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Giving Life on Your Birthday
Published September 07, 2009 @ 11:10AM PT
Four years ago, a simple birthday party to raise money to help provide clean water in Uganda launched what would become one of the most high-profile nonprofits today. Since then, charity:water has been continuously innovating around how to use media to compel people to action. So today, on my birthday, I wanted to take a moment to ask why we act for change, and how we can accelerate that action.
charity:water is an incredibly media-savvy organization. Their design is absolutely top-notch, with materials and production that is extraordinarily professional without being unfeeling. Moreover, they know how to use video that is extremely captivating without sensationalizing.
But far more important than their production value is how successfully they connect "us" and "them." Their largest campaign to date has been their "Born in September" campaign, which gave people a platform to ask their friends and family to donate money to building wells rather than giving them gifts. In their second year of the campaign, they raised $150,000, and then almost a million in their third.
I think this is compelling for a couple reasons. From the absolutely most prosaic, one's birthday is a context that makes it appropriate to reach out to friends and ask for money. In this instance, the ease of giving through platforms like charity:water or even more, Causes' Birthday Wish application on Facebook, accelerates donations.
On a slightly more philosophical level, birthdays remind us from where we came, and of all the people who have contributed to our own success. They provide moments to think about oneself and one's relationship with the world more reflectively, and are a good time to engage a commitment to justice.
One of the things that charity:water does better than almost anyone is sell the idea that people who are working with them are part of a larger movement for good. People want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, but this requires not only a big goal to buy into, but examples of people who seem like you who make it feel like you really can contribute. charity:water's founder Scott built that first fundraiser around his birthday, and even though they fundraise year round has had September - his birth month - be the staging ground for their main push. I don't think this is about ego, I think it's about helping people have an entry point.
I'm not raising money on this birthday, for the sole reason that I ask people to contribute to enough things around the year that adding another one might be a little extemporaneous. Instead, I'd ask everyone reading to use this day to recommit to what you care most about, and redouble your efforts to that end.
For those inspired, use the comments to share your passions.
(Photo: charity:water)
Robert Fabricant on the Difference Between Feeling and Knowledge
Published August 07, 2009 @ 12:44PM PT
The Pop!Tech blog has been pumping out pure gold lately, and today's post by Kristen Taylor is one more great example. In it, she links to a video produced at last year's event by frogdesign's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant and GOOD Magazine. The piece is all about the difference between feeling and knowing.
In the short animated video, Fabricant imagines a pair of shoes that could instantly transport us to different places based on the memory of their feel on our feet. The dunes of Saudi Arabia, a slippery rock in Camden, Maine, the cool dirt of an Iowa corn field.
The video is profound because it reminds us that our society is incredibly intellectualized. That is not to say that our society is intellectual, but rather that feelings and emotions are subjected incessantly to the tyranny of the commentary of the brain. We interpret everything, and sometimes it's overwhelming and the reality is we simply can't think our way out of a feeling.
This is not new in history, as the conversation between faith and rationality, between knowledge and feeling have been ongoing for centuries. But the intensity of the psychic fracture it can produce is made more profound by the omnipresent information that surrounds people in modern society. And I think there is something profoundly important about remembering the connection to our bodies themselves. Ken Robinson points out that the intelligence of the body is one we have systemically minimized in importance in our education system.
The conversation matters for those of us in the nonprofit world because, to some extent, the underlying objective that connects us all is an attempt to make people feel - not just rationally know - but feel in the depth of their guts that they are a part of something larger than themselves, connected to people they will never see, and stewards for generations to come.
Keep track of Robert on Twitter at @fabtweet
Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship
Published July 01, 2009 @ 04:27PM PT
What is truer than the truth? The story.
So began Isabel Allende at her TED Talk in 2007. Paraphrasing the Jewish proverb, she was saying that the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives often reveal as much about us as any facts ever could.
This has always been clearest to me in music. The early American folk ballads that were adapted from the Old World and which would become the root of country and popular music almost invariably had dueling escapism and morality. They told stories of abberational (and unacceptable) behavior that, in their telling, made people feel liberated, if only for a brief few minutes. For every action though there was a consequence, reinforcing not only the dominant morality but the strict structure that allowed social groups to survive the brutality of early colonial life.
A great example is "The House Carpenter," a famous folk ballad (originally British) that has been peformed by everyone from Natalie Merchant to Bob Dylan. In the song, a long-lost lover returns to a woman who has settled with her carpenter husband and new baby and entices her to run off to sea with her, leaving her family behind. What seems like a grand adventure quickly turns sour. The woman becomes despondent, weeping for her child left behind. As she drowns metaphorically in her sour, the ship springs a leak and literally sings, ending her life.
In it's particular combination of escapism and morality, "The House Carpenter" reveals a huge amount about the mores of Appalacian society in the 18th century where the contemporary form of the song was popularized.
But stories are not just codified in contemporary culture; they are often explicitly created to generate a particular response. This is, of course, what we call branding. Brand's help people form an emotional connection with something, and can often quite literally change people's perception of a thing. I recently heard a great story that reinforced this point.
The cousin of a friend of mine was traveling with the Grateful Dead a couple of decades ago. Having run out of money to buy tickets to the shows, he began tie dying and selling t-shirts outside of each new arena. By mistake, however, he had only purchased XXL t-shirts to sell. For a few shows, he was completely unsuccessful. But then it doned on him to call them "Jerry-sized," connecting them with the portly and beloved Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and quickly sold out.
This all matters for this blog because we are in the midst of major branding shifts. Of course many are trying to better calibrate the brands of their organizations with the value they're creating - from the social impact on whatever issue they're working on to the experience for staffers and volunteers involved.
Perhaps even more importantly, however, we have a branding opening in the social enterprise space. Just what to call this is still up for grabs: social enterprise? Social entrepreneurship? Blended Value Social Capital Markets for Good?
We converse about definitions, but perhaps more time should be spent on brand implications. What if capitalism just was social enteprise? What if we rejected the fracturing of social, environmental, and financial value? What if we said that the real abberation were corporations that didn't care about all of their impact? What if we said that every person should be viewed as someone with talents to cultivate, grow, and direct? What if we said that every resource should be stewarded rather than exploited? And what if we build structures to reinforce that?
Those are the real implications for the branding of our movement. I'm thrilled to see groups like BeDo, Endeavor, Acumen Fund, and the Social Capital Markets folks who are telling that story, but I want to see it biggified. I want to tell the story of how individual entrepreneurs fit into larger ecosystems. I want to tell the story of where we want to go, not where we are. I want self-fulfilling prophecy of a better, more just, smarter, more sustainable system.
That's the story we must make truer than the truth.
An Entrepreneur's Pilgrimage
Published June 28, 2009 @ 07:49AM PT
My first trip overseas was to hike a 1200-year old pilgrimage across Northern Spain. The Camino de Santiago is a series of winding, sometimes mountainous, sometimes flat, sometimes arid, sometimes lush trails that traverse much of Western Europe but all lead to the Cathedral of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.
My walking partner Christina and I had heard about the trail from the assistant master of our residential college as Northwestern freshman, and immediately began scheming on how to get undergraduate research grants to walk the trail. A year later, there we were, pilgrim's credentials in hand and setting out from St. Jean Pied du Port, a beautiful ancient town nestled in the heart of the Pyrannes just over the French border, and the classical start of the northern route of the 600 mile pilgrimage.
The trip came at an interesting moment for me. I had come to Northwestern University just a couple short years earlier not knowing what to expect, and feeling like I hadn't properly prepared for either the decision or the place it self. My first fall was spent longing for things left in Maine; a girlfriend, a group of friends, and the comfortable lull of knowing the pattern of a place. For the first quarter of my freshman year I was lonely and despondent, uncomfortable with the radical shift.
But then an amazing thing began to happen. The ties back home shifted; the romantic relationship ended, the friends moved on to their own new lives. In my own life, Northwestern was becoming part of me in ways subtle and profound; I began to feel the joy of learning surrounded by smart people; the community of a residential college enveloped me and drew me out of myself, in some ways in spite of myself; without meaning to, I built a new normal, a pattern of goals and experiences that set pace to the seeming chaos around me, and I became comfortable again.
Walking the Camino de Santiago for me was in many ways a celebration of that process that I had been through. By the end of my sophomore year in college I was both physically and emotionally a different person than I had been upon entering. I was proud, for specific accomplishments yes but more for the sense of having built a life (however nurtured the undergraduate life might be) of my own.
Pilgrimage, as I found that year, is fundamentally about leaping. In the 12th century heyday of the Camino, hundreds of thousands of foot travelers came from all around Europe to find the grace that holy relics, in this case the remains of Jesus' apostle James, could bestow. In the heart of Europe's cultural winter, they were seeking transcendence.
Their faith had to be not only in the power of relics, but in their capacity to undertake such a journey. Indeed the power of pilgrimage - and perhaps the power of faith more broadly - is that it is at once about journey and destination, at once about the incommunicable individual experience and almost unfathomable connection to something bigger than oneself.
My explicit aim with the Camino was to research the nature of modern pilgrimage, which is driven at least in the case of the Way of St. James by apparently far more secular aims than it was in it's millennia old hay day. Yet at the same time, my un-communicated purpose - the purpose of the journey itself - was about having the space and time to truly understand what the last two years of my life had meant, and where they led me.
Almost everyone I encountered on the trail had a similar duality. They had their stated "reason" for walking; to lose weight; to celebrate a new retirement; to reconnect with old friends. But then, almost always, they had a deeper reason for walking that felt hidden, and sometimes even hidden to themselves. In many ways, it was the process of slowly revealing to yourself what that reason was that made the experience so powerful.
I write this as I drive across the country on my way to a new city and a new life in San Francisco. After more than a year of planning, I've left the Center for Global Engagement I've built at Northwestern for the last four years to start a new company that hopes to help people unlock the assets all around them to build meaning and value.
The journey is at once exhilarating and exciting. There is something philosophical about the terror of responsibility that the freedom of entrepreneurship creates. As I am the master of my own destiny; so too am I responsible for it's success or failure.
Yet at the same time, many would suggest that this sense of control is an illusion. In a beautiful TED talk, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about how before the enlightenment, our conception of genius was not just about the artist or the writer themselves, but about the angels they carried with them. When they were successful, they could not claim success solely for themselves because a little piece of God was with them. Yet at the same time, so too were they liberated from the utter responsibility for the possibility of failure.
As I cross Iowa and Nebraska and Colorado on my way west, the same ground that so many covered wagons crossed in search of something new a century and a half ago, I'm trying to remember what I learned on the Camino. The cathedral to which I've pointed my compass may be the social good and financial reward of a thriving company, but almost inevitably I will end up judging my success by how deeply I experience and remember the mountains and poppy fields and windmills and friends that dot the way.
Photo Credit: Julie Berlin, taken in Boadilla de Camino
A Lesson from Iran for Social Entrepreneurs
Published June 16, 2009 @ 08:09PM PT
The most important post any one wrote in our social entrepreneurship space today was Jeff Trexler's "Iran's Green Revolution and Social Enterprise." In it, he argues that social entrepreneurs have a tendency to attach their label to a wide array of figures - historical and contemporary - who stand up to create change, but that while self-affirming this tendency can also be blinding. Read the whole thing, but start with this piece:
In recent years, social enterprise experts have clustered around the theory that social entrepreneurs are special, creating the disruptive social innovations that break down suboptimal social equilibria. It's an inspiring definition to be sure, one that no doubt is a boost to the self-esteem of anyone in the movement. Yet if we look carefully at real-world movements for change, most of it has reflects the work of people who do not self-identify as social entrepreneurs.
For example, consider how the protest movement is mobilizing. The core communications media--Twitter, Facebook, blogs, SMS, mobile phones, computers, even the rooftops on which protesters stood to shout--may be tools that social entrepreneurs use, but we did not create them. The social benefit resulting from social media is at best a positive externality, a second-order consequence derived from someone else's disruptive innovations.
It is also useful to reflect upon the protesters' organizational tactics. They are not starting social businesses, extending microloans, holding pitch contests or making social investments. Instead, they are taking to the streets and telling anyone who will listen or watch what they want. It is a classic display of political force. Each compelling image from Iran--every impassioned Tweet--is an implicit critique of our naive bubble world where the price of progress is merely a monetary value.
If social enterprise is to mature as a movement, we can't afford to believe our own hype.
It's that last line that I think is the most important. It's incredibly easy in any young, vibrant movement like our own to quickly enable a hegemony of thought that becomes it's own constraining orthodoxy. To allow this to happen to the social entrepreneurship field would be deeply ironic, considering how much of it's appeal is to people looking to harness great tools for changing the world from wherever they come.
In fact, it's only the last line in the piece that I have any questions about. Jeff writes: "The more we insist that social entrepreneurship is a unique agent of historic social change, the less effective--and less credible--we become."
I actually think that the problematic tendency is to see social entrepreneurship as the unique agent of historic social change. Recognizing the power of market strategies to improve lives and to restore the social and environmental bottom lines to the balance sheet rather than the externalities list are powerful, and it does seem to me that there is something new (and powerful) about the networks and institutions forming around the people trying to do that.
The problem is when we forget, or try to reduce, or even try to lay claim to the inherent democratic chaos that has been at the center of every broad modern social movement since the abolitionists started signing petitions more than 200 years ago.
Is It Too Hard to Break Into the Social Entrepreneurship Field?
Published June 09, 2009 @ 01:33PM PT
In a great post this morning on the Pop!Tech blog, Ashni Mohnot argues that there are some specific structural constraints to breaking into the social entrepreneurship field that have led to a deep (and perhaps hypocritical) contrast between the field's egalitarian view of the world and the demographic composition of who actually gets to participate.
She points to three particular frustrations:
1. MBAs Only: Mohnot points out that socially entrepreneurial nonprofits have a bit of a fetishization of the MBA degree as a qualification. I think she rightly suggests that while it's reasonable that many people with experience with nonprofit work will need some form of business training to thrive in more financially-driven social enterprises, the MBA is one path to that sort of knowledge and comes with it's own set of baggage (not to mention debt).
2. No Young Talent Cultivation: In a point that hits particularly close to home, Mohnot points out that many (if not most) social enterprises don't have space for young people just coming out of school. She uses a number of examples to suggest how hard it is for graduates to find compelling opportunities, and asks why talent cultivation isn't a more robust part of most social enterprises' practices.
3. White, Western Voices Only: Echoing a conversation that has been tearing across Social Edge for the last week, Mohnot argues that the conversation about social entrepreneurship is dominated by white, western voices. I think that one could argue that, at least when it comes to the blogosphere, part of this problem is that there are still major digital access issues and frankly, differences in comfort with self-promotion that dampen the number of social entrepreneurs in other countries who have any sort of active social media presence. I also think her critique overstates the case that social entrepreneurs only act as "good anthropologists" soliciting feedback rather than actively involving the poor in the design of their own programs (which is precisely what at least two of her previous examples, FORGE and Kiva, do) doesn't do quite enough to recognize the dramatic shift happening towards just that sort of approach. That said, the vast majority of the critique is still right on.
The fascinating thing is that all of this comes down, in some way, to how we prioritze the cultivation of talent as an essential element of the health of our field.
MBAs may be vital, but how do we help set undergraduates on a path to social enteprise leadership before they take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional debt? How do we build nonprofit cultures that value (and are willing to press donors for) professional development that could build some of this training into existing work?
How do we expand the offerings of groups like Kiva and the Acumen Fund that do have fellowship programs open to younger, less-experienced people who want to be in the social enterprise space? How do we disrupt the system to make it the norm for social enterprises to have associate training programs and other structures that would help unlock incredible talent that will otherwise find it's way to other arenas?
And finally, how do we provide the basic infrastructure, support, mentorship and opportunities to unleash the entrepreneurial talent of people in different parts of the world? Jonathan Gosier at Appfrica has found a model that certainly seems to be doing just that for East African software developers, so what can we learn from them?
The take away for me is that we have to be more dilligent in our approach to cultivating, harnessing, and retaining talent, whereever it may come from.
Muslim Social Entrepreneurs and Obama's New Era
Published June 04, 2009 @ 11:37AM PT
Photo credit: Stephen Crowley/New York Times
This morning's speech in Cairo signaled a new US approach to the Muslim world; an approach that like the rest of Obama's young presidency seems to be characterized by pragmatism, common sense, and a deep-seeded belief that all people, communities, and cultures have something to contribute to a sustainable, thriving, peaceful global world, and that at the end of the day, we're only as strong as we are together. There were also, as we've seen elsewhere, indications that economic prosperity relied on a combination of actors including social entrepreneurs.
The speech is a particularly significant moment for me personally. Cairo is a place whose story has become interwoven in complex ways with my own. I wrote earlier this year:
In 2004, I found myself in Cairo, Egypt for a semester abroad. It was after 9/11, a year into the Iraq war, and I was skeptical of the dogmatic us, them, clash of civilizations mindset that seemed to be in style. I wanted to see it for myself.
Egypt was not a random location. My parents had visited Jordan, Israel, and Egypt when I was only three, and just after the start of the first intifada. Their stories introduced me not only to the majesty of history, but of our power to destroy - and often to destroy in the name of the good. I would find an Egypt just as confusing.
Almost from the moment I arrived, I loved Egypt. I loved the layers of history embedded in the very buildings themselves; I loved the passion of constant conversation. I loved the cab drivers who consoled me and my American friends the day after George Bush was re-elected.
But at the same time, my Egypt was not just about Pyramids and politics. In 2004, the violence in Darfur had just flared up and I began volunteering with refugees from the horn of Africa as a way to "do my part." It quickly became the most important part of my week. I spent as much time as I could tutoring English at St. Andrews, a small sanctuary from the cacophony of the outside world.
While I was captivated, I was also appalled. There is no place where I've felt the injustice of opportunity denied quite as oppressively as among the refugees of Cairo. Brilliant, talented, compassionate people are left to languish, denied the basic rights of employment and education. An entire generation of Sudanese youth have grown up outside of any systemic support. And if the Egyptian government's treatment of refugees isn't deplorable enough, the rest of the world treats Cairo like a convenient dumping ground, progressively reducing the number of refugees we allow to cross our borders.
It was the first moment that I felt the seemingly immense gap between my desire to do good, and my ability to actually impact global problems.
I included in that piece just how powerless I felt that fall sitting in a hotel room in Cairo surrounded by other idealistic young friends watching George Bush be re-elected as president. To see then, today, our new president forcefully reject the politics of fear and division and project a new vision of an era of US-Muslim cooperation is thrilling.
In the section of the speech dedicated to what happens next, President Obama asserted that "education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century," and that success would take cross-sector collaboration:
On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America; invest in on-line learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.
On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.
In response to that gap I felt in 2004 between my desire and ability to do good, I've tried to answer by investing in the social entrepreneurship sector. It's incredible to see our president refer to Muslim social entrepreneurs because of the immense potential for positive energy they're creating around the Muslim world. Referring specifically to Arab social entrepreneurs, Ashoka Arab World wrote this week:
...the very movements that have the most potential to realize these promises of change, are receiving the least press coverage. They are those movements for social change that are taking place in the Arab region right now. They consist of civil society leaders, activists, organizations and associations that are committed to tackle systemic issues that their societies face using home-grown and innovative ways. Regardless of which of the twenty-two Arab states you look at, there are movements underway to address pressing social issue.
In Egypt, for example, Ehaab Abdou is mobilizing disaffected young professionals to positively contribute to their country. Ehaab established ‘Nahdet el Mahrousa’ to engage young social entrepreneurs in Egypt and abroad and to push them to be responsible for creating the change they themselves hope for. Hisham el Rouby is another example of a committed leader that is giving youth a strong taste of civic engagement and social responsibility. Through his Youth Association for Development, Hisham is popularizing the concept of volunteer-service, an idea that has already led to the establishment of youth volunteer centers in Yemen, Egypt, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia since 2003. In Lebanon, Selim Mawad is creating a cadre of “agents of change” by providing young people with the skills and knowledge necessary to teach their communities about the need for transparency and accountability in government. His country-fellow, Wael Hamdian, is inspiring youth to become engaged in realizing social change by identifying and promoting ‘local heroes’. In the occupied Palestinian territories, Abdelfattah Abusrour is introducing Palestinian children in refugee camps to a non-violent form of channeling their frustration and anger by promoting a ‘Beautiful Resistance’ that uses arts and theatre.
These are the Ashoka fellows, but after even just five years of traveling to the Middle East and inviting young Middle Eastern leaders like Hany Amin and his brother Ramy Sami, leaders of Better World NGO dedicated to using technology to unleash youth potential in Egypt, I can say that the excitement and passion for social entrepreneurship increasingly characterizing American youth leaders does not stop at our borders.
An Egyptian man applauds as he watches this morning's speech (Getty)
