Government and Social Entrepreneurship
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For-Profit Social Startup Capital: The Missing Middle?
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Holy Crap! President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize
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San Francisco Gets Its Very Own App Store
Watch President Obama Live at the Clinton Global Initiative
Published September 22, 2009 @ 11:16AM PT
The Clinton Global Initiative kicks off today at 4pm EST with an opening plenary featuring remarks by President Barack Obama. Luckily for all of us who can't be there, they will be broadcasting the speech live via webcast, and even encouraging online participants to interact and ask questions via Twitter. It's a great way to broaden the conversation from a gathering that is admittedly elite.
My best guess as to the tone of the remarks - and the conference in general - is that they are going to be all about shifting a framework from thinking in terms of specific, vertical problems or cause areas, and instead seeing the intersection between issues and the immense opportunity for private-public partnerships.
It seems to me that over the last year or so, there's been a major shift in the way that Clinton (and in turn, his foundation) have been looking at things. I think it's a smart shift, and one that if properly harnessed can make good on the fact that he has about as much power to convene actors in a serious way as anyone on the planet.
One of the most interesting parts of the listserv email that I received from the Clinton Foundation this morning announcing the live webcast was that of the five names they mentioned of people attending, one of them was Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Kagame has done an incredible job of positioning himself on the world stage as not a write-away leader of a write-away country, but a person with serious influence and capacity. As it relates to this social business world, he has done an incredible job forming high level partnerships with major companies like Starbucks and Costco to get Rwandan products to US markets. There is a lot of complication around him - he holds far more power than the West usually likes in their leaders - but it's hard to deny how much he's done and is doing.
I'm also really excited to see if and how people engage with the Twitter conversation. The webcast site allows you to log-in via Twitter and then send a question. It's a cool if limited functionality. What would be really awesome is if the site automatically showed you the questions that everyone else was asking. Then, even if your's wasn't answered, you could still join a conversation. Regardless, it's still a major advancement for these guys.
As for me, I'll be excitedly tuning in with the inaugural class of Global Citizen Year fellows. Next gen power. Check it out at 4pm EST.
(Photo: Icrontic)
Nonprofit Leader Running to Replace Ted Kennedy
Published September 18, 2009 @ 10:32AM PT
Alan Khazei, founder of City Year and Be the Change, Inc., will enter the open election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat in the Senate, according to an email sent to friends and colleagues on Tuesday and reported by the Washington Post.
Khazei will be a familiar name for people involved with social justice and civic engagement work. In 1988, he founded City Year, a volunteer program for young people that has grown to 18 cities and an annual $60 million a year budget, inspiring the creation of programs like AmeriCorps along the way. More recently, he's acted as founder and CEO of Be The Change, Inc, a nonprofit working for systemic change through policy and be creating citizen corps capable of partnering with government and private enterprise to enact change.
Khazei is also part of one of the "first families" of social entrepreneurship. He is married to Vanessa Kirsch, the founder and President of New Profit, one of the leading venture philanthropy firms. Before founding New Profit, Kirsch was also the founder of Public Allies, a national youth service organization that Michelle and Barack Obama both had early relationships with.
Would Khazei be a good senator? He certainly has a perspective that is vital on the national stage, and which might be summed up by suggesting that average citizens have immense power to improve the world, and need the support and partnership of government to fully unleash their potential. What's more, for a "political outsider," he has quite a bit of experience working with the apparatus of government. Through his work with City Year, Be The Change, Inc., and New Profit, of which he is a board member and of which advocacy group America Forward is a part, he has an active engagement with legislators around issues of civic participation. The coalition of groups Be The Change, Inc. is a leader of - ServiceNation - had a major role in helping pass the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.
Does he have a chance? It's hard to say. He's up against Massachusetts' Attorney General, two US representatives, and perhaps the Managing Director of Bain Capital and co-owner of the Boston Celtics (yay Democrat Mitt Romney!). Whether people will be looking for experience or a fresh face will be a key question of the campaign.
To quote the friend who let me know about Khazei's announcement, himself a young nonprofit leader: "He is the man. Period. I hope he's running to win and not just to shape the debate." I couldn't agree more, and will be watching closely in the coming weeks.
(Photo: Be The Change, Inc.)
President Obama to Speak at Social Business Themed Clinton Global Initiative
Published September 16, 2009 @ 03:33PM PT
While the Clinton Global Initiative has historically focused solely on key philanthropic categories like climate change and public health, this year the economic crisis has prompted a broader focus on understanding the relationship between innovation, business, and social change. And to kick it all off, President Barack Obama will address the opening session next Tuesday, September 22.
I was extremely excited to read a few months ago that CGI would be taking a step away from it's specific program categories and instead focusing on a program that was more about the collaboration between leaders from across sectors. I think it's a hallmark of social entrepreneurship to look for those sort of connections, and to see "scale" as the thing that happens when you connect a transformative action model with the institutions, individuals and communities who can help it grow.
CGI has absolutely lived up to it's brand when it comes to assembling an incredible group of people. I'm not one usually impressed by the nametags at an event, but President Obama is one of 60 current and former heads of state who will be in attendance, including leaders of countries like Turkey and Rwanda that are building their own ecosystems for innovation. What's more, major business leaders like the heads of Coke and Wal-mart will be there.
From the social entrepreneurship world, there are a number of notably attendees, including Kiva president Premal Shah, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, Green Belt Moment founder and Nobel laureate Waangari Maathai, and microfinance innovator and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
And of course, it wouldn't be complete without celebrities like Matt Damon, Alicia Keys, and Ashton Kutcher. I'm actually not as cynical as some about their participation. If the conversations are serious, they can act as powerful distribution and engagement channels. If Kutcher tweets during the event, that's almost 4 million people who get the message. That's about as powerful as any media CGI could buy.
While I can't be at the event next week, I'll be keeping track of it via remote. Read the full Press Release about President Obama's participation after the jump.
(Photo: sofauxboho)
Google Goes Public (Sector)
Published September 16, 2009 @ 10:49AM PT
Yesterday Mashable reported on a cool little project coming out of Google called Google Public Sector.
The idea is to help municipalities get a better handle on the data that can help them function day to day, and give their staff the tools to better collaborate and communicate internally and with external partners.
As Mashable says, this isn't necessarily ground breaking stuff. In fact, it's pretty much just a reorganization of the existing suite of Google tools. It is cool to see Google trying to organize it in such a way, however, that makes it intuitive and even more helpful for governments.
There is a lot of exciting activity right now around improving the public sector and civic engagement with web tools. Yesterday, CitySourced was one of three runners up for the TechCrunch50 prize, for example. The tool gives users the ability to use their phone to snap a photo of something like a pothole or graffiti, at which point the application uses GPS to tag the image with a location, sends out a Tweet about the problem, and then sends the report to the city agency responsible for dealing with the issue. Participating cities have a dashboard that allows them to control, categorize and interpret all of the incoming messages.
This is an interesting take on "social" entrepreneurship. The common thread with these tools are that they're about using new technological opportunities to harness the labor of lots of individuals to make governments work better. There's something that's thrillingly democratic about that, and it will be exciting to see if and how these tools get traction.
(Image: Mykl Roventine)
Remembering 9/11 and Fostering a New Era of Citizen Leadership
Published September 11, 2009 @ 10:43AM PT
Eight years ago today two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. A collective hush fell over America as we watched the towers crumble and fall, taking with it our imagination of invulnerability and heralding a new and very different 21st century.
Reflecting on the irony of humanity's dual capacity to create and destroy, early 20th century critic Walter Benjamin wrote "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The years after September 11th, 2001 have showed us that the reverse is also true.
Because while the stories we hear usually focus on terrorism, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a seething world at odds with America, the first decade of the 21st century has demonstrated how in a new, networked era, people are not willing to just let the world happen, quietly ceding the authority to change things to governments and businesses with means.
Instead, we've seen an explosion of creative citizen participation. In the US, volunteerism and studying abroad are on the rise and have set off the spirits of a generation who refuse to sit around patiently waiting for their turn for leadership. Around the world, creative social entrepreneurship is driving change as people - even the poorest of the poor - use their talents, relationships and other resources to drive change.
I've been blessed with opportunities to see many aspects of this new citizen leadership. One of the most important and underreported is the incredible swell of activity around peace and dialogue in the Middle East. While news continues to focus on the violence, the story of the Middle East is far more about a longing for peace, the need for infrastructure, mobility, and security, and the growth of a generation committed to a better future.
The story is expansive. In Israel and Palestine, average citizens organize for peace with more regularity than most would think looking at Western media. Organizations like Just Vision are dedicated to telling those stories. What's more, there are many organizations like PeaceWorks that are trying to build the economic infrastructure to accelerate an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Larger groups like RAND are thinking systemically about how to build the actual infrastructure for peace with projects like the ARC. Jeff Skoll's new Urgent Threats Fund is explicitly focused on leveraging all solutions - including those of social entrepreneurs - to build peace in the Middle East.
But the story of citizen engagement is not just at the epicenter of that one conflict. For while some would try to convince us that Americans are engaged in an us vs. them, clash of civilizations conflict with the broader Arab and Muslim world, the reality is wildly different. Groups like the Interfaith Youth Core are enabling broader communication between young people from wildly different faith backgrounds to form bonds that will extend into the future as they assume positions of prominence and leadership in the world.
And around the Arab world, young people are - just like young people in America - harnessing their friends, family and other resources to design entrepreneurial projects for social change. We've had the good fortune at Northwestern University to bring a number of those students - working on issues as diverse as health access, community development, and communications infrastructure - to our annual Global Engagement Summit.
But for as exciting as this new era of citizen leadership may be, serious barriers remain. War, violence, and the perception of impassable barrier of religion, faith and custom far too often remain the norm. The question becomes how do we, as average citizens, accelerate our engagement to make a difference. There are a few paths:
1. Use the platforms that we have to support the work of individual leaders for change in issues of interfaith communication and Middle East peace and development.
2. Find ways to assemble our voices and advocate for greater government engagement with real, long-term peace building, including enabling opportunities for greater economic development and opportunity.
3. Tell a different story. Tell the story of people who try to build up the world rather than destroy it. There are far more of them in every culture, every faith, every nationality, but their work is more subtle and requires us to take a more active interest in sharing their stories as far and as widely as we can.
(Photo: Sunrise over Mt. Sinai by Jesper Särnesjö)
Obama Education Speech: Innovation, Problem Solving, and Twitter
Published September 07, 2009 @ 07:31PM PT
Twitter CEO Evan Williams and President Obama: Inspiration?
Look past all the controversy and President Obama's education speech is an evocation of the heart of the American mythology; work hard and you can achieve. The speech is an interesting case study in entrepreneurial role models.
The main thrust of the content is about the fact that while parents, teachers, governments all have a responsibility to help in our education, how we use what we've been given is ultimately a matter of personal responsibility and initiative.
Importantly, Obama recalls the sort of "asset-based thinking" he was schooled in while organizing in Chicago. He says "every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide."
Of course, there's a call to action to recognize how education will prepare students for the problems we face. Importantly, in this speech it's not just about how engineering and more PhD's will help the US keep its technological advantage. Instead, he says "You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free."
Finally, in the climax of the speech he calls out a new generation of technological innovators and links them to the history of students who changed the world:
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
As Van Jones Leaves, One Less Innovation Advocate in the White House
Published September 06, 2009 @ 11:12AM PT
It's hard to watch the national political debate these days and wonder whether our parents were wrong to suggest that bullies don't win in the end. The shrill caterwaul of Glen Beckism has claimed its first victim in Van Jones, the so-called Green Jobs czar, author of "The Green Collar Economy," and Echoing Green fellow. This is the sort of cynicism that makes social entrepreneurs turn away from government.
Van Jones is a big radical, according to Fox News host and apparent new king of US media Glen Beck. He's had the gall to call Republicans "assholes;" and as a young person he was in a group sympathetic to Maoists. The big "radical" stamp on his forehead however comes from a petition he signed in 2004 suggesting that there were unanswered questions about what the US government knew in advance of 9/11.
Over the past week, Jones has been subject to the constant onslaught of Beck and his ilk, finally succumbing and removing himself from the conversation by resigning. Change.org Global Warming editor Emily wrote a great post on why this was such a loss.
The political conversation around this is probably a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but I will say this. The issues that we face and that we have to address, not in a few years but right now, and not because they're important but because they're essential to the actual ability of this nation and this planet to survive, cannot be allowed to be reduced to soundbyte madness.
The problem is that the game is no longer about "who controls the narrative." The game being played is actually about the selectivity of facts. As a friend put it "they don't control the tone of the national debate, they create the debate itself around whichever unreality suits them." Doing a search for a photo for this piece I searched "Van Jones," which prompted Google to suggest the related search "Van Jones Communist." Really?
At the end of the day, Van Jones is far less important than the implications. I wrote the other day that social entrepreneurship needs advocates with real political power to rebuild and restructure economies. One person extremely well-positioned to be as close to that as we have is now gone and the question becomes, can this or any administration really be a partner in innovation?
(Photo: Van Jones surrounded by other known radicals like Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, via Center for American Progress on Flickr)
