The Voices Beyond The Conference
Published September 01, 2009 @ 05:21PM PT
The elephant in the room of any nonprofit conference is about who isn't there, which more often than not is the people who are actually experiencing the impact of the problems we're all trying to solve. While social entrepreneurship events like SoCap09 and the Skoll World Forum are increasingly focused on enabling international participation, there remains a question of whether we're leaving a fundamentally vital group out of the conversation.
I discussed this topic with Erik Hersman, founder of Ushahidi this morning. Erik, who blogs at Whiteafrican.com, was born to missionary parents in Kenya and has spent his life bouncing between Africa and America. He basically advocated that there needed to be human bridges to carry voices from there to here.
Erik Hersman - SoCap09 from Nathaniel Whittemore on Vimeo.
This is an incredible difficult question. At the Global Engagement Summit I started at Northwestern University, we've allocated about 25% of our budget for the past five years to flying in international participants who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate. That said, our economics were those of an event that is largely paid for by a private university. Most nonprofit conferences have a difficult time just breaking even as it is.
There seems to be an opportunity with social media, livestreaming, and affiliated events (like the new TEDx) series to better tackle this issue head on. Have people seen good examples of getting a more diverse representation at events?
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Comments (2)
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Author
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Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.
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I think this is an incredibly important question and observation.
On the final day "unconference" session at SoCap08, I held a discussion on this very topic - thought it might be useful to share again the ideas our small team proposed last year - which appear at the bottom of this post: http://epicchange.org/blog/2008/10/29/socap-recap/
Enjoy the conference!
Stacey
Posted by Stacey Monk on 09/01/2009 @ 05:54PM PT
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I am so glad you pointed this out. We should also consider grassroots leaders in underserved communities of the United States as well. They are much closer to understanding community problems and know the means to reach communty members. Yet the heads of many community-based organizations either cannot attend these conferences, due to financial or time constraints (the nature of wearing many hats and doing day-to-day work on top of leading), or they do not follow social media.
Posted by Christine Sculati on 09/02/2009 @ 09:42AM PT
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