Dissent
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My Last Word on the Kiva Controversy
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The Conference Is Dead (...Does Anyone Care?)
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The Return of the "Noble Savage" and the Danger of Romanticized Debate
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)
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?
Philanthropy's Next Controversy, Coming to A TV Near You
Published August 25, 2009 @ 07:02PM PT
Michael Valmont-Selkirk, the new face of philanthropy?
If you thought the NBC series The Philanthropist made some waves, you ain't seen nothing yet.
This fall, the Canadian cable channel Showcase will debut "The Foundation," an extremely unfriendly skewering of a fictional philanthropist who runs the foundation begun by his death-bedridden tycoon father with all the cynical, corrupt aplomb you would expect from a TV anti-hero.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Give and Take blog wrote about the show this afternoon and it's already begun to make waves around the philanthropy Twittersphere, with Tactical Philanthropy's Sean Stannard-Stockton saying "OMG. If South Park re-did The Philanthropist. Appalling." and "Philanthrocapitalism" author Matthew Bishop writes "This may be a work of genius..."
So far, all we have is the trailer, which as you can see for yourself, isn't super kind in it's stereotyping of the field:
So what will brew up? Here are some of my predictions.
1. The people who are more inclined to like it or at least give it a pass will argue that it's the corrupt lead character, not the field of nonprofit work in general that is the subject of lampoon. They will say that while this guy is clearly a jerk, he's less and less the face of philanthropy. And at the end of the day, this is just a work of fiction.
2. People who inclined to be either offended or frustrated by the show will be less forgiving of a parody of a stereotype that they have been working to shift. They will recognize the power that media has to shape general cultural attitudes, and worry that a general tone in the conversation about philanthropy being in the shape of characters on The Philanthropist and The Foundation threatens to re-institutionalize a view of neo-colonial philanthropy.
3. There will be a lot of people who actually think that the character in the show strikes pretty close to home, and that the philanthropic pursuits of the ultra-wealthy who would use a last minute show of generosity as a salve for a questionable life is worthy of being ridiculed. They would point out the deep, rich undercurrent of critique that is essential to the health of philanthropy. Or they would just laugh, believing that charity is an out-dated, out-modded approach to changing the world.
So what do I think? A few things. First, it will only matter if it's funny and captivating. It has to be a good show before anyone in the general public will really pay attention. Second, it will only matter if enough people watch it (so far, the YouTube video below has a staggering ~330 views). Third, it will only matter if it becomes evidence of a larger meta-narrative that defines philanthropy in this sort of harsh light.
And that's the real rub of it. The general public's interaction with philanthropy tends tends to come in the form of the media that philanthropic organizations create about themselves, and the opportunities they provide people to get involved. There's something immensely rewarding about making a difference, which is why people like giving experiences (whether it's time or money) where they feel a part of something bigger than themselves.
So at the end of the day, the thing that will impact the general perception of philanthropy is it's efficacy and engagement. Does it solve problems? Does it demonstrate that the world is better for it being there? Does it use resources efficiently? Does it provide opportunities for it's staff to contribute their best talents and their volunteers and supporters to contribute their full range of assets? Is it honest and authentic? Is it actually making a dent?
More than any television show, this is what it's about. Brand matters, but the best way to be seen as good is to actually be good.
Scaling Ecosystems, Not Organizations
Published August 20, 2009 @ 11:58AM PT
After 18 months of traveling, Shawn Rubin, a teacher from Providence, RI, and his wife Laura Westberg had seen the world. They had visited with NGOs, been a part of service learning in numerous countries, and most of all, had been inspired by two of the local social entrepreneurs they had met. As they returned home, they knew they had to stay involved.
This is how Longitude, a nonprofit that supports the work of developing world social entrepreneurs, was born. Shawn and Laura came back and began writing letters to friends and family, telling them about a school for secretarial work in Ghana providing opportunities for women that just weren't normally available, and about the work of a human rights advocate who would travel to Indian villages and let members of the lowest caste know about their rights.
In the four years since, Longitude has raised over $100,000 to support the work of these groups and has placed numerous volunteers abroad with them. It's run on an entirely volunteer basis, and has more or less remained focus on it's personal relationships with the two organizations that first inspired it's founding.
Recently, Longitude founder Shawn had a "15 Minutes of Fame" moment when he was awarded the Eli Segal Award at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. The award is the highest honor an Americorps alum can receive, and as Rubin found himself in the green room filled with political and entertainment celebrities waiting to speak, he had the presence of mind to hand Arianna Huffington his business card, a move that resulted in an invitation to write a blog post responding to President Obama's trip to Ghana that appeared on the front page of the popular news site.
Longitude is a great organization that feels a lot like other, small great organizations I've run into. It was born of relationships developed in person with specific global organizations that had a lot going for them, but perhaps not access to resources to more fully achieve their mission. It's been focused not on creating a brand new, innovative model for social change, but instead on investing deeply in a particular set of relationships.
In some ways, this is the model that has led to the growth of international NGOs in recent years. International travelers meet incredible local projects, recognize the great things they're doing but begin to wonder if they could - with the help of friends and family - better meet some of the resource constraints that hold those local innovators back.
There are many potential downsides of this approach. International development work is a difficult and complicated field. People get degrees in the field for a reason. The best of intentions (and even the best of intentions combined with advanced degrees, it should be noted) often don't produce results, or worse, produce unintended harmful consequences.
Yet there is also something profoundly right about the idea of people helping people who they've been inspired by and developed a relationship with. Done right, this sort of international partnership can produce work that is much more community driven, and if isn't a solvent for all the root causes of global inequity, can be one of the best ways of addressing ongoing challenges.
I've had a complicated history with that sort of work. When I was first introduced to community based organizations and local NGOs around the world, my "problem-solving-centric" mind quickly began to think about specialization, efficiency, and other jargony academic concepts.
What I've come to appreciate is the simple notion that it takes all types. The community organization or local NGO can provide vital local knowledge and perspective too easily trampled by technocratic policy. Their international partner volunteers can provide basic lifelines for support, as well as validation and a sense of connection every bit as important as money. Together, these groups can help support, challenge, and customize the models of innovative social entrepreneurs.
But it takes a different sort of focus to maximize these sort of ecosystems than it does to scale the work of a single organization or model. One of the things that's so exciting to me about the internet is that the mass distribution of information can be leveraged to form better lateral connections and networks of these small by dynamic organizations to share best practices and lessons. I also think that taking the ecosystem view implicates the need for universities and governments, which can be vital to enabling the sort of conditions where small changemakers can thrive.
So when you look at a group like Longitude, think about the other groups you know like it and how you can best contribute. To learn more about them, visit their website or check out the video about their Ghana partner, PROFESA, below:
Photocredit: golongitude.org
When Society Expects Us to Fail, We Usually Do
Published August 10, 2009 @ 01:23PM PT
Season 4 of The Wire focused on a group of 8th graders caught between school and the reality of urban life
Lurking underneath data about nonprofit performance and hiding in the shadows behind our enthusiasm about innovative approaches to social change is a reality that saps our ability to create change.
When society expects us to fail, we usually do.
In a profoundly important piece published in the Washington Post today, former teacher Sarah Fine writes about why she left teaching behind after four years of incredible effort. She lists the culprits you expect, of course. "Burnout," she says, is shorthand for the frustration of dealing with apathetic students, administrations that add work and limit authority without changing pay, and all the other things we've come to associate with a broken education system.
But that wasn't, in the end, what drove her out. She admits with difficulty that it was as much about the way the rest of the world saw her as it was about anything she felt day to day:
Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.
She goes on to reinforce the notion that her Millennial generation is engaged and active, but sagely notices that the flip side of engagement can be a challenge, as well: "Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued."
How ironic.
How ironic that this young woman who had given four years to trying to make it in this vital position eventually had to succumb to the exact same sort of expectations of failure that likely made it so difficult for her students to succeed.
We expect failure from students who grow up around drugs and without strong parental and community support. We expect failure from the teachers who would try to give them a different path forward.
In so doing, we cue society to look at our education system, and by extension the people in it, as broken; worthy of pity and perhaps even sad admiration, but fundamentally fighting an unwinnable battle and as such, naive.
And while our media machine holds up the Finding Forrester examples of unexpected success, the focus on exceptional individuals in the stories we tell ends up reinforcing the hopelessness of the system as a whole.
While we understand, on some intuitive level, the debilitating impact of societal scorn, it remains far too easy for us to write away the emotional impact of societal pity. This is what Sarah Fine is talking about when she asks why her lawyer friends never have to explain why they do what they do. It's not about the work itself, but about the way society values that work.
In many ways, this all comes back to success and is at the center of Alain de Botton's recent talk at TEDGlobal on a kinder, gentler form of success. He linked career anxiety and modern society's justmental tendency to define a person in terms of what they do with the particular way we value material items. In his estimation, we are not a particularly materialistic society, we've simply come to associate certain types of emotional rewards of success with the position of particular types of goods. The point is that it's the emotional reward we're after, not the good itself.
I can't help but be reminded of a moment from South Park, which I continue to believe is the most dead-on pop cultural commentary we have. In this particular episode, 8-year old Kyle Broslovski is asking his father for money for a Chimpokomon, the newest toy that all the students at school must have:
Kyle: Dad, can I have money for a chimpokomon?..Please everyone else has one
Father: Well, Kyle, that's not a reason to buy one. You see son, fads come and go. And this chimpokomon is nothing more than a fad. You don't have to be a part of it. In fact, you can make an even stronger statement, by saying to your peers, I'm not going to be a part of this fad, because I'm an individual. Do you understand son?
Kyle: Yes, yes I do dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the real world. In the real world, I can either get a chimpokomon, or be the only kid without one, which singles me out, and makes the other kids make fun of me and kick my ass.
Father: Hmm. Good point. Here's $10. Actually, here's $20, get one for your brother as well.
The way that a society makes judgments about the value of any good or any pursuit has an immense impact on the way people pursue those things. The expectations that a society has for people in any particular position, whether it's as a teacher in an inner city or as a member of a poor community, have a serious and often detrimental impact on the way those people come to see themselves, and often comes to define the upper boundaries of how they view their potential for success.
When it comes to education, we simply cannot allow the story of a broken, hopeless system to persist. We cannot allow the story of education to be a set of predictable archetypes - the talented student who just needs to believe in themself; the teacher who wants to help them but has the whole world fighting against them - and a predictable set of outcomes - consistent failure with a few shining moments.
Education is how we transmit what it means to be a part of a community, a part of a country, a part of a global community. It is, particularly as the nature of work and life continue to change at an accelerating pace, a field that absolutely everyone has a stake in.
Let's start by stopping our questions about why someone would teach, and starting to ask how we can help.
The Controversy Around Kiva's US Loans
Published July 07, 2009 @ 03:04PM PT
Kiva CEO and President, Matt Flannery and Premal Shah
There is a fascinating and instructive debate happening on the Kiva Friends website about whether or not Kiva should be providing loans to US based entrepreneurs. The first US loans, announced just a few weeks ago, were met with much excitement.
As with any site that has been driven by it's member's participation however, there are many members of the Kiva family who feel that US loaners should be accessing credit elsewhere, and even that having US-based entrepreneurs on the site crowds out others.
A poll started just a couple weeks ago on Kiva Friends asks:
Question: Having loans to citizen's of the world's richest country funded by Kiva members is:
- Taking money from the pockets of entrepreneurs in the third world and should be stopped with immediate effect.
- A good idea, as it doesn't matter where you live, if you can't access credit, you can't access credit.
- Don't know yet.
The debate has been raging for 22 pages of comments. Of those that feel that the site shouldn't be loaning to US entrepreneurs, most of the arguments come down to the fact that credit tends to be more available (in their opinion) for those in the US, that the presence of the larger loans needed by the US will crowd out other loaners, and perhaps most of all that loaning to US entrepreneurs was not what Kiva was intended for, and is somehow an affront to or at a degradation of the mission.
On the other side, supporters point out that no one is committed to supporting US based entrepreneurs if they have personal reservations, that a tiny fraction of the loans available are intended for US entrepreneurs, and that even in the US many don't have access to credit right now.
There are a few things that I think are great about the debate:
1) Although KivaFriends.org is a separate site, it seems clear that Kiva itself is not interested in shutting down this debate. This reminds me of when Barack Obama supported the FISA bill and in response, his supporters used his own organizing site my.barackobama.com to ask him to change his position. Rather than trying to suppress them, he welcomed their participation, even when the group critical of his position became the largest on his site.
2) I wouldn't actually accuse anyone of this, but I wonder if it's harder to feel the flow of philanthropy reversed on citizens of your own nation if you're not accustomed to it. Philanthopy is a powerful force for good, but it is complicated to go about it in such a way that affirms rather than denies dignity. I think Kiva's US loans - loaning to entrepreneurs in general - tends to be a way to do philanthropy that has dignity and ownership embedded at it's core, but it still might produce a different feeling for some in the US unaccustomed to being on the other side of that relationship.
3) I wonder if it's easier for people to be more judgmental about the entrepreneurial capacity of others when the activities of those people feels more familiar? When a US citizen is supporting a bean farmer in Uganda, we don't necessarily know anything about bean farming, and certainly not enough to know whether they're approaching bean farming the right way. We have to trust, and take faith in institutions like Kiva and their intermediary microfinance partners. When someone wants to sell hot dogs down the street from us, however, we may have a different intuition about the supply and demand and likely success of that person, making us be more critical because we have more information (or at least deeper intuitive feelings). I'm not saying that this is the case, but it wouldn't totally surprise me, either.
I'm a supporter of Kiva's experiment. I think their model of making these loans through a nonprofit apparatus may be well-suited to the need and I'm looking forward to seeing how they work.
Risk, Talent, and Why Some Become Entrepreneurs and Others Don't
Published July 05, 2009 @ 01:35PM PT
Jared Diamond demonstrating how different talents matter in different environments, and showing that despite a world class education, he is no better suited to succeeding in some of those environments than others are in his.
In his best selling treatise "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond advances that the difference in evolution and "success" of human societies is based not on innate differences in capacity but in environmental factors that dictated how groups of early people met their basic needs, and in turn, how those conditions dictated the development of political organization, productive capacity, and more.
The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion that one group of people or another was natively smarter. Certain conditions led particularly societies to more quickly develop the capacity for production, politics, and war, and as those societies moved outward, they had advantages that allowed them to dominate others.
This matters because, if we accept this view of the evolution of human societies, what it suggests is that there is not a justifying innate reason that some societies are rich and some are poor. There is not a lack of capacity that preordained that those at the bottom of the ladder should be there. The flip side is that there is no special intellectual uniqueness that makes those societies that have succeeded (at least economically) more deserving of that success than those who have not.
I believe that this reality undermines any sort of deterministic perspective on global inequality, and implicates those with means to be obligated to those without. Perhaps even more as it relates to this blog, I think that this perspective has two big implications for how we think about global development and problem solving.
First, I think the way environment has impacted the success of societies as a whole is analogous to the way particular circumstances impact the way individuals are able to use their innate talents to be successful at whatever it is they happen to be successful at. That is, "Guns, Germs and Steel" is to societies what "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell is to individuals. The point is that in understanding why some succeed and others don't, the environment in which innate capacity is nurtured (or not) is as essential as that capacity itself in determining how it will manifest.
This point was reinforced for me a few days ago. I arrived in San Francisco only to have a sublet that I was supposed to live in for about 6 weeks fall through at the last minute. Suddenly without a home, I realized that I had literally dozens of people who I could stay with for a few days. My safety net was dense. This is one side of a larger network of resources which provide me the capital, connections, expertise, and other things essential to being a successful entrepreneur, social or otherwise.
These resources alone will not guarantee my success, but they fundamentally change the likelihood of that success, as well as significantly decreasing the risk involved with starting my own enterprise. These resources are by no means the norm, in fact they are the exception. As a sector that deeply prizes "risk taking," it's worth remembering that risk looks very different in different environments.
Second, I think that this argument reminds us of just how much opportunity there is to invest in the capacity of individuals and communities who, for whatever combination of reasons, have tended not to have access to the ingredients to let those capacities fully flourish.
Bill Clinton often says something to the effect that ‘around the world, talent and capacity are distributed in equal measure, but resources and opportunity are not.' I think that's dead-on, and I think that is the principle that animates those excited about investing in bottom of the pyramid enterprise.
As social entrepreneurs, I do believe we have an obligation to recognize the gifts around us, and to reinforce, in our actions and speech, that everyone has unique talents to be nurtured and given life.
