as part of nfpSynergy’s Virtual Promise (2008) report said that their organization used social networking websites.
First, what the research does not mean: Don’t jump into Facebook immediately! It’s easy for organizations, especially ones with small staff sizes and lots, and lots on the growing “to do” lists to see stats or research like this and automatically say, “Okay, then we should be on Facebook and it’ll solve all of our youth engagement problems.” Or, maybe not that statement exactly, but close to it. This data does confirm many thing we already knew: that most young people are using social networking platforms of one kind or another, that females are more likely to use networking tools than males, etc. It also shows that those young people who are engaged or involved with charities are also those using social networking tools. But, it does not say that they want to engage with charities in social networking platforms or, if they do, how they want that connection to start and continue. So, if your organization serves or engages with youth and you want to think about moving into social networking spaces, here are a few pointers to help you get started! No running in the halls! There’s no point rushing into things, so give yourself the time to think strategically about how you want to use social networking platforms in your organization’s work and how it best fits with what you are doing now and the goals you want to achieve. If you are thinking of using Facebook, for example, you will want to consider whether you want to create an individual account, or Fan page, or a group; each platform has it’s own options for how organizations could be represented and each option has different ways that other users would be able to interact. You also want to consider which young people you want to connect with: as noted above, different ages may use different platforms; there’s lots of research also discussing the different regions or nationalities using each platform, as well as socioeconomic groups (check out Danah Boyd’s recent dissertation on the way teenagers use social networks!). Secrets, secrets are no fun! Regardless of which platform/s you decide to use, remember to be authentic and transparent. No one likes secrets! Young people you are trying to connect with online (anyone, really) will judge you by your profile information: does it say who you are, which individuals at the organization may be speaking on behalf of the organization via the account? does it give your contact information outside of the social network (website, email, blog, or address)? how about information - if you provide mental health services, for example, post information about how to get help if you need it, or how to help a friend, and so on. All this will help to make your profile more reliable and trustworthy, as well as put information out into a social space where youth could come across it without necessarily looking for your organization specifically. Going to Johnny’s party? The parties, the dances, the school events, they all helped shape many of the memories from being school-aged. There’s no reason to leave them out of your plan for connecting with young people in social networks! Create opportunities and events that bring people together online and offline - these activities can help move people up the ladder of engagement, get them volunteering or advocating for your organization, using your services or helping promote them. Plus, social networking is all about connecting with friends, new and old; if your organization is a catalyst for community by connecting those who are affected or interested in the causes you work on, it will be easier to round up participation for your campaigns (on or offline) and find more supporters to help push your mission and work forward. So, throw a party or two, and have fun! What do you think? Are you an organization that works with young people, and are you using social networking sites to connect with them? What lessons or examples do you want to share?
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| April 7, 2009 10:38 AM |
You’re Never Too Young to Change the WorldLast night I gave a short talk to about 100 high school students in the LeadAmerica program. The experience was probably more inspiring for me than for the kids! I opened up my speech with a question: how many of you have ever volunteered for a charity or done community service? Almost every single hand shot up into the air. Then I asked a few of the kids to stand up and tell me about their volunteer experiences. One girl had been a junior leader for the City of Rockville. One boy had handed out food to the homeless, and he described the mission of the nonprofit he helped as succinctly as if he worked there. I shared three stories with them: my background and why I work in the nonprofit field, the story of Adele Ann Taylor ,who at 13 years old, started a nonprofit to promote literacy. I also told the story of a young Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. when he was a teenager trying to decide whether he would study law, medicine, or theology and what a remarkable young man he was. Then to see his short rise to leadership as one of the most influential figures in the civil rights movement just 10 years later. The point I tried to make is that you’re never too young to change the world. As a young person, we all have stirrings of great ideas to improve the communities where we live. The only difference that only certain people actually act on those ideas. At the end of my remarks, I asked the roomful of kids to do me a favor and think about something they really care about, to tell me their big crazy idea for creating the world as it should be. What I heard from those high schoolers was astonishing and inspiring:
We could have gone on all night long. But what I realized was that these young people were probably going to be our future nonprofit leaders. And as I listened to each one of them stand up and share their passion, I almost cried right there. If ever there was a time I doubted that the next generation would want to take up the torch of social change, these kids restored my faith right then and there. I also realized that it’s up to you and me to make sure these motivated young people find a great place to work when they come to the nonprofit sector. We might be Gen x or Gen Y, still young ourselves, but we have to continue to pave the way for those that will inevitably come behind us. Here’s a short video with clips from the talk set to my favorite John Legend song. Too bad I couldn’t show the kids, as they are all underage, and I didn’t have a waiver to film them. You’ll just have to take my word for it that they were pretty awesome.
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| March 4, 2009 01:00 PM |
It is a recession, and it could be a restructuringI’ve been thinking about this post since last November. Unfortunately, quite a few things have come between my thinking about it and my writing about it. My thinking on this is not totally complete, but let me put out some ideas because I think this frame is critical—this is an opportunity to reframe, rethink, re-set, and re-build some of the things we take most for granted. It is not (just) a recession, it (can be) a restructuring. This video, which I found on Marty Linsky’s blog (with a big shout out to Virginia Clarke) is worth the 4 minutes and 50 seconds to watch—I bet it will get you thinking in a “re-set” kind of way. So, beyond the alliteration, what does a restructuring mean? Focusing only on issues of the public good and how they get done and who contributes to them (what I might have previously called philanthropy) let’s think about this: We know that nonprofits are under extreme duress financially. Our communities are filling with neighbors out of work, houses under water, questioning of the “American dream,” fear that the government won’t be able to “get us out of this mess,” closed shopfronts, under-performing schools, health care crises…you know the list. Our collective financial assets have dropped by some un-imaginable amount—10 trillion USD? 30 trillion USD? These are numbers none of us can visualize, let alone really comprehend. Most of us have also finally gotten the message that we live on “spaceship earth”—the resources of which are both finite and undergoing rapid changes for which we argue about the pace but can’t really begin to comprehend or plan for the impact of higher coastlines, arctic water passage, post-petroleum economics, and so on. It doesn’t make sense to think of this as a dip in an otherwise upward trend. It is more like a turn off onto a different path. People born since 1990, all over the globe, have fundamentally different assumptions than those born before that year about where information lives, who controls it, where and how work gets done, what the “proper” role of government might be, where their friends live, how much personal privacy they have, want or value, what kind of resources will be needed to fuel their futures, what kind of innovation might fuel the economies in which they will live, and what their individual relationships to others—proximal and far away—are, could be, or might be. So, what might now seem to be on the edge of philanthropy—or any industry—may very well come to its center. And quickly. Here are some ways restructuring might happen:
Such a future is already here. The debates about the future of the newspaper, working models in which indigenous knowledge informs medicinal innovation, free and open educational resources and tools to access them, debates on social innovation and business models, and the growth of the science commons, creative commons and (maybe even) a giving commons are early signs of movement in these directions. Linsky’s post above asked individuals which way they’ll go—hunkering down or resetting. These are choices at the individual level, but the larger forces are already in motion. What do you think? Are we at a fork in the road? Which way will we go?
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| September 16, 2008 12:00 PM |
Arts Education Needs InvestmentSupply of the arts is outpacing demand, a critical gap that arts advocates and investors need to help bridge. The arts help drive the U.S. economy, and arts advocates have done a good job building arts programs and access to them. But they also have failed to invest enough in arts education to build an audience for the arts. That is the conclusion of a new RAND study for the Wallace Foundation that urges policymakers in the arts and in education to focus more on changing public policies to strengthen and expand arts education. Connecting kids to the arts helps ensure they will become arts consumers as adults, creating the demand needed to help cultural life in America thrive, the study says. National and state standards for the arts content that schools should teach are comprehensive, the study says, but too few students actually get that education because state, local, and district policies fail to provide the resources or school time to teach the arts. And over the last 20 years, the study says, state arts agencies have invested less than 10 percent of their grants in arts learning. The study recommends that state arts agencies and policymakers survey arts education in their states, develop high-school graduation requirements for the arts, publicize exceptional arts-learning programs, and push for changes in state policy to increase the amount and breadth of arts-learning opportunities. “For policy change to happen at the state level, the entire arts community needs to get behind it,” an author of the study says. “Arts educators can’t do it by themselves.” A 2007 study by Americans for the Arts found nonprofit arts and culture fueled $166.2 billion in spending in the U.S. in 2005, generated $29.6 billion in annual federal, state and local tax revenue, and accounted for 5.7 million jobs. In addition to enriching our culture, the arts clearly are big business. But until arts advocates and investors focus more of their effort and resources on closing the gap between demand and supply, the arts will fall far short of their potential to transform civic society into a culture that is truly civil.
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| July 24, 2007 09:43 AM |
Getting Everyone on the Bus
In an influential Foreign Affairs article last year, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder argued that the impending offshoring of tens of millions of jobs is a “Third Industrial Revolution.” It will spread beyond manufacturing jobs to high-skill professional services that were previously insulated, such as accounting, law, and virtually any kind of data analysis. (X-rays, for example, can now be read by specialists in India.) Although this disruption will be massive, it can be managed, according to Blinder, so long as we recognize that the critical divide is no longer between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, but between work that can be done at a distance (“impersonal services”) and work that must be done interpersonally (“personal services”). Here in Los Angeles, we haven’t adapted quickly enough to globalization, but there are signs that our leaders are increasingly acting as Blinder’s theory would predict. Labor unions are prioritizing industries that are not subject to offshoring, such as home health care, hotel, and restaurant workers. Similarly, government and civic leaders are placing great stock in the economic potential of ports, airports, and the entire logistics industry, as well as green technology. Blinder thinks the key may be thinking differently about education. Our current system is geared to push the lucky and talented into college—which may no longer result in a stable professional career—and provide a basic education that was adequate for the manufacturing jobs of the past but is woefully short on the verbal and tech skills required for blue collar jobs of the present. (Have you seen the electronic gear your UPS delivery person lugs around?) In the nonprofit sector, thoughtful leaders are acting in accord with Blinder’s theory. For example, the Kellogg Foundation’s New Options Initiative aims to create a credential alternative to high school diplomas and associate degrees that will land youth in good careers. The James Irvine Foundation’s emphasis on technical education and academies in which young people can learn real world skills is helping young people better prepare for the global job market. Against this backdrop, the social sector’s developing emphasis on family interventions—a recurrent theme in the interviews my colleagues and I have been conducting with civic leaders and public officials this summer—may foretell a trend. We aren’t doing nearly enough to help parents ready their kids for these new realities. We have all known this for decades, of course. The preschool and child care movements are longstanding, and fairly successful—but not enough. To hear leaders from business, government, labor, academia, and politics all hit the same note on this subject is striking. The impacts of globalization may make nonprofit work even more central to our society. Alhough nonprofits are not immune to offshoring, most of the services they provide, such as teaching, health services, counseling, and advocacy, cannot be delivered over a wire. Furthermore, these services are precisely the areas that will require greater investment to make American workers competitive, meaning that the sector is likely to grow. Now, what could professional sports possibly have to do with all this? We’re all familiar with the extraordinary measures college and professional teams will take to find top talent. Scouts begin tracking basketball players when they are in the third grade. What if we took a similar approach to finding other talents in young people? We should be looking in those same neighborhoods for kids who might grow into good programmers, mathematicians, analysts, social workers, and peacemakers. Google is one company that goes hunting for talent (a friend once told me about a co-worker who had been invited to work for them four separate times), but if Google and its competitors could just start earlier, and if we could just provide better early childhood environments, we’d really be on to something. The irony of global competition is that the pressures for quarterly profits push us to recruit from overseas. For the same amount of effort and expense it takes to get highly educated workers H-1B visas, couldn’t we develop two or three times as many capable young people in this country? The problem is that no company wants to wait 12 to15 years when they need someone today. That leaves us with a workforce that is somewhat like major league baseball before Jackie Robinson: There’s a world of talent out there that’s not being realized.
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| April 8, 2004 03:57 PM |
Private Money for Public SchoolsEducation policy is dominated today by conversations about vouchers, or public money going to private schools. But what I see all around me is the opposite phenomenon, private money being given to public schools. Large foundations (Gates, Broad, Carnegie, and so on), large corporations (Wells Fargo, Target), and individuals all give money in large amounts to public schools. The media celebrates this as an example of how the efforts of private actors are supporting public institutions, how parents are acting on behalf of their children in bolstering public schools in an era of fiscal crisis. This is all true. But I see the potential for a very large downside to this new phenomenon. |
| March 17, 2004 01:37 AM |
“The Path of Change”One of the most widely pursued goals in philanthropy is the “improvement of K-12 education.” In the current issue (Spring 2004) of SSIR, talk show host Michael Krasny brings together two experts from different fields, Tom Vander Ark, executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (and a former school superintendent) and Jerry Porras, a professor emeritus of organizational behavior and change at the Stanford GSB, to discuss this complex topic. A thread running through the conversation is the role of test scores in driving the improvement process. If not test scores, then what? What do you think? |
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Amy Sample Ward’s passion for nonprofit technology has lead her to involvement with 
Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, D.C. area. She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at 
Lucy Bernholz is the founder and president of 
Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of 
What do green ports, family interventions, and professional sports have to do with each other—and the future of the nonprofit sector? 
Peter Manzo is the director of strategic initiatives for the 