Dissent
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.
The Danger of Too Much Information
Published June 30, 2009 @ 10:12AM PT
frog design's Nick de la Mare wrote a really great piece the other day about the danger of over information. In short, he suggests that as the streams of information around us become overwhelming, we begin to find ways to filter, sort, and avoid things we dont feel add real value. The danger becomes that we, to use his words, "chose too narrowly." He starts with a great historical discovery, a quote from a newspaper in 1893 about what the world would look like 100 years later:
In 1893 the Newark Ohio Daily Advocate ran a series of articles predicting what the world would look like in a hundred years. "Every person" they said, "of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual enfranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable."
His point is, of course, that while we're not all writing books, we're all Tweeting, Status Updating, and broadcasting ourselfs constantly, in the process, congesting the general cognitive space with far more bits and bytes than anyone can handle. The question becomes: what happens next? The natural tendency is to find ways to filter. Indeed, new business models are being born to help people better filter and discover the information they actually care about. The problem, and the paradox as de la Mare puts it, is that in a world of so much information, it becomes easy to just select that information which confirms our own understanding of the world, never challenging us to think differently.
The huge number of information streams before us gives the power to choose only those that are agreeable, to reinforce our culture and values at the exclusion of the new and uncomfortable. One of the nice things about standing under a waterfall of information is that you are forced to engage with viewpoints and perspectives you wouldn't have chosen on your own.
It's a great piece, and an important reminder of the underside of the information age.
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.
Humanitarian Marketing's Dangerous Race to the Bottom
Published June 06, 2009 @ 11:05AM PT
The world's worst humanitarian crisis? (photo credit: New York Times)
Somalia is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to a warning issued by Oxfam this week. The statement prompted a Time article "Somalia's Crisis: Not Piracy, but Its People's Plight" that is now making it's way around Twitter. The designation of "worst," while good for flashy magazine headlines and NGO press releases, is part of a dangerous race to the bottom in the marketing of global humanitarian plight that has inadvertently sapped political relevance.
The first time I went to Uganda was in August 2005, a little less than a year after then head of UN humanitarian affairs Jan Egelend called it the "biggest neglected humanitarian crisis" in the world. As one of my earliest up close interactions with the global humanitarian system, it was fascinating and strange to see how international nongovernmental organizations wielded that designation like a trophy or talisman. As I researched international aid in northern Uganda's internal displacement camps, versions of Egelend's quote came up more often than just about any other statistic or sound byte.
This is understandable and deeply human. Superlatives exist in language to help us differentiate magnitude, excellence and severity. And in a world in which so many global challenges vie for media attention and donor dollars, it is understandable that the aid community grabs onto external forces that validates the atrocity of the particular injustice they seek to address and that can lead new allies and stakeholders in their direction.
But I have come to believe that this clinging to designations of superlative horror is the one of the most corrosive and dangerous forces in marketing and media around humanitarian crises. I believe that by propagating these sort of statements, aid agencies have accidentally become complicit in inspiring apathy in the broader public.
Superlatives like "worst," and "most neglected" put the emphasis of our attention not on the horror of injustice, but on the singularity of a particular instance of injustice. While this may prove a temporarily galvanizing force, what it leads to is a shortness of attention and a race of resources to the next new worst crisis. Aid worker after aid worker in Uganda in 2005 talked about having been stationed in one location, getting half way through a project, and then having resources immediately vacate as some new crisis (the big disruptive force then was the Tsunami) grabs more attention.
Now it's a fair question to ask how much of this problem is the endless cable news media cycle vs. the aid agencies themselves. It's also at least reasonable (if I think wrong) to ponder whether humanitarian aid policy should be driven by trying to ease the worst of the worst situations. But I still believe that the quickness with which we the social change community latch on to superlatives is a fundamental problem. It is, to be ironic, perhaps the "greatest" branding and marketing challenge we face.
