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/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/a_spark_for_good_art/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_spark_for_good_art/ Back in 1999, playwright Lisa Kron applied for a grant from a new arts organization called Creative Capital. She had no idea what she was getting herself into. When Kron learned that she would be receiving a few thousand dollars, her initial reaction was, “Great!” And then Creative Capital staff kept asking her, “When are you coming in to talk with us?” Kron demurred, saying: “I’m fine. Really.” Privately, she fretted about wasting her time “on help I didn’t need,” she says. When she heard that the organization was planning a retreat for its artists, all Kron could think was, “Leave me alone.” The plot changed when Kron discovered that there was more money in the pipeline—up to $50,000, available at milestones in the life of her project. This unusual cash flow wasn’t the whole story. As her three-year fellowship unfolded, Creative Capital offered Kron a range of career-boosting benefits, including help with marketing her work and practical advice about budgeting. Kron went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for Well, the autobiographical play produced while she was a grantee, and today credits Creative Capital with taking the “beggar mentality” out of arts philanthropy. Instead of offering her a… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-12-21T17:46:14+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_tiny_cues_trigger_altruism/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research_tiny_cues_trigger_altruism/ During our time on this planet, we humans haven’t lent a hand to just anyone. Instead, we have usually saved our solicitousness for our own kind. And although over millennia the boundaries separating “us” from “them” have widened—from only kith and kin to entire neighborhoods and nations—the tendency has stayed the same: We help our own. Yet a surprising new experiment shows just how easily this human bias can be transformed into altruism. “The connections between affiliation to the group and prosocial behavior are so fundamental that, even in infancy, a mere hint of affiliation is sufficient to increase helping,” write coauthors Harriet Over, a doctoral student in psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, and Malinda Carpenter, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For the study, a research assistant first showed each 18- month-old infant one of four possible sets of eight photographs. The photographs in all four sets featured a common household object (e.g., a teapot, book, or shoe) in the foreground. But each set had a different cue—a prime—in its background: two dolls facing each other (the affiliation prime), two dolls facing apart, one doll alone, or an inanimate object.… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-11-19T06:00:36+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/are_you_talking_to_me/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/are_you_talking_to_me/ If you’re a born and bred American and you’ve lived in any non-Anglophone country, you may have realized after a time that the local people you met didn’t just speak a different language—they were really weird. They acted in all sorts of ways that struck you as irrational, frustrating, and eventually annoying. They stood too close to you, or too far away. Their voices were too loud, or too soft. They were vague about such basics as time, distance, and probabilities. And after months of this disorienting behavior all around you, you may have wondered whether you were going mad. In a sense, you were. You were suffering from what has come to be called “culture shock”—a sometimes-traumatic condition that results from the removal of familiar cultural cues. In its worst manifestations, culture shock can make you feel as though you’ve been detached from reality. This concept was brought home to Americans by returning Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s and 1970s. Because volunteers had been immersed by design in local cultures, they brought culture shock to light for many Americans. Fortunately, even before the first Peace Corps volunteers were posted overseas, a cultural anthropologist named Edward T. Hall had… Arts, Culture, and Religion, Book Reviews 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_kickstarter_for_creative_types/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_kickstarter_for_creative_types/ Benjamin Wagner has a unique appreciation for the differences between big media and independently funded projects. As vice president of news for MTV, he spends his days producing stories about megastars like Jay-Z. Nights and weekends, Wagner invests his own creative energies—and money—in a no-budget documentary project that gripped him several years ago and won’t let go. Together with his brother Christofer, a videographer, Wagner has invested “eight years, 4,600 miles, and $30,000” to make Mister Rogers & Me. The film was inspired by a chance encounter with the late children’s television legend, who challenged Benjamin Wagner to pass along a message about the value of all that’s “deep and simple.” The brothers don’t know if their film will ever earn back a dime, but they have learned that generous strangers are willing to help them get to the finish line. The Wagners are among a fast-growing group of artists, musicians, writers, and other creative types who are going directly to the public to underwrite their dreams via an online fundraising platform called Kickstarter. It off ers a space to pitch ideas to people willing to kick in a few bucks, without asking for payback or a share of ownership… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-11-18T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/recreating_fine_arts_institutions/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/recreating_fine_arts_institutions/ By some measures, the fine arts have been enjoying a boom. The number of U.S. nonprofit arts organizations has grown exponentially, from a few thousand in the 1960s to more than 50,000 today. Not only are there more organizations, many individual institutions have grown significantly in size. Bolstered by ever-larger donations and endowments, leading symphonies, museums, and theaters have built larger and more opulent spaces and vastly increased their programming. To support these new endeavors, institutions have bulked up their infrastructures. Many organizations that had 10 to 20 employees in the 1970s now boast 100 to 200 employees, with much of the growth coming in development and marketing. Unfortunately, as a recent survey of arts participation in the United States indicates, demand did not keep pace with the growth of the sector. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reports that between 1982 and 2008, adult attendance declined in almost every art form: ballet attendance was down 31 percent, opera was down 30 percent, classical music was down 29 percent, nonmusical theater was down 21 percent, and jazz was down 19 percent. And the rate of decline has accelerated in most of these disciplines in recent years.1 Not only is… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-11-03T17:12:32+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/rethinking_human_nature/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/rethinking_human_nature/ The conventional view of human nature is that self-interest is our strongest instinct. In this narrative, every action and decision that Homo economicus makes—the choice of a mate, what work to pursue, whom to befriend—is ultimately driven by self-interest. Even child rearing is merely a way to propagate one’s genes. This view of human nature is not without merit. Most people would agree that self-interest is a powerful driver of human activity. But is this a complete and accurate portrait of human nature? What about people’s proclivity to act cooperatively and altruistically? Is it the case, as Adam Smith and T.H. Huxley believe, that prosocial behavior is solely a cultural construct created to curb our supremely selfish base impulses? These are the questions that Dacher Keltner tackles in his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, strives to unearth clues about the neglected dimension of human nature: “positive emotions that bring the good in others to completion”—emotions that he believes have been serving mankind for millions of years. As a postgraduate student Keltner worked with Paul Eckman, a pioneer in the study of emotions… Arts, Culture, and Religion 2009-08-18T23:00:34+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_madoff_philanthropic_implosion/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_madoff_philanthropic_implosion/ When news of the Bernie Madoff investment scandal broke in late 2008, a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment quickly followed. “The greed and corruption of the Jews has brought the financial system and the American economy low,” wrote a reader named Jeanrenoir on Portfolio.com, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Web sites, newspapers, and magazines in both the United States and Europe likewise hosted racist vitriol and conspiracy theories. Yet if there was any conspiracy, it was that of Madoff cannibalizing his own community—the Jewish community—of much of its net worth. His Ponzi scheme bilked hundreds of millions of dollars from a long list of Jewish charities, including Yeshiva University, Hadassah, the American Technion Society, the Elie Wiesel Foundation, and Brandeis University. Long before the Madoff scandal hit, these organizations were already struggling with the most grievous recession in decades. As the CEO of the largest Jewish philanthropy in New Jersey, I and my staff have had to adjust our course in response to Madoff ’s fraudulent dealings. After first learning of the Madoff scandal, I immediately huddled with my management team to learn whether we had invested any of our resources with Madoff or Madoff -related funds. We had not, so… Arts, Culture, and Religion, Philanthropy, Responsible Investing 2009-08-18T23:00:19+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/why_they_stayed/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/why_they_stayed/ When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, Nicole M. Stephens didn’t think the media, government officials, or even relief workers understood the plight of the people left behind. “The question everyone asked was, ‘Why did those crazy people choose to stay?’” says Stephens. She also noticed that no one actually bothered to ask this question of the so-called stayers. As a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University, though, Stephens decided to ask the stayers herself. In her new study of the stayers, the leavers who evacuated, the aid workers who helped both groups, and the lay observers who watched from a distance, she and her coauthors reveal that the stayers did not think they had a choice, because they did not have the resources to get away. Yet the stayers did not see themselves as passive victims, either. Instead, “they viewed themselves as being strong, actively helping each other, being connected to others, and showing their faith in God,” finds Stephens. Meanwhile, however, “many observers and relief workers thought that the stayers were just being foolish and lazy, and so tended to blame them for their suffering,” she says. Stephens and her coauthors tie the… Arts, Culture, and Religion, Human Rights 2009-08-18T23:00:07+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/art_mimics_art/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/art_mimics_art/ More than 1,000 visitors a year tour the nonprofit Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC) in Pittsburgh in search of ideas for their own organizations. They get an eyeful. In an after-school program called Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, at-risk teenagers produce stunning ceramics, paintings, and multimedia in studios that rival the best college facilities. In its sister program, Bidwell Training Center, unemployed adults nurture hothouse orchids and cook gourmet meals to prepare for technical careers. Another program brings in world-class jazz musicians to produce Grammy Award-winning recordings. “No matter where your eye turns, there’s something cool going on,” says CEO and founder Bill Strickland. “That’s quite deliberate.” Strickland, a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as a “genius award”) recipient, has spent the last 40 years in the same tough neighborhood where he grew up, honing MBC’s model of community change. And his model gets results: reduced high school dropout rates, increased college admissions, and adults placed in jobs that lift their families out of poverty. Now, Strickland is spreading MBC’s lessons far beyond Pittsburgh. Funded in part by a $1 million grant from the Skoll Foundation, MBC has planted off shoots in San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids, Mich., and plans to launch another… Economic Development, Education, Arts, Culture, and Religion, Nonprofit Management 2009-08-13T22:54:12+00:00