http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en nicholas_jenna@gsb.stanford.edu Copyright 2010 2010-02-24T07:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/all_entrepreneurship_is_social/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/all_entrepreneurship_is_social/ Over the past decade or so, the term social entrepreneur has become a fashionable way of describing individuals and organizations that, in their attempts at large-scale change, blur the traditional boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Given the ceaseless appearance of innovations and new institutional forms, we should welcome a new term that allows us to think systematically about a still-emergent field. One danger, however, is that the use of the modifier social will diminish the contributions of regular entrepreneurs—that is, people who create new companies and then grow them to scale. In the course of doing business as usual, these regular entrepreneurs create thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed, the intertwined histories of business and health in the United States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship. The pantheon of model social entrepreneurs should thus include names such as railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, meatpacking magnate Gustavus Swift, and software tycoon Bill Gates. THE STEW OF POVERTY People tend to think that advancements in health care, for example, are the achievements of either government or the social sector. More recently, they note how the work… Social Entrepreneurship 2010-03-17T15:35:33+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/settling_up/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/settling_up/ In 2000, while working for a national refugee resettlement organization in New York City, Jane Leu decided that the federally funded system of matching immigrants to careers was a failure. “We didn’t have an incentive to focus on [the] quality” of the placements, she remembers of her six years of putting highly educated, English-speaking foreigners in low-skill jobs. “It was just about quantity.” So with no funding, a borrowed laptop computer, and her kitchen table as a makeshift office, Leu started the nonprofit Upwardly Global, whose goal is to help highly skilled immigrants reclaim their careers in the United States. The beginning was rocky. With no funds and no employees, Leu was limited to one-on-one sessions with job seekers, reaching out to foundations for grants, and making employers aware of a hidden talent pool: 1.3 million bilingual workers with degrees and professional experience in every possible white-collar profession. Successes trickled in. By 2002, the organization received its first grant and hired its first paid employee. In 2003, Leu’s work was recognized by the Draper Richards Foundation when she became its first fellow, earning a $300,000 grant. Today, Upwardly Global employs 29 people to serve some 600 job seekers a year.… Human Rights 2010-03-04T23:15:03+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/merging_wisely/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/merging_wisely/ In the midst of the worldwide financial crisis, funders are increasingly suggesting that nonprofits consider merging—that is, fusing their boards, management, and legal entities to form a single organization. In 2009 alone, my consulting firm delivered nearly 60 presentations and workshops on mergers and other partnership forms to more than 6,000 participants—double the previous year’s tally. Similarly, our strategic restructuring practice (which handles mergers and other partnerships) grew 60 percent last year, during the worst part of the recession. Now 2010 is upon us, and the urge to merge shows no signs of abating. Underlying this trend are two core beliefs: The nonprofit sector has too many organizations, and most nonprofits are too small and are therefore inefficient. Mergers, the thinking goes, would reduce the intense competition for scarce funding. Consolidating organizations would also introduce economies of scale to the sector, increasing efficiency and improving effectiveness. Yet a closer look at the nonprofit sector suggests that this thinking is too simplistic. Mergers are risky business. They sometimes fail, although not so frequently as in the corporate world. They usually cost more than anticipated. They sometimes create more problems than they solve. And the problems that they allegedly solve—too many nonprofits,… Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy, Responsible Investing 2010-02-25T20:56:12+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_leap_forward_for_social_enterprises/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_leap_forward_for_social_enterprises/ Rubicon Bakery is deservedly famous for its 12-layer chocolate cakes and other rich confections that generate some $2 million annually in sales. Each sale helps underwrite job training and other programs for poor and disenfranchised people. This social enterprise works wonders for the 4,000 people in the San Francisco area that Rubicon Programs reaches annually with its bakery and landscaping businesses, along with its housing, mental health, legal aid, and other social services. But for those who are down and out in most other communities, chances are slim of finding the same kind of help. After 23 years at the helm of Rubicon Programs, Rick Aubry has decided it’s time to take “the next big leap forward,” and design social enterprises that can succeed on a national scale. “Most social enterprises have remained local or at best regional,” he says. Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army are rare exceptions, both using a thrift shop model that’s more than a century old. Figuring out what those national solutions might look like is the task facing Rubicon National Social Innovations. The best fit for scaling, Aubry predicts, will be a sustainable idea that fills a widely occurring need. Similar to for-profit franchises,… Social Entrepreneurship 2010-02-24T06:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_interviewer_beware/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_interviewer_beware/ Her suit is Prada. Her hair is neatly coiffed. Her handshake is firm and her eye contact steady. Her body leans forward ever so slightly to show that she is interested, but not anxious. Her easy banter manages to convey her many achievements without seeming arrogant. Her replies arise after thoughtful pauses. Her compliments seem sincere. And her next job is quite likely to be the one you are offering, suggests a new meta-analysis of several dozen studies. Combined, the studies show that hiring managers are remarkably susceptible to a job candidate’s appearance, gestures, postures, flattery, and self-promotion. Alas, the study also finds that these interviewer-wooing tactics have more to do with whether a candidate gets the job than how well she performs at it. “Many executives and managers have too much confidence in their ability to read people,” says Murray Barrick, chair of the management department at Texas A&M University and the study’s lead author. “They don’t want to hear that self-presentation tactics are having this much impact on their hiring decisions.” “I also didn’t think that our effects would be this strong,” he adds. Barrick and colleagues’ study offers an antidote to the beguiling wiles of potential hires:… Nonprofit Management 2010-02-24T06:00:53+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/airborne_peace/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/airborne_peace/ On Wednesdays in Rwanda, just before sundown, the radios come to life. Farmers lay down their tools to gather under shade trees, fan clubs take their usual seats in the bars, and a hush settles over prison courtyards. Each week, an estimated 85 percent of radio listeners in Rwanda tune their radio dials to the soap opera Musekeweya (New Dawn). Using a Romeo and Juliet plot to symbolize Hutus and Tutsis, the program teaches listeners how to prevent ethnic violence, embrace reconciliation, and heal the wounds of the past. In 1994, radio-borne hate propaganda helped prompt a Hutuled genocide of 75 percent of the ethnic minority Tutsis. Within three months, the genocide wiped out 10 percent of the Rwandan population — some 750,000 victims. Now, Musekeweya is reclaiming the radio to help survivors live together again. “Musekeweya helped me calm down,” says Kennedy Munyangeyo, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Kigali who lost his two brothers, several uncles, and a sister to the genocide. “I used to think that we should react by hating the people who did the genocide, but after a year of listening to the show, I realize that if someone did a bad thing, the answer is not… Arts, Culture, and Religion, Human Rights 2010-02-24T06:00:51+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_bite-sized_goodness/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_bite-sized_goodness/ In the time it takes to update your Facebook page, you could be making the world a slightly better place. That’s the idea behind The Extraordinaries, a Web-based platform for microvolunteering that’s been generating plenty of buzz since its launch last year. The goal is to harness thousands of currently untapped hours by making volunteering fast, convenient, and bite-sized. While waiting for a bus or cooling your heels at the dentist’s office, you could be using your smart phone to tag photos for the Smithsonian, send a study tip to an at-risk student, or map your local parks. “We want volunteering to be as fun and ubiquitous as playing a game,” explains Sundeep Ahuja, cofounder and president of the San Francisco-based business. The Extraordinaries (www. beextra.org) was founded by a trio with deep experience in social media. Chief technology officer Ben Rigby pioneered the use of mobile phones for youth voter registration when he founded Mobile Voter. CEO Jacob Colker was one of the first to harness Facebook to organize political campaigns. Ahuja was a product manager at MySpace before helping to launch Kiva, the microphilanthropy site. Traditional community service “has been about carving out a Saturday afternoon or an… Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy, Responsible Investing 2010-02-24T06:00:44+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/lessons_in_courage/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/lessons_in_courage/ In Afghanistan, grief is never far away. “You are always losing somebody,” says Sakena Yacoobi. A native of Afghanistan, Yacoobi has lost friends and colleagues to bombings and kidnappings. She has seen routine health matters turn fatal for want of basic medical care. When the losses pile up and Yacoobi gets to feeling “a little down,” she asks her bodyguard to drive her to a nearby preschool. There, it doesn’t take long before this short woman in a hijab is smiling. “I see kids singing, drawing, playing, learning. Their happiness is my happiness,” she says, “and I am ready to go 100 miles per hour again.” For more than a decade, Yacoobi has devoted her considerable energies to rebuilding educational opportunities in a country that had almost forgotten how to learn. The Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which she founded in 1995, now reaches 350,000 women and girls annually with programs that extend from preschool through university. In addition, men and boys benefit from AIL’s leadership training, which promotes peaceful strategies for resolving conflict. AIL also provides health education, operates medical clinics, and teaches income-generating vocational skills like carpet weaving. Through all these initiatives, AIL emphasizes critical thinking “so that… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:40+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research1/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research1/ In 1988, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s famously conservative prime minister, approved a revolutionary reform: Allow secondary schools to shrug off local control and become autonomous, central government- funded entities. To convert into one of these so-called grant-maintained schools (GMs), a school had to secure the majority vote of its students’ parents. By 1997, some 900 of the United Kingdom’s 3,500 state-funded secondary schools had gone GM (the rough equivalent of a conversion charter school in the United States). Damon Clark’s father was the principal of a GM school. Two decades later, Clark is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Florida, where he has uncovered the first evidence that GM schools fare better than standard schools on national exams. “GMs increased the pass rate on their Grade 11 exams by about 5 percentage points,” from a 40 percent to a 45 percent pass rate, he says. He further finds that upturns emerged as early as two years after the GM conversion and persisted eight years later, at the end of his study. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, advocates of charter schools and their analogs contend that giving schools greater autonomy not only will… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:40+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_joanne_weiss/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_joanne_weiss/ Joanne Weiss’ career demonstrates that social innovations are often created and driven by people who reach across the nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors. Weiss started her career by co-founding and leading several for-profit companies, most of which were in the educational field. She then joined the nonprofit NewSchools Venture Fund, which for the last 12 years has funded nonprofit and for-profit educational reform organizations. And last year Weiss was recruited to be the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund. The Race to the Top Fund is not a typical government program. Instead, it borrows from the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, most notably the idea that competition can stimulate change. Rather than getting grants based simply on how many children are in school or how many schools are failing, states must compete for money by putting forward innovative programs that improve their educational system. Some states will get money and others will not, based on performance and outcomes. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Weiss explains what the department hopes to accomplish with Race to the Top, what criteria will be used to judge the states’ proposals,… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:37+00:00