Opinion Blog : Entries Tagged With 'social+change'
| April 30, 2008 11:23 AM |
Root Causes vs. Facebook Causes
The attention lavished on these platforms is a net gain for micro-philanthropy. With each blog post, more people find innovative ways to support grassroots initiatives. Recently, even mainstream media outlets such as MSNBC (Facebook Causes), Oprah (Kiva), Steven Colbert (DonorsChoose), The Wall Street Journal (Change.org), and CNN (SixDegrees) are covering micro-philanthropy. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement that surrounds these initiatives. But maintaining a critical lens is equally important. I am concerned that few, if any, social action platforms are currently leveraging the self-organizing potential of social media to address the root causes that make online social activism necessary in the first place. As food for thought, here are two excerpts from Wikipedia’s entry for “root causes”:
As legions of digital natives start to self-identify as citizen philanthropists, they should be given online tools that permit them to do more than donate to an existing organization or recruit friends to a cause. The following exemplify deeper level corrective actions that social action platforms could facilitate:
Will platforms like Facebook Causes, DonorsChoose, Kiva, Change.org, and SixDegrees render top-down organizations obsolete? Do they bypass old-school methods of fundraising and grant-making? Have they planted the seeds for a society composed of highly motivated micro-philanthropists?
Posted by Katie Harrington
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| June 6, 2008 09:00 AM |
Games for ChangeGlobal Kids, a New York-based urban youth nonprofit, launched a video game yesterday (from the fifth annual Games for Change conference in New York City) called Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City. In the game, set in New Orleans during the Katrina disaster, players follow the struggle of a fictional character named Vivica Water as she searches for her mother and helps her neighbors during the storm. Targeted toward inner-city high school students—and made in collaboration with a group of them at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn—this most recent offering from the new “cause gaming” movement aims to “celebrate New Orleans culture and draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008.” Similarly, a video game released in February called ICED: I Can End Deportation also seeks to engage the voices of society’s dispossessed. Made by the small human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, this game tries to promote immigration policy reform, Breakthrough’s mission. Both games, thanks to their interactivity, pack emotional resonance as they tell the stories of the victims of social problems and policy disputes. To be sure, this is important, as empathy is the first step toward effective social problem-solving. But consumer, beware. Some of these games don’t go far enough. ICED profiles five teens of different ethnic backgrounds and invites players to “walk in their shoes” to “learn how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights to all immigrants.” Gen X and Y care a lot about social issues and there’s an opportunity for game-makers to influence these future leaders and decision-makers. But wouldn’t this game be even more powerful (and socially responsible) if players were given more shoes to fill? What if you could also play the role of an immigration officer, or a border patrol cop, or a senator fighting immigration reforms on Capitol Hill? Wouldn’t the nonprofit’s work be even more credible among policymakers or wealthy donors looking for social issues to support with their dollars? There’s no question that the games for change movement represents an exciting and deservedly hot new trend for tech-savvy nonprofits: Games can be a powerful new way to raise funds and bolster waning membership rosters. Further, letting people of all ages “live” in new worlds and try on new behaviors can help nonprofits better engage the people they serve, as well as draw more public and private aid to the plight of society’s dispossessed. But how carefully these games portray all sides of the social issues they’re advocating will be critical to their effectiveness and credibility in the long term. Indeed, solutions to social problems don’t occur simply because people gain a better understanding of the victims of poor social policy-making. Exploring the complexity of social problems, all sides, is what games can do best. Consider World Without Oil, for example, a year-old game that bills itself as “a serious game for the public good” and attempts to capture multiple viewpoints by letting players imagine the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis and how it affects their lives—oil company leaders included. Or take a look at Peacemaker, a game about the Middle East conflict developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University. It lets players take on the role of either the Israeli or the Palestinian leader, so as to better understand the kinds of decisions either one of them might be forced to make. It puts people into the decision-making shoes of one, or ideally both, of the leaders in that conflict. Additionally, the United Nation’s Food Force engages kids aged 8-13 years old by sending them out on six realistic aid missions. It had more than 2 million downloads in its first couple of months of release in 2006 and it’s now up to 4 million. One key feature of this game is its ability to effectively portray the challenges of delivering aid amid a variety of real-world challenges. A newer game that focuses on complex problem-solving from the start is UNICEF’s Ayiti: The Cost of Life. As journalists have long realized, quality content is not simply about how well one can argue one side of an issue, but rather how deft one is at arguing multiple sides of it—indeed, acknowledging that multiple sides even have an argument to make. Don’t believe it? Just ask some of the kids starting to play ICED. In a soon-to-be-released survey, a majority of them said that while they like the game and find it an authentic portrayal of the impact of current immigration policies, many students also “felt manipulated and like they were being asked to play politics for somebody else,” says Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology, which collaborated with developers on the game. “These games represent a good start, but there’s no question that they will need to become more sophisticated as the games for change movement evolves.” Viva the evolution. In the dawn of new media, the public’s ability to understand the multiple grays of an issue should count the most when it comes to making change that matters—and that sticks. Says MIT professor Henry Jenkins, an expert in youth media and an enthusiastic supporter of the emerging social games movement: “We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality.” Amen.
Posted by Katie Harrington
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| June 13, 2008 07:00 AM |
Learning from LaunchingPhew! That was a sigh of happiness, relief, excitement, and wonder; if such a sigh can be expressed in text. Why such emotions all wrapped in a sigh? Yesterday afternoon was the public launch of connec+ipedia. I have been fortunate to be part of the team developing this free, open source tool designed for those working for the common good—it is a wiki tool with database functionality, allowing you to create content for people, places and things and all the connections between them. I learned a lot during the last 18 months of work and think many of those lessons apply to many other projects, wikis, and start-ups.
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| July 8, 2008 11:15 AM |
Are We Still Involved in the Pursuit of Truth? If Not, Why Not?Sam Davidson shares a great quote he saw at the National Civil Rights Museum: “Truth comes from being involved, and not from observation and speculation.” Amen to that. The pursuit of truth is really why many of us came into the nonprofit sector. Most of us were looking for something real, something meaningful happening in this big bullshit world. But the question is, do most of us find it when we get here, or do we just find more spin, just as much posturing as we see coming from our politicians? As Jeanne Bell will tell you, we pay a price for the stories we tell about ourselves. Because the problem with many nonprofits today is that we are supposed to be in the business of making social change—the kind that can be funded, measured, replicated, and tied up in a pretty red bow. The kind of change that can only happen in air-conditioned offices with receptionists screening our calls, that doesn’t need to speak out against anything because the good work speaks for itself. We think we know what the community needs even though we’ve never set foot over on the east side of town. We have our protocol and our fears about getting too political, and we think we’re doing some good if we get a little mentoring program up and running without addressing the piss-poor state of the school system. Really? I’ve been thinking a lot about the inauthenticity of keeping quiet. I moved to DC in 2004 after participating in the March for Women’s Lives, a huge march on Washington and a real protest to secure reproductive rights for women in the face of the Bush administration’s actions. I helped organize one of our bus groups of women’s studies students from Richmond to DC and it really felt like I was doing something, for once in my life. My grandmother thought I was insane to be involved with such an event, and was convinced I would forever be on the “government’s list.” And the college feminist radical in me really wished I was indeed on some watch list. I was proud to be identified as a dissenter. I wanted it to be on the record that I did not agree with the political decisions that were being made on my behalf as a woman. I got involved because NOW (National Organization for Women) along with the Black Women’s Health Imperative had provided me with some real knowledge I wouldn’t find in the history books or on primetime TV. And they showed me what it meant to take action, armed with that truth, to drive change. Yet somewhere along the way I traded in my protest signs for business casual and board meetings. I’m not really sure how I feel about it now, I’ve been wondering if this is the same sector I discovered in 2004. I mean, we can’t be all about protest and dissent 24/7, right? Someone has to pick up the pieces. But maybe this sector dichotomy is just a representation of the way we’re being trained to toe the line. As Elisa, one of my readers, comments: It doesn’t help that our educational system and the organizations we work in don’t encourage us to do this kind of try and fail experimentation. I don’t know about anyone else, but where I went to school, toeing the line was going to get you farther all the time. Then you transition to a work place that is the same way and it becomes in your best interest (at least in terms of staying ‘comfortable’) to again toe the line. And I have to be honest here, a lot of my idealism from four years ago has since waned because I’ve seen how nonprofits really work. But I’ve been thinking about what my responsibility is to the Rosetta of four years ago, the one who found out what was really going on and told everybody about it. What is my contribution if I forgo seeking truth in order to avoid getting into some kind of trouble? Where are we going as a nonprofit sector if we lose our drive for the pursuit of truth at all costs? And what good are we as independent organizations if, when we find it, we are too afraid to speak truth to power? Am I the only one that’s lost a little of my college idealism? What’s been your experience?
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| July 18, 2008 04:08 PM |
This Is What Philanthropy Looks LikeDuring the lead-up to the Iraq War—for good reasons, a subject overlooked in conversations about social innovation—I found myself marching through the streets of Montreal, New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. The people I was protesting alongside had many chants. The one that stirred my emotions every time went, “This is what democracy looks like; this is what democracy feels like.” Digital natives like me are inclined to cut and paste any number of lofty terms and subject them to the same reality check we challenged democracy to in the lead-up to the Iraq War. The phrase that I belted as loud as I could in 2002-03 passed judgment on more than just the political events of that moment. It confronted directly the television and glossy magazine culture I was born into. In hindsight, it seems to have anticipated the citizen advocacy, citizen journalism, and now citizen philanthropy movements that emerged in the years since. Before 2002-03, democracy for me was no more than the provider of political entertainment, be it Bill Clinton playing the saxophone or parodies of George H. W. Bush saying “it wouldn’t be prudent.” In practice, it consisted of my parents stepping into a poll booth once every four years, just to cancel out each other’s vote for U.S. president. The emaciated version of democracy in which I grew up asked simply that people vote and laugh. (See Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for more insights on television and democracy.) Chanting “This is what democracy looks like” and experiencing what it felt like to say those words with hundreds of other turned-on, concerned citizens created something more authentic and quantifiably better than the democracy I had known. Democracy became an invitation to hit the streets and speak up. For this reason, the phrase has stayed with me through the crime of aggression that eventually unfolded in Iraq. In the years since, I have seen projects emerge that invite citizens to flip the funnel on broadcast media and agitate for social change. Projects like AskYourLawMaker and Spot.us are showing people what journalism should look like. Initiatives like the Care2 Petition Site, ThePoint, and PledgeBank are demonstrating what advocacy should feel like. For my part, I have been putting together a network of likeminded people who, if the need ever arose, could hit the streets with signs that read, “This is what philanthropy looks like.” On the citizen philanthropy front, we have a common goal of making the age-old institution of philanthropy more user-friendly and user-generated. Like advocacy and journalism before it, we are transforming philanthropy from a top-down process into an invitation for the grassroots to speak up and make something happen. The new philanthropy doesn’t require millionaires, corporate social responsibility programs, or large endowments to run. Instead, it runs on the resources and passions of real people. No one owns it, but everyone can participate. Registered 501(c)(3) organizations take note: Citizen philanthropists don’t make grants just to institutions. Through social networks, blogs, text messages, and email, we fund one-off events in our local communities as well as our friends’ projects and outstanding individuals trying to effect positive change on the other side of the world. Like any movement that has broad appeal, citizen philanthropy has produced strange bedfellows. A contributor to the SSIR opinion blog recently described the phenomenon in terms of online giving markets. This vocabulary of choice in philanthropy borrows heavily from the very free market system that produced the television and glossy magazine culture that some of us citizen philanthropists oppose. I like to describe citizen philanthropy as a direct critique of consumerism, replacing opportunities to consume with opportunities to give back or take action. Capitalist or anti-capitalist, the television and glossy magazine culture against which I raged in 2003 has no place in the new philanthropy. Foundations and nonprofits are learning that glossy is a bad word among digital natives; that direct mail increases an organization’s ecological footprint; and that TV spots are a waste of time. Citizen philanthropy, as it matures, is touching many hundreds of thousands of people. These people are serving as full partners in the change they want to see in the world. They are helping to fund, implement, and evaluate micro-philanthropic initiatives from start to finish. Sometimes these initiatives require many people taking a simple action. For instance, the DarfurWall has recruited thousands of people to donate just $1 to combat the crisis in Sudan. At other times, citizen philanthropy initiatives involve just one or two people devoting time and toil to more labor-intensive actions. In 2006, a friend of mine spent six months drawing attention to an individual’s struggle in Nepal and in the process became intimately connected to that person’s life and future. She is now working full-time to advance the citizen philanthropy sector. For philanthropy to be true to its name—love of humanity—then indeed, this is what it will have to look like.
Posted by Jennifer Roberts
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| August 6, 2008 09:45 AM |
We Are Media Project: A Lesson in Eating Your Own Dog FoodFirst things first, have you ever had to eat your own dog food? I’m talking about the idea of having to take your own advice, use the strategies and approaches yourself that you advocate to others. The We Are Media Project from NTEN and Beth Kanter is a lesson in just that! The goal of the project is to “build a toolkit and instructional guides about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.” Sounds great, but the catch is that it is all being done remotely, with social media experts all contributing to the project wiki. This means collective lessons in community building, community engagement, participant retention and working wikily! So, will it work? We have just entered week 6, Considering the ROI of Social Media. Topics already covered include: Why Should Your Nonprofit Embrace Social Media? (Or Not?), Thinking Strategically About Social Media, The Social Media Ready Nonprofit: Dealing with Resistance, The Art of Storytelling, and Online Community Engagement Strategies and Skills. I have been a participant from the start and have paid thoughtful attention to the way the project has grown and the ways Beth has encouraged participation. If you have ever worked on a collaborative project, especially in a wiki, you may have noticed participants that only lurk in the shadows, contributors who burn out, conversations that get abandoned, or even just an overall loss of momentum as people revert to sending individual emails or not participating at all. There is an assumption when working on something like the We Are Media Project that those involved will be less likely to abandon the work or feel intimidated by the technology (after all, these are the folks advocating for others to use the technologies!). Even though the community involved is already sold on the topic and approach, it still doesn’t guarantee success. In these first six weeks, I have seen a great deal of participation, positive interaction, and real collaboration. For example, when one contributor offers up an idea that gets others thinking, the other participants turn that one idea into a list of ideas. Beth has done a great job of energizing contributors and the evidence is in all of the content throughout the wiki. Some of the the hardest parts of the project so far for the organizer (Beth), from my perspective, include:
Whether you are interested in social media tools for nonprofits, or not, this is a great example of a collaborative project - successfully eating the dog food! There are tremendous offerings from social media experts that are valuable on their own, but when combined in to a training kit will produce an invaluable package for nonprofits and those working with them on social media strategy and implementation. If you are a social media expert, be sure to check it out and share some of your knowledge! Have you ever been part of a collaborative project where you were the organizer or community builder? What lessons did you learn (maybe even the hard way)?
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| September 3, 2008 08:32 PM |
How I Became a Social EntrepreneurIn the spring of 2001, I had just moved to California and took a temporary administrative job at the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Center for Social Innovation. The two best things about that job were the people I worked with and the exposure to the amazing conferences and discussions that happened so frequently on campus. I remember first hearing the term “social entrepreneurship” in a lecture in Bishop Auditorium during my lunch break; I was instantly intrigued. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur! But doing what, exactly? I had no idea. The motivation, values, and energy were all there, but the specific context was missing. This was a problem. You can’t be a social entrepreneur without, well, a specific idea to implement. I felt like someone who wanted to be an author but had no idea what the book should be about, or someone who dreamt of going to the Olympics but hadn’t chosen a sport. So my task became choosing a context, and finding my one, specific mission. At least I wasn’t starting completely from scratch. I’d always known I wanted to do something to alleviate poverty, and to think globally about doing so. I tried to absorb everything about international development, poverty alleviation, and the like. I began digging, searching, reading, reflecting, journaling—just trying to figure out what in the world I could do to make an impact on poverty. I kept files with titles like “dream jobs” and “social entrepreneurs” and “international development courses/programs.” I’d have at least three to four lunches or coffee dates a week with anyone who knew anything about poverty. I worked overtime, sometimes doing extra projects (or entire extra jobs) to see more, learn more, absorb more, more quickly. Even while at Stanford, I had a second job evenings and weekends, as a live-in “house mom” and manager of New Creation Ministries in East Palo Alto, a home for underprivileged teenage moms and their kids. It was a whirlwind, but boy, did I learn a lot! A few years later, in the fall of 2003, I was no longer a temp, and was serving the GSB as a senior program manager in the Public Management Program. One evening, I stuck around after work to hear yet another speaker on campus. He was talking about something related to banking, which I knew nothing about, but apparently he worked with very poor entrepreneurs. It sounded like it could be up my alley, so I went. The speaker that evening was Dr. Muhammad Yunus. Hearing his story changed my life. Something clicked. This sounded like a fit. This was my context. I wanted to figure out how to contribute to the work of microfinance. In his November 2007 blog entry highlighting “Six Lessons of Kiva,” Guy Kawasaki references this time in my life: “Bank on unproven people. What would the ideal background be of the founder of Kiva? Investment banker from Goldman Sachs? Vice president of the World Bank? Vice president of the Peace Corps? Vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation? Partner at McKinsey? How about temporary administrative assistant at the Stanford business school? Because that’s how Jessica started her quest. The spark that lit the fire was a speech by Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner.” It’s true—I was, for all intents and purposes, “unproven.” But, that was OK, because I’d been quietly preparing. When Dr. Yunus came to campus, my ears and eyes and heart were open. I knew what else was out there in the social sector, and I knew that this was a beautiful fit for me. I was ready to take the next step. Things happened quickly from that moment onward. I began to take very specific action, in a specific context (microfinance)—I didn’t just dream about it. A few months later, I quit my job at Stanford to join Village Enterprise Fund (VEF), a San Mateo-based nonprofit focusing on micro-enterprise development and training in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. I moved to East Africa to begin my VEF work, through which I met more than 100 entrepreneurs whose stories would inspire the creation of Kiva. Kiva became my specific mission. From a handful of friends and family members lending $3,000 to seven entrepreneurs in Uganda, as of this blog entry, Kiva has facilitated nearly $40 million in loans from 330,000 lenders to 60,000 entrepreneurs worldwide. A funny thing happened while we were building Kiva: I actually forgot about my initial obsession with the idea of being a social entrepreneur. Only retroactively have I been able to look back at the last few years and say, “Oh, yeah… I guess that happened!” My vision got specific. The tasks in front of me each day got specific. Those initial dreams about what I wanted to be, a social entrepreneur, led me to a specific mission for what I wanted to do, Kiva. For anyone out there who finds themselves in a similar place—wanting to be a social entrepreneur, but not knowing where to focus or how to start—here are some ideas: Learn: Read, research, write, etc. Go to lectures. Absorb whatever you can on the topics that interest you. Get an idea of what the issues are. Take a class or just make up your own little reading lists and assignments if you love structure. Listen: Reach out to a real, specific, human being who could be your “customer” (someone whose problems you want to understand, and who you’d like to serve by addressing those problems). Listen very carefully. Learn as much as you can. Then, reach out to another person, then another, then another. (Read Paul Polak’s amazing book, Out of Poverty, for much more on this concept!) Ask: As you start to amass questions and can’t find the answers yourself, reach out to people who might. Get their opinions, their insight, their advice. Learn how their organizations work, what problems they face, what challenges and successes they’ve had. A special note: There are many ways to be entrepreneurial and create significant social change without starting your own organization. Sometimes you can be more effective at doing the specific thing you want to do in the world by joining an existing group or project, and revolutionizing from within. Jump: At a certain point, you just need to start pursuing what resonates with you. Follow it as best you can, wherever it leads. It’s OK if you don’t know what the next five steps are. It’s enough to take one step in the direction of your interest. Sometimes you can only find the second step after you’ve taken the first one. Keep Dreaming: Kiva represents my wildest dream of what I wanted to do in the world. And it’s happening! I couldn’t be more thankful for this. But something else is happening too: The faster Kiva goes, the more it grows, and the more I’m convinced that other great changes are possible in the world. I hope never to stop dreaming, preparing, and being ready to see what’s next.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| September 4, 2008 05:04 PM |
Social Enterprise in Scotland: The World Forum
I’m here in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the first-ever Social Enterprise World Forum. There are over 400 attendees from 25 countries, all here to talk about how to use business to accomplish social outcomes. And Scotland is a logical place for such an event. “Social enterprise is a key part of the Scottish government’s social strategy,” says Ruth Parsons, Director of the Public Sector (Scottish government). Plus, the Social Enterprise Alliance is a cosponsor of the event, and we’re scheduled to host the third world forum in San Francisco in 2010. One of the fun aspects of social enterprise conferences is to visit the social enterprises. Before the conference was formally opened, there were three different study tours available to attendees. I visited the One World Shop and learned about the history of the fair trade movement. The UK is probably the leading country in the world for consumption of fair trade products, mainly because fair trade has become a mainstream concept in supermarkets here. We then walked through Edinburgh on a lovely, sunny afternoon to the Soap Company. This social enterprise sells hand-made soaps, creating production and retail jobs. It’s part of the Forth Sector, a regional social enterprise group with a handful of enterprises. The opening ceremony had a mind-boggling location: Edinburgh Castle. I haven’t been to a social enterprise conference where the opening event included viewing the crown jewels of the country! We had drinks overlooking the city, and the kilts were out in force. The introductory speeches highlighted the Scottish national government’s commitment to social enterprise, which is a noteworthy aspect of the sector here in Scotland and in the UK. The UK actually has a government minister for the Third Sector, who is focused on social enterprise (he’s due to speak on the second day of the conference). I also learned about devolution here in Scotland, which means that the Scottish national government now has responsibility for issues that used to be controlled by the UK central government. This makes the social enterprise scene just a bit more complicated here!
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| September 9, 2008 11:47 AM |
The Democracy 2.0 Grant Summit: An Experiment in Collective GrantmakingIn recent weeks, the nonprofit blogosphere has been abuzz with anticipation of Washington, D.C. becoming the “Social Change Valley of North America”. No, I’m not referring to the implications of a White House regime change. The moniker Change Valley comes from the high concentration within the beltway of nonprofits, foundations, and companies using technology to effect social change. Among the many groups leveraging social media for social change in the DC area are Global Giving, EchoDitto, The Sunlight Foundation, The Case Foundation, Care2, DemocracyInAction, Razoo, AskYourLawmaker, the Genocide Intervention Network, OneWorld.net, and finally a group called Mobilize.org. Last month, I talked with Ian Storrar and Maya Enista of Mobilize.org about their upcoming Democracy 2.0 Grant Summit, a “grantmaking summit” designed to put “citizens at the center of democracy.” On September 18-21, between 75 and 100 representatives from the millennial generation will get together to discuss the role of money in politics. Their task is to come up with five technology projects that would reduce the influence of wealth and special interest groups in policymaking. Each of the five projects selected through a combination of keypad voting and expert judges will receive between $3,000 and $5,000 in funding. The money is intended to kick-start the development and launch of winning projects. Thanks to funding from The Sunlight Foundation, registration for the event is free. Projects will be evaluated based on five categories:
I have taken a special interest in the grantmaking summit model that the Democracy 2.0 forum represents. Once proven as an effective way to discuss critical social issues while focusing on actionable takeaways, then I suspect we’ll see an increasing number of these face-to-face forums wherein attendees receive funding for technology projects they would like to implement. The possibilities for this model are endless. Inspired by the example in Washington, D.C., informal groups with access to either institutional or grassroots funding could meet up, deliberate, and make plans to implement projects of their own choosing. It’s governance without the representatives. Or in technology lingo, it’s where Meetup.com converges with micro-philanthropy. To the extent that the Democracy 2.0 Grant Summit is successful in “changing the pattern of civic engagement,” it will keep the blogosphere buzzing about Washington, D.C. becoming the Social Change Valley of North America, despite politics as usual.
Posted by Jennifer Roberts
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| October 29, 2008 11:15 AM |
Making Sense of the Social Capital Landscape: Defining a Common Language
I recently collaborated on a white paper with colleagues from the Calvert Social Investment Foundation, a pioneer in social investing, and McKinsey and Company, the large corporate consultancy that has an ambitious goal: to make sense of the Social Capital Landscape. Our goal is to define a common language. We began by bringing in definitions from the traditional capital markets and mixing them with language and metrics from the non profit world in what we hope will become, as our thesis evolves, a coherent picture. Our thesis is here, and we presented it as a work in progress to the more than 635 people who attended the recent Social Capital Markets conference at Ft. Mason in San Francisco. To get the people at Socap08 involved and to see if we were on the right track, we turned the target graphic (zeroing in from relief to recovery to development to systemic change in the “bullseye”) into a grid, then printed it out 30 feet wide on the wall. Every registered attendee had three small adhesive name tags, a red one for their primary interest and two black ones. Nearly 400 people literally “put themselves on the map” during the course of the event, saying they were involved in health care and development, or housing and systemic change. The readiness of people to put themselves on the map, and the natural sector-focused groupings that arose from the exercise and other context building tools we provided at the conference makes us think we are indeed on the right track; people do want a landscape to the area of social investing and are eager to put themselves “on the map” and talk with their “neighbors” in contiguous industry/impact sectors and relevant asset classes. All of that self-reported contextual information is being turned into an online database that should be available soon. One thing that became clear, literally at first glance, however, is that almost no one put themselves on the map at the outer ring of relief. Partly, I think that is because we limited that category too much; we said it only included things like responses to “a natural disaster or human security crisis.” In the paper itself, we said that included things like soup kitchens and domestic abuse hotlines, but the example on the grid on the wall had fewer examples, and included things like tsunami relief. Even if we had been clearer, however, I think that at a conference like Socap focusing on ways to invest with a positive social impact, areas like relief will be under represented. If that is going to be the case, I think it’s important to state clearly that there is no hierarchy of virtue. Even though systemic change creates lasting results and creates multipliers, it is not by nature superior to relief. If the relief aid isn’t provided in a timely and effective manner, then the community won’t be intact for recovery, development or systemic change efforts. All of these types of social impact are necessary and important. Asking that qualitative question of whether relief is less valuable than systemic changes brings up the issue of impact metrics; one of the noisiest and most contentious areas and one I have tried for the most part to stay out of. Two things have changed my perspective; new money has come into the social capital market; more than 400 of the 635 people who attended Socap08 registered after Lehman Brothers went under; they were interested in a new kind of capital market that includes the traditional investment criteria of risk and return but they also wanted to include the third dimension of social impact as they made their decisions. New investors, even the new money trickling in during the current financial crisis, demand a way to evaluate the return on their impact. So the metrics field will no longer be the domain of squabbling insiders jealous of their terms and yardsticks. It will have to get real, because capital flows in and out of the market will demand it. I have some ideas for the kind of metrics required: metrics that do no harm, and that create more value than they cost. In addition, it is not appropriate to apply a systemic change metric to an effort that is properly in the relief area. To ask people running a soup kitchen to document the root cause of homelessness is to apply a systemic metric to a relief question. The result is less money devoted to mission, and a distraction to the people who know their first priority is to feed the people who come in off the street. If more metrics equal less lasagna in the bellies of hungry people, then it’s a metric that does harm. One of the virtues of San Francisco’s huge homeless population is that you can easily see where homelessness fits in at every point on the social impact target map. Soup kitchens and needle exchange/shower facilities and shelters are in the relief sector; they are just about meeting today’s needs. Transitional and group housing moves to the recovery space. The job training programs like the Chef’s program, which leads formerly homeless people into careers as cooks, could be classified as development, as could some of the low income housing initiatives. Systemic change efforts are harder and by their nature take longer and involve coordination across multiple stakeholder groups, but they exist as well. The takeaway? Just because a new capital market is arising, where investors are learning to put their money into social enterprises that can deliver scalable social impact, create systemic level change, and return capital, does not mean that investing is the answer to all social problems. Philanthropy and public sector support will have a continuing and increasingly coordinated role to play as the social capital market evolves. The problems in the relief sector are not going away and capital that asks for a financial return may not often be the answer in that sector. Giving still matters and is not going away. Feeding people at a soup kitchen today is still a good thing to do. And that is likely to be true for the foreseeable future. Metrics will matter as the social capital market forms. They need to be metrics that do no harm and that provide more value than they cost.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| November 6, 2008 02:54 PM |
The Secret SauceBoth Barack Obama and John McCain used the Internet to reach voters this election—but Obama mastered the medium early “and exploited it to the hilt,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder of TechPresident.com. There’s no question: Election 2008 will go down in the books as the first nationwide political contest for social capital. In an interview today with Cause Global, Rasiej credits Team Obama’s “culture of belief in the Internet” for building a movement for change among ordinary citizens energized via social media into a community of engaged, viral marketers for Obama’s campaign. The Web strategy, says Rasiej, was critical in helping the Illinois senator win the White House. (Indeed, an analysis of the vote today by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press says that without a doubt, “the overwhelming backing of younger voters was a critical factor in Obama’s victory.” Obama drew two-thirds—or 66 percent—of the vote among those younger than age 30, Pew reports. In addition, Trendrr, an online statistics mashup tool, shows Obama had a clear lead in using social media to connect to his audience, as well as an overall lead in winning the attention of the blogosphere as a whole. On social networks, Trendrr says, Obama held a big lead over McCain, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared with McCain’s 219,404. Between November 3rd and 4th (election day) alone, Obama gained more than 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, says ReadWriteWeb, Obama gained 2,865 new followers between November 3rd and 4th, for a total of 118,107, while John McCain’s Twitter account only had 4,942 followers in total.) Team Obama also saw an opportunity in exploiting the flagging credibility of mainstream media—again chiefly among younger voters. “[Obama’s team] leap-frogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them [via social media] once it was uploaded,” Rasiej said. Especially in the final days before November 4th, Obama’s campaign sent daily emails and text messages directly to supporters, urging them to vote with friends, participate in phone drives, and volunteer at campaign events—even offering up a contest in which last-minute donors could be selected to attend Obama’s election-night party in Chicago. Says Rasiej: “Going forward, social capital will become increasingly more valuable than fundraising dollars…The political power of the future will be a question of how robust and engaged a political entity’s [social] network will be”—not just how much money a candidate has in the bank or how many friends he/she has in Congress.” A key lesson for cause activists everywhere from the election? Says Rasiej: “What we’re really seeing here is the reaction of a new network publicsphere—or, you could argue, a whole new political media ecology, a generational shift that’s empowering an entirely new human experience of participatory, civic engagement. It’s taking our former notions of civic engagement and redefining it as something continuously very relevant to people’s lives.” For more on the lessons for nonprofits in Election 2008, check out Tom Watson’s post today at onPhilanthropy.com, where he is a consultant and writer. Watson is also the author of the forthcoming Cause Wired, a book about the use of social media in advocacy. Writes Watson: “While there is a temptation among those who track causes and online fundraising to separate political organizing from philanthropy, I think that’s a mistake—it’s wishing for a division that the audience simply won’t tolerate going forward. It’s like hoping that a print classified operation will continue to grow during the age of Craigslist. Young people don’t separate their causes into neat little boxes labeled politics and charity. They simply respond to what moves them, what their friends recommend, what they believe might change the world. “...It’s no accident that my nonprofit clients are asking about Web sites like Barack Obama’s. The [old] order is rapidly fading.”
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| January 14, 2009 10:00 AM |
Competition vs. Cooperation at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP)There are two competing philosophies that, at first glance, seem to both provide value to the base of the pyramid (BoP) approach – competition and cooperation. In my mind, the BoP theory is as close as any to a “free-market” approach to development, as it promotes competition that will bring the best products and services to meet unmet demand. Competition is a part of a self-regulating market. It inhibits price-gouging, encourages multiple product and business model designs, and provides consumers with choice – all key tenants of the BoP philosophy. However, as organizations working at the BoP compete, their focus can shift – from the customer to the competitor. If competition is not dealt with properly, it becomes a battle of resources and reputation, instead of a fight to serve the poor in the best way possible. A similar phenomenon has plagued the NGO community over the years, and this is partially caused by serving two masters – the “client” on the ground and the “donor” (agency, charity, government) in the developed markets. Were the NGO community unconcerned about serving the latter, we would probably not see as many fancy websites or media releases – but the truth of the matter is that we need both constituencies. I am not saying that we do not need BoP organizations to engage in competition on the ground, but rather that from what I have seen that is not where the battle has been waged. From my perch at the William Davidson Institute, I have seen that as competition heightens, resources and energy shift away from improving direct delivery of goods and services towards building legitimacy in established markets. Leaders tell their teams: we have to have a case study written about us; it is time to re-brand ourselves; our Web site needs a facelift; why don’t we try to co-brand with a company, etc. When it comes to organizations that are attempting to work at the BoP, but still reliant on legitimacy (i.e. funding and talent) from developed markets, there may be value in cooperation — a word that can leave free-marketeers shuddering with fears of inefficiencies. Why cooperate? According to NextBillion.net’s Rob Katz, the base of the pyramid market is still largely a free-for-all. The vast, untapped nature of the market means that it will take numerous organizations, working together, to spark more interest and investment in the BoP before the stakes are high enough to worry about stashing resources. According to Katz, “I would note that no VC fund in its right mind cooperates with its direct competitors, but it is a testament to (a) the size of the market and (b) the sub-optimal state of the field that Acumen Fund and others are looking to cooperate as much as we are when it comes to supporting small and growing businesses at the BoP. If this were a truly commercial opportunity, we could not be working together as we do. The fact is, it is still VERY much a hybrid space, and we need to band together to create a commercially viable, investable asset class. That’s why there’s plenty of cooperation. “I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. Brian Trelstad at Acumen Fund and Willy Foote of Root Capital have both articulated these ideas to me recently, and each notes that the need to cooperate in a hybrid space is what’s driving the growth of the new Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs. Think about how microfinance has grown – 30 years ago, non-commercial, hybrid microfinance institutions were all banding together at conferences. Gradually, with a lot of philanthropic support, they’ve developed a real industry, and now microfinance is a commercial, investment-grade asset class. We need to do that with small and growing businesses serving the base of the pyramid market.” Despite the benefits of cooperation, and the numerous networks that have been established to promote cross- pollenization in the field, such as ANDE and PDMS/Pulse, BoP organizations, like any business or NGO, are concerned with their own growth and survival. Take talent, for example. The war for talented individuals with the skills and the passion to work at the BoP is intense. If an employee at a U.S. intermediary organization were to decide that he or she may be better suited for a project on the ground, how likely is it that his or her employer would say, “Oh yes, that sounds great, we want you to have the greatest impact possible.” It is much more likely that the organization would do everything in its power to hold on to that highly-skilled person, regardless of whether or not it resulted in the greatest good for society. This is partially because we believe that our organization, and our cause, with which have sacrificed so much for, must be doing the most good. Let’s take another salient example – intellectual property and technology rights. In the field of transporting water, there are many competing designs. The producers of the Hippo Water Roller, a South-African based design, have chosen to not patent their technology. Co-founder Cynthia Koenig told me that this is because: “Rather than trying to control our design, we’d prefer to serve as an inspiration for similar tools. After all, we’re trying to solve a problem, and realistically, we won’t be able to distribute Hippos to all the 1.1 billion people who lack easy access to water.” It’s main competitor – The Q-Drum, which is also located in South Africa, has chosen to take out a patent for its similar design. I’m not saying that either approach is better. In fact, founders of both organizations may believe that their approach to competition vs. cooperation may result in the best outcome for the BoP. Many staunchly believe that design for the BoP should be open source, but others point to the fact that patents can create incentives for innovation and result in better quality control. Which approach results in the greatest good for the greatest number? Maybe the inherent enigma is tied to the fact that most BoP organizations are still serving the dual interests of talent, donors, and media in the developed world while providing on-the-ground services to customers that probably can’t even read their glossy English Web sites. However, there has certainly also been a push for greater cooperation in the BoP space, as we have learned from our NGO colleagues. In my mind, there is value in both cooperation and competition. I think that there is something to be found in the delicate balance of bringing together diverse perspectives on the back-end to establish a market of free competition that leaves the fate of the organization in the choice of the end-user.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| January 20, 2009 11:00 AM |
Will Recovery Effort Dilute Obama’s Giving-Sector Strategy?While mildly optimistic the Obama administration can build a true partnership with the giving sector to take on America’s toughest social problems, a leading scholar of the sector fears the massive job of reviving the failing U.S. economy could limit or even doom the hope for that collaboration. “My great fear is that the economic recovery will become Barack Obama’s Vietnam War, and will drive out the resources and attention and political capital that could be used for a whole variety of promising possibilities that relate to the nonprofit sector,” says Lester Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Salamon helped organized a two-day meeting Jan. 13 and 14 at which roughly a dozen nonprofit and foundation leaders reviewed recently-circulating proposals on a policy agenda for the giving sector in working with the new administration. Participants at the gathering, held at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Conference Center in Tarrytown, N.Y., included a nonprofit consultant who has been involved in the transition but was not there representing it, Salamon says. All participants were assured they would be speaking as individuals and not necessarily as representatives of their organizations, he says. He declined to identify participants but says they represent nonprofit intermediary organizations that have nonprofit and foundation members. Within two weeks or so, he says, the group should release its recommendations. While he would not discuss details until the recommendations are released, Salamon says everyone who attended received a policy-agenda document he had prepared that drew on the work of the Listening Post Project at the Center for Civil Society Studies. That effort has been tracking the views of grassroots nonprofits and collecting empirical data on nonprofits and the operating and policy issues they face. During the election campaign last fall, the project issued a communiqué that summarized nonprofit executives’ ideas about policies the new president should pursue to address America’s big social problems. While he would not provide a copy of the eight-to-10-page policy document he prepared, saying some of its ideas likely will be included in the new recommendations, Salamon says that document reflects many of the findings of the Listening Post Project. Among the issues the document addresses, he says, he lays out three broad areas in which the nonprofit sector should be involved in efforts to fix the economy. “It’s an incredible delivery system that should be part of the recovery program,” he says. In the face of proposals for a big increase in federal funds for emergency services, for example, Salamon calls for those funds to flow though groups like local United Ways and community foundations to nonprofits that provide direct services. He also calls for matching grants nonprofits could match with volunteer hours, a strategy he says could help mobilize citizens in the recovery effort, including those who are unemployed. Separately, he says, he has suggested to members of the Obama transition team a specific vehicle for handling funds for emergency food and housing programs. Mortgage relief also is the focus of recommendations in the document for addressing nonprofits’ role in the economic recovery, Salamon says. The national network of low-income housing groups and housing-finance institutions, for example, could serve as a vehicle to help work out problem mortgage loans, he says. “These organizations have enormous track records and experience dealing with low-income mortgage borrowers,” he says. “They’ve got experience in how to structure loans for low-income persons that would be an excellent use” of funds distributed through the government’s massive Troubled Assets Relief Program, known as TARP. The third set of recommendations in Salamon’s document involving nonprofits’ role in the economic recovery address emergency incentives for charitable giving and volunteering “that would help bring extra hands into this recovery effort,” he says. In one controversial proposal, he says, he calls for temporary suspension of the excise tax on foundation earnings if foundations in return increase their grants to direct-service organizations above the five percent of their assets they are required to pay out. The document also addresses ideas to support “capacity-building” in the giving sector, Salamon says. He says he is “mildly optimistic” the Obama administration will develop strategic policies to foster greater collaboration with the giving sector and spur more charitable giving and volunteering. Having worked as a community organizer, Obama “understands community institutions and nonprofits,” Salamon says, and the incoming administration seems to recognize “the potential of nonprofits to improve policy and improve ways in which we solve public problems in this country that is refreshing and unusual.” The new administration also has an “apparent openness to a set of ideas that connect to the nonprofit sector very directly” and with a perspective “that really takes account of the actual operations of nonprofits and doesn’t go off on ideological diversions.” The outgoing Bush administration has had the “ideological perception that the sector is a substitute for government, that government can back off and nonprofits and volunteers and philanthropy can fill the gap,” Salamon says. “It was not truly a partnership.” The incoming administration, in comparison, has a “better sense of government as a true partner of the sector,” he says. But he cautions that his appraisal is “still speculation and vulnerable to the pressures that are going to arise and already are arising from the demands of the economic recovery.”
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| January 21, 2009 10:00 AM |
It’s Time to Turn Back the DialI woke up today to a brand new America. An America where any individual can live their wildest dreams and where our collective action can make a difference. I was fortunate to be at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. yesterday as our new President Barack Obama was sworn in. The subsequent Inaugural speech he delivered was so right for the moment. It was as if our incredible crowd of a million people were being forgiven for living mediocre lives for so long, and were now being given permission to be our naturally wonderful selves again. Sometimes we just need someone to give us permission to fly. What President Obama has given many of us, I think, is a new sense of responsibility—to our country and to ourselves. Poet Maya Angelou has said that we all must take responsibility for the space we occupy. Shirley Chisholm put it a slightly different way when she declared that service is the rent we pay to be on this Earth. However you want to spin it, millions of Americans all over the country today are inspired to do something better with their lives. Pop diva Beyonce was beside herself with emotion last night as she sang “At Last” to the new President and First Lady, saying that Obama makes her want to be smarter, to get more involved. The voice of the next generation, in particular, knows now what we must do. It is time for us to begin turning back the dial. John St. Augustine knows a little something about the span of a life. He gave a talk last year about “living the uncommon life” and how urgent it is for us to make deliberate choices with our time here on Earth. If, on average, we will only live to age 77 or so, what will you do in those short years during the remaining timeline of your life? Most of us already know what we must do. What we have always longed for in our heart of hearts, in our wildest of dreams. My Life List has even compiled 90 of the most sought-after human goals. What has happened is that we have tuned out for so long, keeping ourselves busy with everything else on our to-do lists. We have lost the signal. I believe Barack Obama, in his inaugural speech yesterday, did not just lay the groundwork for a new attitude in America. He also called us as individuals to be responsible for the space we occupy. He called us to turn back the dial and reclaim that signal of hope, that radio station on the inside that compels us to live well and do good. Deep inside of each of us, there is a glimmer of wanting light that wants to do something real and true. On a clear day like yesterday at the Capitol, you could see it on the faces of a million people shivering in the winter air, wearing nothing but hope on their faces. We have been forgiven for so many years of waiting until we get our ducks in a row before we do what we want to do in our lives. We have been given permission to fly as far as we want to go. We have all been inspired to turn back the dial and become better Americans in the process. Listen for what it is that you are called to do. And when you hear it, don’t wait. Do it now.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| February 9, 2009 10:00 AM |
A Technology Revolution for Revolutions!In the good ol’ USA it’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet has transformed power dynamics. In some respects, it took the Internet to push out the old guard and bring in the new—and the first minority president in the history of our nation. Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters compared to McCain. He also had 24 times the number of Twitter followers and three times the number of website visitors to his site in the final weeks of the campaign. Voters watched 15 million hours of Obama video on YouTube and his campaign regularly emailed approximately 13 million people and received of course half a billion dollars in online donations. The Washington Post termed this the “YouTube Presidency.” The revolutionizing of revolutions is not only an American phenomenon; it has quickly become a critical catalyst behind collective action throughout the world. Interestingly these Internet savvy activists are using tools not designed initially or intended for these purposes, but they are powerful tools nonetheless with regards to social action, labor action and really any kind of collective action. In its article, Revolution, Facebook-Style, the New York Times reported recently about how these Web 2.0 tools have been adopted for Jihad but also to protest dictatorial leaders in police states. As the Internet improves at exponential rates, so too will the way it is harnessed for the sake of power and influence. It will be used for forces of good and forces of bad. Similarly the Economist wrote recently about how online protest spontaneously emerged after the Greek police shot a young boy, facilitated by an online-enabled self-organization. Activism does not only affect those in political power, but also big business. In 2007, the first virtual strike was organized in Second Life and caused IBM’s CEO of Italy to resign and the workers to gain better terms in their union negotiations. See the video below. Labor strikes, PR scandals and government regulation are all examples of non-market threats that are recognized as a major business risk in today’s economy. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry every year. As the nature of this threat transforms itself and grows more daunting with the adoption of new social software technologies and the saturation of internet penetration, business will need to react. Social protest and advocacy is evolving at a similar pace as well threatening those in political power. They will need to embrace this phenomenon as quickly as those without power. Existing tools and future Web tools yet to have emerged are not going to be used only for insurgents trying to overrun those in power: a tool for revolutionaries. They are utilities whose fundamental value is to help crowds emerge into organized campaigns deployed as a force by the organizers, be it those in power or those seeking greater influence. However, because crowd-sourcing is most effective when voluntary, those businesses, organizations or governments looking to do so better be in the right. They better have such great products and such good policies that their supporters and evangelists are willing to hit the e-streets. One more point for democracy!
He’s starting Blitz Bazaar because “there is nothing more exhilarating than building an enterprise that changes the world.”
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| March 31, 2009 10:00 AM |
SkollFestThe annual Skoll World Forum in Oxford —called the “Davos for social entrepreneurs”—is always about celebrating up-and-coming and established entrepreneurs who don’t simply want to get rich but also want to forge innovative solutions to the world’s social problems. But this year’s event, sold-out despite the dismal global economy, was as much about achieving some legitimacy, at last, for the fledgling new field. At the time of the first Skoll Forum six years ago, social entrepreneurship was seen “as an interesting but ephemeral fad” by those in mainstream business, academia, government, and the media, said Skoll Centre Director Pamela Hartigan. But not anymore: these same people, Hartigan said, are now finding that social entrepreneurship has been “a harbinger of future organizations, systems, and practices.” The forum—which was held in what Skoll’s Oxford Centre Chairman Stephan Chambers called “the most chilling economic environment we’ve ever experienced”—was hosted by Oxford University and Jeff Skoll’s social enterprise foundation last week. [Skoll, who was the first employee and first president of eBay, also is the founder of the independent movie company, Participant Productions.] Some 785 delegates from 65 countries attended the event, the biggest-ever Skoll forum, including Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and currently the founder and president of Peace Worlds Group, and Soraya Salti, senior vice president of INJAZ al-Arab, a youth education and empowerment project in Jordan. A wide range of panels Thursday and Friday included talks entitled The Uses and Abuses of Power in Social Innovation, Capital Markets in Crisis, Powerful Women: Shifting the Status Quo, Technology and Shifting Power in a Hyper-Connected World, and Tomorrow’s News: Models for an Everyone-is-Media World. Cause Global covered parts of the conference, which we at SSIR will be cross-posting this week. Among some of the first-day’s highlights:
We’ll be running more highlights through the week. For more on social entrepreneurs and the state of social innovation, see this recent article in The Economist.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| April 3, 2009 09:30 AM |
SkollFest WrapsA week ago today, the Skoll World Forum at Oxford University concluded, with its leaders and many of its delegates declaring that the failures of the global economy have given legitimacy, at last, to the new field of social entrepreneurship. The growing ranks of business innovators who also want to solve the world’s social problems, they said, now seem the best hope for institutional innovation in the 21st century. “Our trusted institutions have turned out to be stunningly untrustworthy, ” said Colin Mayer, the dean of the Said Business School, the site of the conference. “While governments around the world believe they are in control and that the old order will soon re-emerge, you can be sure they are not and it won’t. Now, more than ever, there is a need and opportunity for institutional innovations.” Social entrepreneurship used to be seen as “an interesting but ephemeral fad,” said Skoll Centre Director Pamela Hartigan—but not anymore. Those in mainstream business, academia, government, and the media “are now finding that [this movement] has been, indeed, a harbinger of future organizations, systems, and practices.” Jeffrey Skoll, in concluding remarks, urged delegates to step up their leadership efforts in the coming year. He quoted the American economist Paul Romer as saying, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Among closing-session highlights:
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| April 6, 2009 11:09 AM |
Social Innovation in the White HouseIn the midst of a thoughtful discussion at the Wagner Center of the competing demands on philanthropies for funding of overtaxed social services and of social-change advocacy, big news: the White House is about to announce creation of the long-proposed Office of Social Innovation to bring together government responses and resources to the concerns of the philanthropic and charitable sectors. Bureaucratic-style confirmation: the office appears on the list at whitehouse.gov. Speculation about possible leadership has begun.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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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.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| April 16, 2009 12:50 PM |
The Innovation ImperativeI set out to write about President Obama’s forward-thinking decision to create an Office of Social Innovation to unleash new approaches to solving problems that have resisted traditional approaches. Even though the office and a related social innovation fund are still in their early planning stages and not even officially been announced, it is already clear to me that they represent a significant opportunity. By creating this office and fund, President Obama is giving a clear signal of support for principles near and dear to Venture Philanthropy Partners: that the nation must invest in innovation targeted at the public good, that outcomes and impact matter, that dollars should flow preferentially to those who are having the greatest impact in addressing our growing social needs. But a funny thing happened on the way to that blog item. After sharing a draft with others, wiser than I, to test ideas and “poke the system,” it became apparent that I was missing the forest for the trees. There’s no question that shining the spotlight on social innovation is remarkably important. Yet it will require innovation of the broadest possible breadth and depth if we are to solve our most vexing social challenges. So instead of focusing on social innovation, I feel compelled to lift up a level and talk about innovation more broadly. I am convinced that, amid the many challenges facing our President, nothing is more important for the long-term strength of our nation than driving greater levels of innovation across all sectors of our economy, including the nonprofit sector. From the halls of Congress to the rural towns in our heartland, we simply have to come to grips with the fact that the rest of the world is no longer ceding the role of lead innovator to America. Emerging powers like China are seriously challenging us in our core competency. As the journalist James Fallows concludes in an outstanding cover story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, “China [is using the economic downturn] to design innovative products that will get it the high profits and the high-value jobs Americans kept to themselves for decades. And that is very bad news for the United States, unless it uses tough times to reinvent itself, too.”
America has a deep, proud tradition of innovation. But we don’t have this existential urgency and, in spite of all we’ve done, we do not enjoy a full cultural embrace of innovation. We desperately need that urgency and embrace. Through radical innovation in our commercial, nonprofit, and public sectors, we must break the status quo that is too often miring us in mediocrity—from how we manufacture our products to how we educate our children, from how we consume energy to how we provide health care. We have no choice but to discover and deliver new, different, and better ways of dealing with our most vexing challenges. The aftermath of the financial crisis and threats to our global leadership will put America’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to the test of its life!
Motivation. The tumultuous industry shake-ups in the 1970s and ’80s caused a breakdown in trust for a generation of employees, blue and white collar alike. The shake-ups dramatically changed the mindset of millions who lost their jobs as a result of—pick your euphemism—“downsizing,” “restructuring,” “consolidation,” “merger,” “outsourcing,” or “reductions in force.” I witnessed this in several ways. First, the software firm I co-founded helped a number of Fortune 500 firms consolidate operations, with resultant large, well, reductions in force. And, in our own firm, when I had the bitter task of telling good friends that I was letting them go, one looked me in the eye and said, “I understand what you have to do, but, @%*!, I’ll never work for someone again!” He struck out on his own; many others across our nation did the same. Less obvious is how their sons and daughters internalized what they saw. When many of them started careers in the 1990s, they became entrepreneurs, embraced “free agency,” or went to work for smaller start-ups. They chased their dreams, drove change, and satisfied their desire for independence and self-actualization. New Capital. Although wealthy individuals had invested through venture capital for a long time, the volume of capital exploded in the 1980s and ’90s as a result of changes in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and an influx of large institutional investors. This vast source of capital funded many aspiring entrepreneurs and emerging business opportunities through the turn of the 20th century. Disruptive Technology. Early in the 1990s, the Internet, previously the domain of the Department of Defense and academic researchers, went mainstream. It gave the Davids of the world the power to compete with corporate Goliaths. Suddenly, an entrepreneur working from his or her basement had the power to access the world’s resources—anyone, any place, any time. The price of basic business technology plummeted.
What I do know for sure is that I’m picking up the early signs of a new convergence. Influx of Talent. The carnage in big corporations is going to drive millions of additional people—especially the young people who grew up in homes hit by corporate layoffs in the 1980s—to explore the entrepreneurial route. Clearly, the conditions are once again ripe for bright young minds to pour their energies into bootstrapping their own entrepreneurial ventures rather than tethering themselves to big companies. In addition to young talent, we will also see an influx of seasoned Baby Boomers, the most highly educated generation ever, who are looking for purpose through an “encore career” rather than retirement. Not all encore careers are entrepreneurial in nature, but the potential for innovation is enormous. Just take a look at the remarkable winners of the Purpose Prize, sponsored by Civic Ventures. I love the story of the former lighting director who built a $28 nut sheller that has made a huge impact on the lives of farmers in West Africa! In addition to these talent infusions, we will also see huge contributions from New Americans. A key ingredient to American success in innovation and invention has been its openness to new people with new ideas. A disproportionate number of innovators in America were born outside the United States, just as literally millions of small businesses were created by immigrants over the years. This is a vibrant source of talent for our future. New Mindset. With youth setting the tone for this talent, a new mindset is emerging. Compared with previous generations of entrepreneurs, a far greater proportion of entrepreneurs today seek to do well by doing good. From engineering students at MIT developing an inexpensive shock absorber that harnesses previously wasted energy and uses it to improve fuel efficiency to Stanford grads selling hundreds of thousands of solar-powered LED lights in poor communities in Africa and Asia, the new entrepreneurs are rejecting the greed and ethical lapses they’ve witnessed in their young lives. They have been heavily influenced by macro events like Katrina, global terrorism, growing threats to our climate, and the meltdown of our global financial system. They are much more socially conscious, inherently global, more concerned about the state of our planet, less enamored of traditional political-party orthodoxy, United Way, apple pie, and Chevrolet. YouTube, Stephen Colbert, and the Smart Car are much more relevant. New Network Technologies. Thanks to an entire new class of social networks, resource-matching and open-source models, and other innovations of the second generation of web development and design (Web 2.0), the Internet is becoming the ultimate tool, not just for connecting but also for organizing and coordinating across a broad and diverse continuum of resources—with a speed, ease, and effectiveness we’ve never witnessed before. The cost of coordination is falling to zero. If you had a good idea in 1970, it was incredibly hard to move it forward and bring it to market; it was often one man or woman against the world. In the 1980s, the arrival of the PC allowed the little guy to look big and compete in new ways. When the Internet arrived in the 1990s, one man or woman could suddenly sell to the world. Now, thanks to the newest Web-based tools, it’s not just about selling to the world anymore. The next wave is collaborating with the world. The time from idea to result will—again—shrink dramatically. We’ve only seen the first glimpses of this potential. For example, Barack Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois if not for the online tools 20-something Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and other innovators put into action. With a modest budget and small team of developers, Hughes and others created community-building tools for the Obama campaign website which made it far easier than ever before for motivated volunteers to organize themselves and mobilize others. Even when the vast majority of the Obama campaign’s staff and budget were focused in the critical early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Obama website was giving volunteers in every corner of the nation the training, talking points, images, databases, and other tools they needed in order to find supporters and get them to the polls. When it became clear that neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton was going to land a quick knockout, “all of a sudden it made a difference that we have 60 really organized groups in Kansas, a caucus state,” Hughes told Fast Company. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban just launched a fascinating experiment in what he calls “open source funding.” He has invited entrepreneurs anywhere in the world to post business plans on his blog. He hopes that his open approach will produce not just good investment opportunities for his company but also spark widespread innovation. “I expect other people can and will comment on [your idea]. I also expect that other people will steal the idea and use it elsewhere. That is the idea. If it’s a good idea and worth funding, we want it replicated elsewhere. The idea is not just to help you, but to figure out how to help the economy through hard work and ingenuity.”
If necessity is the mother of invention, then this crisis, which has laid bare the depth of our needs, provides us the dramatic necessity to drive innovation and spur entrepreneurs of all types and sizes to find ways to deal with our challenges. The real change makers will be those throughout the land in small and big enterprises, the new and the old, the scientific innovator to the obsessively compelled entrepreneur, across all sectors, who take up this challenge.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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