Social Enterprises

Social Enterprise Weekly Updates - Justmeans

2010-10-08T04:14:00.000-07:00

The power of pull: How to seduce your employees into being green! - Clare Cunningham

Socially responsible companies are generally considered leaders in driving forward green innovation in the workplace, however at Forster Communications they are more into cycling it forward. The London based communications agency has gained a reputation as a leading socially responsible company in the UK by placing care of the planet at the heart of its operations. The company prides itself on being a communications agency, which helps change people's lives for the better; whether this is through green initiatives, improved health or building strong communities. Last year the Forster won The Sunday Times Best Green Company award. Forster's list of clients includes Amnesty International, Vodaphone and The National Trust (the UK's largest historic and natural conservation trust). Among their most successful work are the cycling campaigns they have run for National Bike Week and Devon County Council.

Post continues: http://www.justmeans.com/-power-of-pull-How-seduce-your-employees-into-being-green/33134.html

New Guide Explains How To Establish A Social Enterprise - Harry Stevens

In its first week of existence, a social enterprise guide produced by Social Enterprise London for the local authority umbrella body London Councils, was downloaded 4,000 times, the online publication Third Sector reports. The guide, called Transitions, is an introduction to public sector workers who are thinking of creating a social enterprise to deliver services traditionally reserved for the public sector. The guide explains the concept of social enterprise and details information on the types of areas to which it can be applied.

Transitions also addresses some of the barriers and challenges one faces when creating a social enterprise, explains the process of establishing a business and outlines ways to receive support from employers. Social Enterprise London points out that social enterprise is not appropriate for everyone. It does assert, however, that social enterprise has shown a great deal of success in the UK, with over 62,000 social enterprises in existence which demonstrate "that the values of fairness, community investment, local control and a social or environmental mission can make for more efficient services, better user experiences and happier staff."

Post continues: http://www.justmeans.com/New-Guide-Explains-How-Establish-A-Social-Enterprise/33220.html

The USDA Announces Winners of the Apps for Healthy Kids Competition - Audrey Watters

The USDA has announced the winners last week of its Apps for Healthy Kids competition.

The competition was a part of First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! national campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation. The competition invited software developers and game designers to build innovative tools to help teach nutrition and health concepts in an engaging way and to encourage kids to eat better and engage in more physical activity.

Post continues: http://www.justmeans.com/-USDA-Announces-Winners-of-Apps-for-Healthy-Kids-Competition/33551.html

Indian Billionaire to Invest in Social Enterprise - Harry Stevens

SKS Microfinance's initial public offering (IPO) on the National Stock Exchange of India in August raised over $350 million for the company. One of the chief benefactors of the IPO was Vinod Khosla, the self made billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems who clocked in at 880th place on Forbes' most recent list of the planet's richest people. SKS's IPO netted Khosla, who invested in the microfinance firm a few years ago, about $117 million. Now Khosla plans to start a venture capital fund that will be used to reinvest his returns into Indian enterprises that are fighting poverty while turning a profit. The fund should prove to be a tremendous boon to Indian social enterprise.

Khosla also seeks to change the culture of philanthropy in India by encouraging his fellow Indians to give more. India's economic growth over the last decade has brought unprecedented wealth to the country - Forbes estimates that no less than 69 billionaires hail from India, a dramatic increase from just seven in 2000.

Post continues: http://www.justmeans.com/Indian-Billionaire-Invest-in-Social-Enterprise/33724.html

Crowdmap Offers a Cloud-Based Crisis Mapping Service

2010-08-10T03:25:00.001-07:00

Improvements in mapping and mobile technologies have helped facilitate the development of new social innovation tools that respond quickly and efficiently to crisis situations worldwide. "Crisis mapping," as its called, is a processing of collecting mobile and map information and crowdsourcing, visualizing and analyzing that data. Mapping can be undertaken by researchers, first responders, NGOs, citizen scientists.

Ushahidi is a software tool uses for such mapping projects. Swahili for "witness," Ushahidi was initially created following a disputed presidential election in Kenya in 2007. The website collected eyewitness reports of violence, contributed via email and SMS. The software used to build the site was open sourced in 2008, and the Ushahidi platform has been in development since then.

Today Ushahidi announced the launch of Crowdmap, a hosted service providing Ushahidi "out of the box with nothing to install." Analogous perhaps to the difference between Wordpress.org (a downloadable version of WordPress that you run on your own server) and Wordpress.com (a Wordpress blog hosted on the Wordpress server), Crowdmap will provide a hosted version of the Ushahidi software.

Post continues: http://www.justmeans.com/Crowdmap-Offers-a-Cloud-Based-Crisis-Mapping-Service/26071.html

Social Media and the Hyperlocal

2010-05-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

Although one of the promises of Internet technologies is that it can put global information resources at our disposal -- it is theWorld Wide Web after all -- there has been a turn recently towards these very technologies being used to put us in better touch with our local communities, right down to what's happening in our neighborhoods. Although the buzz around location-based social networking has been going on for a little over a year, with Foursquare's launch last year at SXSW, the turn to location-oriented technology tools could mark a shift towards paying attention to a localized sense of place, and this in turn could promise a way for a more engaged citizenry.

Local Social Networking: The GPS capabilities in smart-phones have facilitated the growth of location-based social networking. These services allow you to "check in" in a particular location, marking your presence at a particular site. These services are particularly attractive to restaurants and other venues, who reward customers who check in with promotions. Location-based social networks do just that -- intersect social networking with a particular location, allowing friends to interact online and offline. Popular location-based networks include Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite. Local review site Yelp recently added the ability to "check in" as well.

Local Search: Although people have become accustomed to turning to the Internet to "search," they often want to be able to find something -- a product or a service -- locally. Many new Web 2.0 tools are being developed to replace the "yellow pages" as the resource people utilize in order to find local information.

Local Blogs: Blogs have long been one way to maintain a connection to the news and events of a particular community. Local blogs often pay attention to happenings that might not rise to the level of the local mainstream media. Written by local authors with a local readership in mind, blogs are one way in which the Internet technologies help communities stay up-to-date with what's important.

Local News: Although the mainstream media has suffered substantial cuts to its labor force in recent years, people's desire for news has not changed. Although many people have turned to national, syndicated sources of information, there seems to be a turn lately towards localized news. Social media startups, including sites like Fwix, EveryBlock and Outside.In, offer hyperlocalized news, allowing users to indicate not just the city or topics they're interested in, but the specific neighborhoods. These hyperlocal news sites aggregate local blog posts, local news feeds, and other public data, including in the case of EveryBlock, 911 calls, restaurant inspections, and other civic data.

All these new social media toolspoint to the importance in remaining connected to one's community. Despite the ability of new technologies to connect us to the rest of the world, the increasing popularity of these services indicate that people still are deeply interested in what happens at home.

Crowdsourcing & Web 2.0

2010-04-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

For many years, it seems the buzzword in business circles has been "outsourcing," the idea that companies turn to third-parties (often overseas) to fulfill some of their services. But it may be the new "sourcing" buzzword is "crowdsourcing," turning not to a single third-party but to "the crowd" for help in projects. With the growth of social media and Web 2.0 tools, crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular.

The idea of crowdsourcing draws, in part, on James Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds. In it, Surowiecki makes the argument, as the subtitle suggests that "the many are smarter than the few" and that collective wisdom has much to teach businesses and governments.

This potential for benefiting from the "wisdom of crowds" has been embraced by several new technology tools that allow users to weigh in and assist in the development and decision-making processes. These crowdsourcing tools are innovative ways in which public sentiment can be used to shape the direction for a product or a project.

Crowdsourcing has been used to assess a number of different areas, including determining speakers at conferences, in deciding on logos for businesses, and -- in the case of perhaps the best known example, Wikipedia -- in determing what constitutes "knowledge".

Typically crowdsourcing efforts fall into one of three areas:

Creating products and projects: When using crowdsourcing for product creation and testing, input from users is taken and weighed in order to ascertain the direction for a project.
Predicting outcomes: Recent studies have shown that analyzing sentiment via Twitter is a good indicator for the success a film will have over its opening weekend
Organizing information: Wikipedia and StumbledUpon are good examples of taking user input to categorize information.

While there are many tools that can be used to help with crowdsourcing -- tools where companies can solicit input and gauge users' response -- it is important to remember that sometimes the wisdom of the crowd proves to be decidedly "unwise." Surowiecki speaks to the dangers of this in his book, noting that crowds can be swayed by the emotionality and conformity of the group. Sometimes "the crowd" is too homogeneous to be innovative. And Surowiecki reminds readers that despite crowdsourcing's "wisdom," crowds are only as smart as their smarted individual member.

Nevertheless, crowdsourcing seems to point to interesting potentials for engagement with the customer and can be a powerful way to do good. "Outsourcing" has been a controversial move for some companies. It remains to be seen if crowdsourcing will be viewed as a positive or negative move. After all, what are the implications of handing over your creative processes to outsiders?

Have you tried to crowdsource any projects? What were your experiences? Comments welcome!

Social Enterprise Alliance Summit 2010

2010-04-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Passions X Competencies X Resources = Social Impact

The Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA) states that passion is something that will most definitely be sparked and cultivated at this event. There will be influential guest panelists and speakers that will offer their insights in an effort to ignite greater passion in the social enterprise realm. There will be awards offered to those who are currently making a difference- which will spark a drive in others to also become recognized for their work. The goal is to motivate like minded individuals and increase the love of social enterprise.

Beyond cultivating passion, the conference hopes to enhance participant’s knowledge and offer new skill building opportunities. It is the hope of the SEA that people will walk away with new skills and abilities that will then affect their ability to facilitate social impact. There will be workshops offered and firsthand accounts on how to maximize positive impact for every dollar received.

The final component of the equation deals with resources. SEA plans to bring together social entrepreneurs from all across the globe. Part of the conference is called the World Forum. The conference boasts the presence of nearly 50 sessions that will showcase all the ways that social enterprises are playing a role in shaping the recovering economy. By exchanging ideas and strategies, SEA desires to foster strong efforts to build a strong social enterprise field. An especially interesting element of the conference will be the Angel Forum where eight social entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to pitch their social enterprise to a panel of judges and a live audience. This will offer these budding social entrepreneurs the potential to be featured on the Social Enterprise Alliance website; and could lead to angel investors or other funders.

The title of the conference is “New Approach, New Economy: Realizing the Potential of Social Enterprise.” According to SEA, it is vital that all social entrepreneurs who work hard during the year in their particular ventures to come together and share their learning, offer encouragement, and seek ways to collaborate for the purpose of advancing the field. Registration is still available and participants can even register onsite for an additional fee. Some of the discussions that will be held are as follows:

Investment & Finance
Models & Strategies
Policy & Advocacy
Leadership Development & Education
Communications & Storytelling

If you are attending please offer your comments upon your return and share what you learned.

Photo Courtesy: socialearth

Marketing Strategies for Social Enterprise

2010-04-14T01:20:00.000-07:00

In the social sector competition and marketing are becoming increasingly more relevant. In the realm of social enterprises this could not be truer. When all things are said and done, social enterprises are businesses. The nuances of those businesses are what set them apart from other profit making businesses, but one thing that is shared is the need to compete and market oneself effectively. Thomas Wolff, the author of Managing a Nonprofit Organization in the 21st Century offers a nonprofit definition of marketing. He expresses that marketing is seen as effectively engineering the satisfaction of all constituents who will assist the organization to successfully accomplish its mission, while meeting program goals and achieving financial stability. The process of marketing is executed by conducting market research, establishing a brand, and finally implementing a marketing mix.

In order to develop an overall marketing strategy or plan, a nonprofit organization must have the facts n how well it stacks up against the competition; how it is perceived in the community; how its programs, activities, and products are regarded; and how it might command a bigger share of customers, clients, funders, or other constituents (Wolff). Marketing research is the vehicle to which all of these questions are answered. To begin the market research process an organization may decide to segment the population to create a “target market.” Target marketing is the process whereby decisions are made about which groups an organization will choose to serve. Each segment of the target market that is identified as being important to the organization needs to have a marketing method applied to ensure their needs are being addressed. Market segmentation allows nonprofit organizations and social enterprises alike the ability to control whom they serve by choosing where it is most effective or most important, according to organizational mandate or mission, to spend limited resources, as opposed to letting the limits of their funding arbitrarily make that decision for them.

Once a target market has been identified the organization can move onto conducting extensive research on those members of the population. To successfully analyze the environment, an organization should seek to determine what market related questions they would like answered.
Preliminary research may have to be conducted to ensure that all necessary questions are asked and all marketing objectives can be met. Following the preliminary question formulating phase, a formal research plan must be created. This includes creating instruments that will allow the organization to successfully gather relevant data (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, phone interviews, etc.). Of course after all the data has been collected, it must be analyzed and taken into consideration as the organization moves forward.

Branding is also important to the marketing process. It is the process of establishing the organization’s public image. According to Stephanie Krick, a professor at the University of Central Florida, the goal of the brand is to create a positive and favorable organizational image in each target audience. These positive reactions are based on an individual’s beliefs, ideas and impressions of the organization’s services, programs and management styles (Krick, 2010). As mentioned in a previous post on Justmeans.com, a strong brand is the main component in being noticed, which is why it is crucial for nonprofit organizations to get their image right.

So, the research has been conducted, and the image has been created, now comes the task of actually reaching the target audience. This is done through an intensive process called a marketing mix. Within this process an organization has to determine why someone chose to buy a product, purchase a service, pay for programs, or even make a contribution to a nonprofit organization (Wolff). To answer these questions, a marketing mix consisting of four elements must be facilitated. Those four elements are the four P’s of marketing: Product, Promotion, Price, and Place. Once these decisions have been made an organization will then tailor its products, services, and messages, adjust its prices and delivery systems, and promote itself in ways that truly serve the target market.

Photo credit: The Text Works

Battling Social Media Overload

2010-04-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

As someone who works in the technology field, I'm quite accustomed to spending most of my days online. And as someone who is heavily involved in social media, I admit to spending a lot of time checking updates via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. (OK, the latter isn't necessarily work-related. Scrabble anyone?) I am also an early adopter of many new technologies, but again, this is part of my work world. But I do sometimes find the number of social media sites I must visit and update overwhelming. And I've seen more and more friends lately post on Facebook that they're giving up social media. Suffering from social media overload, they are opting not to participate in social media at all.

This decision seems a bit drastic, I would contend. Instead of cutting all social media out of your life, I recommend the following steps -- for both personal and professional use -- to help prevent you from feeling overwhelmed by social media choices.

Avoid social media for social media's sake: Rather than signing up for every service possible, pick the sites that best serve your goals. Do you want to reconnect with old friends? Try Facebook. Do you want to connect with potential business associates? Try LinkedIn.

Use the services you're most comfortable with: If you already belong to a social media network, it might be better to remain active and increase your presence there than it is to create profiles on every site. The drawback of the latter is that you might find yourself with a lot of unused and out-of-date profiles. There's little use to having people stumble upon your profile if it hasn't been updated since 2006!

Engage: One of the keys to make participation in social networks useful is to, well, participate. But remember that these services are not bullhorns. Do not merely "shout" at your "friends" and "followers," only using these networks to push information out. While social media is a great place to share information, it is important to be responsive -- listen, comment, engage.

Trace, evaluate, adapt: If you are using social media for professional purposes, do be sure to utilize the analytics tools that many of these services offer. These can help you ascertain the traffic levels and the user engagement. It is important to check these regularly to evaluate the ROI of a platform. But as the field of social media is ever-changing, you should be prepared to adapt. For example, just because a service like Foursquare is popular now, does not mean you should be forever wedded to location-based marketing.

Take a break: If you're feeling overwhelmed, step away. Rather than delete your profiles and swear never to return to Facebook again, simply designate a small amount of time (daily or weekly) to give to social media. You needn't feel compelled to respond to every post or every comment or every tweet.

Thinking about E-Books

2010-04-06T02:43:00.000-07:00

With the release of the iPad this weekend, much attention is again drawn to electronic books, a social innovation that is shaping how and what we read. An increasingly popular way to read with an estimated one million plus e-readers sold, the iPad joins the market of other popular devices, including the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Only a small portion of American bookbuyers buy and read books electronically, but that number has been steadily on the rise. Studies show that most readers and frequent book-buyers still prefer their books in print, but as people grow more comfortable with reading digital texts, more consumers do seem willing to try e-books.

Even if you don't own an e-reader and/or aren't confident that it's the right technology tool for you, there are several other ways in which you can read e-books:

Computer screen (You can download files as PDFs or TXTs or in other formats depending on the software you are using)

PDA/smartphone (There are multiple applications you can download and install)

paper (Print it out!)

If you're not certain you want to invest in an e-reading device like an iPad -- or even if you already have -- here are some resources where you can find free eBooks. This is not only a good way to save money when testing to see if you like reading e-books, but it's a nice way to read "the classics," many of which are freely available in the public domain.

WEBSITES

Project Gutenberg 30,000 free books (also available through the iBookstore)
Google Books
Wowio

MOBILE APPLICATIONS

iBooks
Amazon Kindle App
Kobo
Barnes & Noble
Stanza

(Another source for free e-books, although not to everyone's taste I realize, are the iPhone and iPad Comics Apps Marvel and ComicsX)

As a book lover, I have resisted e-readers, preferring to have the paper-bound one in my hands. Having gone to graduate school to study literature, I have had a hard time imagining a world without the printed word, without "the book." (I also have a hard time not taking notes in the margins) But as I find myself spending more and more time reading online (reading blogs, reading the news), I've become increasingly comfortable with digital text. However, this type of reading is quite different, I would contend, than the type of reading I do with a book, physically, in my lap. On a computer, I tend to multi-task and follow links, not reading with the same focused and solitary concentration that a book gets (or supposedly gets).

How will this new form of reading change how we think about books -- both those delivered in print and electronically?

Have you tried e-books? What are your thoughts? How will a social and technological innovation that shapes how we read shape us in turn?

$50,000 for Social Entrepreneurs

2010-03-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

The Hitachi Foundation is searching the country to find young social entrepreneurs making an impact in their communities. The foundation is especially looking for new social enterprise start-ups that focus on helping move people out of poverty and into "mainstream America."

The award is offered by the Yoshiyama Program, which is named after Mr. Hirokichi Yoshiyama, the Chairman of Hitachi, Ltd. Upon his appointment as Chairman, he established the Hitachi Foundation. Upon his retirement with the donation of personal funds from his pension, he expanded his foundations reach and created the Yoshiyama Award for Exemplary Service to the Community. This award was operated by the foundation from 1988-2008. In 2008, the Yoshiyama Program was established. This program goes beyond the Yoshiyama Award for Exemplary Service in that the Program does not just honor young people for the changes they have made, instead, recognizes and rewards young people for the changes they are making. It also differs in that it focuses the award on young entrepreneurs and their quest to help low-wealth individuals in a targeted community in the US, overcome one or more barriers to economic security.

The Yoshiyama Program will select 6 entrepreneurs who will each receive $50,000 and technical resources to strengthen their business. The cash award will be dispersed over a two year period. The Foundation will provide a peer learning/mentoring network. This would include helping with the development of a marketing plan, financial management, leadership training, general management, and human resources policies.

The Program aims to discover the next generation of young business leaders. Along that vein, the Program seeks to identify 18-29 year olds who have formed financially viable businesses that create jobs, supply goods or services, or use internal management practices. While the Foundation recognizes business leaders of all ages are being productive in fostering substantial change, the Hitachi Foundation has a history of honoring young people, and seeks to continue that tradition.

There are a few stipulations to being eligible for the Program. Your business has to have generated some income. The Yoshiyama program is focused on businesses that are 1-5 years old and have been generating income for at least the last 12 months. If your business has not yet reached that milestone, the Program encourages applicants to apply in the future when they have.

The Yoshiyama Program will also document the stories of the selected young business leaders and put them in a position to serve as examples of how to run a financially sustainable business. The program hopes that the promotion of these young leaders and entrepreneurs will cause others to learn from. Furthermore the Program hopes to inspire the creation of other businesses that will strengthen the community.

If interested here is the timeline:

March 22 - Round 1 applications due

April 16 - Round 1 judging complete

June 7 - Semifinalist applications due (This portion of the application will include a phone interview, further documentation and references)

July 16 - Semifinalist judging complete

September 9-10 - Finalist presentations and interviews with judging panel- Washington, D.C.

September 24 - Prize recipient notification

Early-mid November - Yoshiyama retreat and Awards Banquet

What do you think, could your business use $50,000?

Photo courtesy: Winnermoney

Corporate Innovation via INTRApreneurship

2010-03-09T00:44:00.000-08:00

My mother has been telling me my entire life that it is not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. These wise words were usually given because she was trying to convince me to just believe what she said and not try to prove it to myself. Like when she told me that touching the blades of a running fan would probably hurt my fingers. True to my inquisitive form, I touched the fan blades anyway and bruised my finger before the blades came to a stop. When she realized what I had done she offered those infamous words- why do you always have to try to reinvent the wheel? When considering social enterprises, the same theme can be applied.

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, 1.5 million nonprofit organizations have been established. Those 1.5 million organizations are applying for the same grants, and competing for the same donors. With that many organizations, there is no getting around the fact that just within the United States, there are probably several organizations providing the same services to the same populations. Social Entrepreneurship is a fairly newer field with not as much competition, but the interest is growing and so will the number of existing companies. This begs the question: Is it necessary to always reinvent the wheel, so to speak?

To address this question, the Ashoka foundation has coined the term, "Intrapreneur." This term is being applied to change making individuals who are fostering ideas from within existing organizations. Individuals are finding ways to use current resources from an already established organization and put them to use in a socially motivated manner. Many corporations are trying to find ways to inspire and motivate their employees to focus on internal practices that will be new and innovative, as opposed to discouraging such ideas and forcing their employees to have to leave and start-up a new company.

Many of the 1.5 million organizations mentioned above will struggle to provide their services. Many will fight for a membership that is strong enough to accomplish any real goals, and as mentioned before they will definitely struggle to secure enough financial support to carry out their missions. With so many organizations in existence the talent pool just gets stretched too thin.

It is similar to the current political party structure. Primarily there are the Democrats, Republicans and Independents. The Independent party has become such a strong force to be reckoned with that it often splits the votes of the other camps. When voters were feeling removed from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the 1992 election, Ross Perot gained popularity with the independent voters. While he did not gain majority support, he did set the stage for Bill Clinton to squeak out a win by drawing would be Republican voters to vote for him. Had he not been a contender, those Republican voters could have turned out for George H.W. Bush and history may have been different. Applying the same philosophy, if workers within existing organizations would ban together to make operations better, instead of starting something new, the organization's history may be changed. It is just not always feasible to split the workforce and expect to get productive social returns.

Some may believe that they cannot effect the same change from within an existing organization. I have heard that the battle for internal resources to support your idea can be exhausting. Having to fight against established norms and traditional dogmas can be discouraging. And finding enough people from within the organization to support you can be frustrating as well. But, the reassuring thing is, intrapreneurs are a lot like entrepreneurs. They are innovative risk takers who possess conviction, persistence and insight. An intrapreneur thinks like an entrepreneur, looking out for opportunities, which profit the organization. Intrapreneurship is a novel way of making organizations more profitable where imaginative employees exercise entrepreneurial thoughts. And utilizing the resources of existing company personnel does not require any different set of skills or mindset than that of the entrepreneur. The mind only has to shift from creating ideas that will help get a company off the ground towards creating ideas that will help their current company perform better. It is in the best interest of an organization to encourage intrapreneurs as they will be the ones to benefit from the ability to reinvent themselves as a socially responsible corporation and improve performance.

Entrepreneurs will always have their place, without them we would be without numerous innovations that have changed our lives. But, entrepreneurship is not always going to be the best answer- and as my mom always said: it just not necessary to always try and reinvent the wheel.

As always, let me know what you think!

Social Enterprise on TV

2010-03-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

Now social entrepreneurship has its own TV show, thanks to a partnership between the Skoll Foundation and the BBC World global network. The eight-episode series started February 13, 2010, is called Alvin’s Guide to Good Business, and is being hosted by financial expert Alvin Hall.

Hall brings his 25 years of experience on Wall Street to probe the business models and results of eight social entrepreneurial organizations working around the globe.

In the most recent episode, the third in the series, Alvin traveled to Japan, where the Marine Stewardship Council has been working to convince both fishers and consumers of the importance of sustainable fisheries.

In the second segment, Alvin traveled to India to look at IDE-India, which makes affordable irrigation products to help farmers grow their crops during the dry seasons. The first episode looked at Riders for Health, led by Andrea and Barry Coleman, 2006 Skoll social entrepreneurs. The group uses motorcycles to deliver health care in Africa.

Upcoming segments will feature Apopo, Partners in Health, Friends International, Kiva, and Camfed. Each series segment is being streamed online here at http://rockhopper.tv/skoll/default.aspx during the week of its broadcast and beyond.

The series is being developed in conjunction with RockhopperTV, which also runs a blog about the behind-the-scenes people and entrepreneurs Hall encounters while producing the series.

Micro Lending vs. Pay Day Loans

2010-02-24T00:19:00.000-08:00

Take a drive down any urban thoroughfare and you will see an abundance of businesses exalting their "pay day is today" mantras. These businesses thrive in low income neighborhoods where individuals are generally living check to check and need some extra cash in between pay checks to make ends meet. You can also find a strong force of these services online, where there has been an uptick in business with the recent economic downturn.

If you have been fortunate enough not to have needed such a service here's how they work. You go into one of these store fronts (or apply online) and provide a recent pay stub and a recent bank statement. Based on how much you earn every pay period, you are then approved for a certain amount- generally not to exceed $500.00. Once approved you write the company a personal check for the amount you were approved, plus the interest fee (more on that later). This check is then held for collateral until you repay the debt. The repayment periods are usually about 2 -4 weeks (to coincide with your pay frequency).

This sounds like an ideal service for those who need it right? Wrong! These companies may not offer credit checks, which make their services widely accessible, but they do lend this money at exorbitant interest rates. The price associated with not having your credit run, is generally an annual percentage rate of about 300-400%. This means that the customer is paying so much in fees that they almost have to take out another loan to cover the hit they have taken to their monthly or bi-weekly budget. As a result a vicious cycle is created and the lenders have a cache of return patrons.

This for-profit service is vastly different from the social enterprise of micro lending. The patrons of a micro lending service are looking to secure small amounts of money to start a business of some sort. In the United States many of the persons interested in this service live below the poverty line and do not posses credit scores that would make them eligible for a conventional business loan. With a micro loan- their business ideas can be realized.

Unlike pay day loans, which only offer a financial trapto its customers; micro financing services usually come with education and training in addition to the funds. Those who receive the loans receive training on how to spend and allocate the funds to make the most of their proposed venture. In the New York City social venture Project Enterprise, local residents with poor credit submit a business plan along with their application for loans requesting amounts ranging from $750-12,000. In addition to the funds, the applicant receives business training, and network opportunities.

Socialinnovations such as Project Enterprise fill a much needed void in the economic community that does not come with the cyclical borrowing of pay day loan institutions. Pay day lenders seem to capitalize off the low income community in which they do business, while micro financing offers the opportunity for residents to reach above the poverty line and enhance their community. Micro lenders also do not adhere to the stringent repayment guidelines of most pay day lenders; allowing their recipients a repayment schedule of 1-2 years.

As the economy continues to be halted by the current financial crisis, lending to small businesses has come to an almost complete stop. Without an almost perfect credit score, those with desires to start their own business are finding their American Dream to be almost impossible. Micro lending provides a valued service and allows opportunities in communities where traditional lending practices are virtually nonexistent.

What do you think?

Photo Courtesy: About.com

India Nonprofit Uses Twitter to Get Books to Calcutta Kids

2010-02-22T03:41:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk about how Twitter is being used to help raise funds to help those in need around the world, but Pratham Books, a Mumbai-based nonprofit in India, recently used Twitter in a different way—to track down the young volunteers behind a mobile library project that was using a cycle-van to deliver free, second-hand books to poor children and teaching them to read.

Upon reading a story about the project earlier this month in Newstrack India, Pratham Books, a nonprofit trust that publishes high-quality children’s books, decided it wanted to help. Trouble was, nobody knew how to make contact with the mobile library service, including the news bureau that picked up the story. Undeterred, PB trustee Kanchan Bannerjee offered to sponsor the contribution of some Bengali books for the project, but only if PB could find the children involved.

PB volunteer Gautam John (@gkjohn) jumped on the challenge, turning to Twitter in an effort to crowdsource the contact information. He sent out the following tweet: “Anybody in Calcutta who can help @prathambooks get in touch with these kids please? He attached a link to the Newstrack India story—and a half-hour later, people started retweeting the message, and within a day, Pratham Books had the information it needed.

The result? According to the nonprofit’s blog, Pratham Books “will be sending out a set of Bengali books to these kids, who every Wednesday drive their mobile library, aptly named Boi Gari (Books Van) so they can distribute the books to children in rural areas. A huge thank-you to all the Tweeple who helped us connect.”

Pratham Books (@prathambooks) says the Twitter experiment has inspired them to find other such projects all over India—proof positive that there’s not only wisdom in a crowd, but also generosity.

Social Entrepreneur Philip Berber’s 5 Lessons for Social Change

2010-02-22T03:20:00.000-08:00

Internet millionaire-turned-social innovator Philip Berber, speaking at today’s TEDxAustin conference in Texas, said his Glimmer of Hope Foundation has learned five lessons in its 10 years of building water wells and helping the poor in Ethiopia. He urged fellow conferees, many of them also social entrepreneurs, to take heed.

“Traditional international aid programs don’t work,” Berber said.

Here, he says, is what does:

Start in a single village and work bottom-up. “Traditional international aid starts in an ivory tower, looking down their noses, telling poor Africans what they need and want,” Berber said. “We rejected that model and we started by asking people what they wanted.”
Work with and listen to the rural poor. “They have the will, ability, and motivation o improve their lives. What they need is the support and funding. Give them bricks, they will build a wall. Give them a pump and they will dig the hole.”
Work with organizations already on the ground. “We don’t need more ex-pat Westerners driving around in Land cruisers telling people what to do. See what aid already exists and see if it’s something you and they can use.”
Help the poor make their own money. “As obvious as this sounds, the way to get out of poverty is the make money to do it. Think agriculture and enterprise. Aid and trade.”
Knit together a group of services, simultaneously. “Just getting the poor clean water won’t do it,” Berber says. “They need water and sanitation, health care and schooling, food and a place to go to the bathroom. Let your donors choose which project in one village that they want to fund and then keep them informed with photos and GPS photographs of the schools they are building and the wells they are paying for.”

“One of the greatest injustices on the planet is that so few have so much, and so many have so litter. Let us not be that generation that watches Africa go up in flames while we all stand around holding our watering cans.”

Over the past 20 years, Austin, Tex.-based Glimmer of Hope has invested $135 million into 4,000 projects in Ethiopia and has been able to impact 2 million lives. Says Berber: “We’re just getting started.”

Global Responsibility Licenses: A New BOP Initiative

2010-02-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Last year, the number of chronically hungry people in the world passed the 1 billion mark – nearly one-sixth of the world’s population. Despite life-changing advances in technology enjoyed by developed countries, real progress toward food security, clean water, and health among the very poor continues to elude those living at the so-called Bottom of the Pyramid.

A group of young social entrepreneurs comprising the World Economic Forum’s young global leaders initiative is working to change that. They’ve recently come up with a project that aims to convene business, NGOs and social advocacy organizations around new approaches to innovation and product licensing to turn this situation around.

Called the Global Responsibility License project, a group of young innovators led by James Bradfield Moody, a 25-year-old Australian engineer who is general manager of International Development for CSIRO – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Moody and his team of young WEF leaders are seeking to make intellectual property available for development uses while preserving protections for commercial uses and managing institutional risk.

“Unlocking IP across multiple technology sectors will foster innovation and kick-start the design, development and deployment of technologies,” Moody told a group of social entrepreneurs at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Combined with legal support to draw up the license’s terms so that they’re tailored specifically to the institutions and organizations involved, the GRL “has the potential to bring down barriers faced by current patent commons initiatives and foster new partnerships on a scale previously unachievable,” Moody says.

An example of what IP-sharing can do for those without, Moody says, is the Plumpy Nut, a product developed in 2006 by a British firm that took nut-based technology and added milk, glucose and micronutrients to help feel children and families in the Ethiopian highlands. Before Plumpy Nut reached that population, Moody said, only 10 percent of people were getting nourishment; after distribution of Plumpy Nut, about 70 percent were. “Our idea is to look at the patented world,” Moody says. “There are 5.6 million patents in force in the world today. They’re designed to be a temporary monopoly intended to reward innovation. Trouble is, those patents actually also prevent access sometimes to benefits for developing communities.”

Moody says there are three uses for knowledge in the world today – commercial uses, which benefit the 2 billion people in the developed world; emerging market knowledge, which aid the 3 billion people in that sector (mostly China and India), and then the “space at the bottom of the pyramid,” he says, for the 1 billion people living there. “For these people, there should be licensed humanitarian uses for this knowledge,” Moody told WEF-goers. “From a commercial perspective, there is no market for this knowledge at the bottom of the pyramid, so we’re trying to make one and get that right balance between science, business, NGOs and the donor and legal communities to make it happen.”

Moody and the Young Global Leaders have convened a working group and over the next year will report their progress to the WEF. “Our goal is to get this off the ground in the next year,” Moody says. “The people who need it the most shouldn’t be forced to wait.”

Di-Ann Eisnor: Social Entrepreneur Champions Social Maps

2010-01-25T00:49:00.000-08:00

Social entrepreneur Di-Ann Eisnor says that when she was 12, she would hang out with some friends in the housing projects in her native Taunton, Mass. -- at the time, a distressed, post-industrial city that had yet to reinvent itself. "I spent so much time there that at a certain moment, I'm leaving school one day and I get jumped by a group of girls who found that it was not such a great thing for an outsider to be coming into their neighborhood," says Eisnor, now 37. Two black eyes and a concussion later, Eisnor says, "I realized I had crossed a border that wasn't on any map."

The experience would shape her later work; today, Eisnor is one of a few Web pioneers working to create social maps -- citizen-generated maps comprised of crowdsourced stories, videos and histories about places around the world. "Imagine 100 million city guides filtered by infinite perspectives," says Eisnor, CEO of Platial, Inc., the social mapping startup she founded to be a guide of “who and what is nearby” and be shared digitally. On a Platial map of Portland, OR, the company’s headquarters, for example, people have posted stories and pictures of local landmarks that only the locals would know about, from a sunken barge to a decrepit manor house -- and even the location of a local sweatshop.

In these stories about place, Eisnor says, is power. "Places have meaning; identifying what exists in the hyperlocal is to create an ability to celebrate it, or to change it," says Eisnor, who calls herself a neogeographer. "On regular printed maps, what really exists can disappear or be completely overlooked and remain hidden. Platial is all about citizen-generated maps that can reflect, in real-time, what a place means to its users. Neo-geography can be dynamic and the basis for social action."

In that vein, Eisnor is just getting started. She is now leading a small but growing group of neogeographers internationally in efforts to redefine the way maps are drawn. Maps used to be printed, then adapted to the Web as an information resource. But now, she says, because maps can be accessed on the fly with mobile technology, maps can be redrawn to spawn social action.

“The merging of crowdsourced information and access to real-time data from new developments in mobile communication can actually impact decisions and actions, such as when and where to purchase a product; when and where and with whom to barter; when and where to locate the most effective routes for emergency response; when and where to build new roads or public facilities, and when and where to buy a home or change a route or itinerary based on real-time circumstances,” she says. “In this realm, time is inextricably linked to location, which removes historic obstacles to actionable or live mapping.”

Besides her work at Platial, Eisnor is serving as community neogeographer for Waze, an Israeli startup that launched in the U.S. this past summer. The company focuses on location-aware, real-time and mobile traffic-routing; Eisnor is helping the startup hone its strategy and technology.

But Eisnor says the toughest challenges facing neogeographers lie ahead. During a recent speech at TEDx-Silicon Valley, Eisnor warned that the world's borders are about to be redrawn on a massive scale, chiefly by waning access to natural resources like water and food, and that rising tensions between nations about ownership of these resources have the potential to breed regional conflict on a massive scale. It’s time, she said, to start looking at the world differently and classify people not so much by which country they live in but by their common needs and potential. A cartographer's map of the world underground water reserves, for example, shows there are 273 cross-border aquifers, meaning that as clean, fresh water becomes a more precious resource in the years ahead, governments on both sides of existing borders will have to agree how this water will be used, mined, and how to prevent it from being polluted.

“If we create new kinds of digital maps that help us to map how humans interact, chiefly over the issues that divide them or bring them together, then we can create dynamic maps that can help us resolve some of these differences,” Eisnor says. And if everyone has the ability to post their stories and small perspectives on these maps in real time, then maps become statements and solutions, shared knowledge, and new dialogues – not simply a set of permanent, cold lines that depersonalize and divide us.

"As Churchill said, we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Eisnor told the TEDxSV crowd. “But with social mapping, we can create our maps and thereafter they shape us. The cool thing now is that with social mapping, we can put map-making tools in the hands of millions and be continuously reshaping how we look at the world, based on what is happening in a place."

New GEM survey cites social entrepreneurs

2010-01-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

The latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor was launched today in Santiago, Chile, and it’s showing that young social entrepreneurs are rising in influence and number across the world, chiefly in innovation-driven economies.

It was the first time that the 10-year-old survey partnership between the London Business School and Babson College – the largest single study of entrepreneurial activity in the world -- included a measure of new social enterprise activity in its annual survey.

Its findings on social entrepreneurship across 49 countries (SE defined here as “individuals engaged in entrepreneurial activities with a social good”) showed that:

Social entrepreneurial activity appears to rise slightly with a country’s stage of economic development. “Individuals in richer countries, having satisfied their own basic needs, may be more likely to turn to the needs of others,” the study said. “In other words, the opportunity cost of social entrepreneurship may be higher in developing countries.”
More men than women started socially oriented ventures in 2009.
Social entrepreneurs tend to be active at younger ages than business entrepreneurs.
Better-educated individuals were more likely to be social entrepreneurs.
Social ventures were started in a variety of areas, notably education, health, culture, economic development, and the environment.
The distinction between “social” and “regular” entrepreneurship is sometimes blurred. However, using a more refined spectrum of social enterprises based on innovation and predominant organizational objectives, results suggest that social objectives (not-for-profit and hybrid social enterprises) still prevail over more economic (for-profit social enterprises) and less innovative ones (traditional NGOS).
Social entrepreneurial activity is much lower than traditional entrepreneurial activity in almost all countries surveyed, though in some countries (chiefly Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Jamaica), there is significant overlap of social and business entrepreneurship, suggesting that “social” and “business” entrepreneurship categories may be blurred.
Social entrepreneurs differ widely in the type of organizations launched and the kind of social or environmental problems they try to solve. Social enterprises identified in the report spanned a wide array of areas such as education, health, culture, economic development and the environment. While sector participation does not vary much by country, there are differences in social issue focus among the three country groups by economic development. Social entrepreneurs in factor-driven economies tend to focus on more elementary issues and pressing needs such as basic health care provision, access to water and sanitation or agricultural activities in rural areas. In innovation-driven economies, individuals are particularly active in launching culture-related organizations, providing services for disabled people, focusing on waste recycling and nature protection or offering open-source activities such as online social networking.

GEM researchers also developed four broad groups of social enterprises: traditional NGOs (high levels of social/environment
Goals and not-for-profit status); Not-for-profit social enterprises (high levels of social/environmental goals; not-for-profit status; innovation); Hybrid social enterprises ( high levels of social/environmental goals; earned income strategy “integrated” or “complementary” to the mission), and For-Profit social enterprises (high but not exclusively social/environmental goals; earned income strategy.)

Across all 49 countries surveyed, not-for-profit social enterprises were most prevalent (24%); followed by hybrid for-profit/nonprofit models; for-profit social enterprises (12%), and traditional NGOs (8%). However, there were regional preferences. For example, hybrids were most popular with social entrepreneurs in the Scandinavian countries of Finland and Iceland, as well as in Algeria, Uganda, the Dominican Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Malaysia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Switzerland. Meanwhile, the for-profit social enterprise model is most favored, GEM says, by the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Romania.

While the rate of social entrepreneurial activity is dwarfed by traditional enterprise activity in efficiency-driven countries, they are a “significant” component of entrepreneurship in many innovation-driven countries. “A significant minority of social entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries, appear to wish to have a profitable business that at the same time addresses social issues,” the report said. “This demonstrates that for many people, the categories of “social” and “business” entrepreneur are artificial, and more holistic definitions of entrepreneurship are needed if we are to capture the true extent of this phenomenon.”

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

Crowdsourcing Public Art to Inspire Social Change

2010-01-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2002, Naomi Natale had an experience that would transform her from a photography student in picturesque Albuquerque, N.Mex., into what she calls “a little crazy woman with big, crazy ideas.” That summer, Natale read a fundraising letter from Kenya’s Sisters of Mary Immaculate, about the millions of African children who have been orphaned by AIDS, civil war, and poverty. It inspired Natale to travel to Kenya with her camera to document the local orphan crisis and help the nonprofit raise money to help. But Natale didn’t expect the summer project to change her life. “I went there trying to help people fundraise for thousands of orphans and came back with individual faces stuck in my mind and real-life stories,” Natale told TEDxMidatlantic conferees in Baltimore last month.

One of those stories was especially unforgettable, Natale said, about two artistically gifted orphan brothers living in the slums of Nairobi, who sculpted toy airplanes and trucks from scrap metal that they found on the streets. Natale never met the boys; by the time she had heard about them, they had disappeared from the streets and were presumed to be dead by those who knew them. The youngest boy was eight years old. “To this day,” Natale says, “I continuously wonder about the tremendous potential that is disappearing along with the lives and the futures of children in crises like these.”

Inspired, Natale, in the fall of 2006, created a public art project that would help to raise money for the orphans. She invited 1,000 artists, school groups and people in her family and friends networks to make cradles out of scrap materials. Each cradle, she explained, would symbolize the lost potential of children in crisis. “If we can see enough potential in a piece of scrap to make a cradle, why can’t we see enough potential in our orphans to act?” Natale asked as part of her invitation.

She didn’t expect much of a response: each invitee, she explained, would be expected to raise $100 from others to both make the cradle and donate to the Firelight Foundation, which helps build small orphanages in Africa.

But Natale underestimated the appeal: The Cradle Project generated interest from across the country. More than 555 artists sent in cradles, which were shown at a public art installation in an abandoned warehouse in Albuquerque in 2007 attended by more than 5,000 visitors. In all, more than $90,000 was raised for the Firelight Foundation through sponsorships, an auction of the cradles and sales of a book on the cradle project.

And now, Natale, a 2010 TED Fellow, is thinking even bigger. Her new One Million Bones project, aims to raise awareness of genocide around the world. Once again, she is inviting artists and citizens to participate – but this time is asking 1 million people to create fabricated human bones, each symbolizing someone killed or displaced due to genocide.

Her new goal: to collect these “bones” and display them, this summer or fall, on the National Mall in Washington. Each bone will be sponsored by an artist, who will make each bone and also donate $5 to the project per bone, thereby generating $5 million that would, in turn, go to partner organizations working to help genocide victims around the globe. For $15, people who wish to participate but who don’t want to make a bone, Natale says, can have bones made for them by public artists supporting the project.

Sound far-fetched? Natale is the first to say her idea is bold and audacious. But she is passionate and has already generated growing interest among public artists around the country. “Most of us will never view a mass grave and most of us will never understand what a pile of human bones looks or sounds or feels like,” she says. In 1994, President Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake, said that if the U.S. government was to support effective action to stop the genocide, “then the American public needed to make it clear that’s what they want. Lake encouraged human rights advocates to ‘make more noise’ and thereby direct the U.S. government’s response to the crisis,” Natale told TEDxMidatlantic conferees in November. “I want us to make noise today in Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Burma and in other places around the world where people are being denied the right to exist. Governments are murdering their people and our governments are responsible by international law to intervene but we as their citizens must tangibly pressure them to do so. By installing 1 million bones on the national mall in Washington, I am demanding the people and the journalists and the politicians to pay attention. If they do, it will create a noise impossible to ignore.”

Public art, she says, is a powerful tool for social action, but it’s a form that is not being used enough. “People need to understand their role in a movement if they’re going to consider participating and they need to be able to see that they can take ownership in that movement, and have their actions followed by reactions,” she says. Large-scale public art installations can help people to see the impact of their actions. “Letters, phone calls and emails to decision-makers can play an extremely important role,” Natale says, “but not enough people use these forms of protest or dissent because they doubt that their individual correspondence makes a difference. But that attitude leads to inaction, and then nothing changes and people give up hope.”

Public art like One Million Bones, says Natale, can break that cycle of apathy. “All I know is that I’m not okay with genocide happening on our watch,” she says. “As individuals, we can use our voices and action to tell our governments and the international community to solve these problem, using the power of a symbol and the importance of those who know the stories behind those symbols to keep telling them.”

Co-working Trend Gaining Momentum for Social Entrepreneurs

2010-01-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

One of the hottest social enterprise trends of the past year – and one of the top trends expected to continue well into 2010 and beyond – is co-working. Wikipedia defines co-working as “an emerging trend for a new pattern of working.” Social entrepreneurs are increasingly trading in their isolated, work-at-home environments for coworking – what Wikipedia calls “a social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.” Trendwatchers in the social enterprise space predict that co-working will continue to gain popularity among social entrepreneurs in 2010, thanks largely to the still-flat economy, in which startup budgets will remain tight.

But co-working isn’t just about saving money. Unlike business incubators, co-working environments focus on community – and social good -- rather than profit. According to Heather Fleming, the CEO of Catapult Design, which operates out of Mission*Social, the co-working space in San Francisco provides each conference room with monitors, speakers and Web cams that are rigged to the walls for frequent international video Skye calls. Additionally, she says, “most of the IKEA furnishings in the space are perched on wheels to make changes fast and easy.” But most significantly, Fleming wrote in a recent bog post for PopTech, “the solidarity component (of co-working) also plays a valuable role in space serving social entrepreneurs…I now get to sit next to two successful female CEOs running technology organizations.”

And there are other pluses, Fleming says. “Co-hosting Catapult’s holiday party with the immensely popular SamaSource (which also co-works at Mission*Social)
http://www.justmeans.com/CHANGEMAKERS-Leila-Chirayath-Janah-Micro-work/6079.html fueled the expansion of our social circle,” Fleming said. “And naturally, being in proximity of 20 feet with Inveneo has already resulted in a joint proposal on a new project.”

Co-working emerged in 2005, publicized by tech engineer Brad Newberg to describe a physical space. Newberg organized a co-working site called the Hat Factory in San Francisco, a live-work loft that was home to three technology workers and open to others during the day. To this day, Hat Factory charges $10 per day or $175 per month for a desk, standard office amenities and access to a shared kitchen, private meeting room and a lounge. Today, there are hundreds of co-working sites available in urban settings around the world: co-working spaces now exist in Britain, Argentina and Australia, as well as in the U.S. – chiefly in San Francisco and New York. The global Hub network is expected to continue to grow next year and has begun to experiment with seed funding collaborations and startup-incubation that relies on co-working communities.

In New York, co-working groups include Spark Space, The Hive at 55 and New Work City, where full-time, part-time, and drop-in memberships as well as workshops and events can be held.

Another co-location hot spot is San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) area, a place where some of the most affordable office spaces are located for social entrepreneurs operating on tight budgets. This area of the city has long served as a kind of start-up haven; the trend continues. Among those social entrepreneurs housed in this area are Public Architecture and blueEnergy Group, which provides sustainable energy to marginalized communities. The city has a second co-location area in the building at 972 Mission, called Mission*Social, a co-working space also aimed at social entrepreneurs working in San Francisco. Founded by Inveneo, the space is stocked with groups that include SamaSource and which serve communities in Rwanda, Guatemala, India, the DRC, Zambia, Kenya and other areas in the developing world.

Interested in co-working? The site of the upcoming TEDxSoMa
will be in a popular South of Market co-working space, ParisSoma. Or join the co-working Google Group, and the LinkedIn group on co-working.

If you’re already in a co-working arrangement for social entrepreneurs, let us hear from you on how goes the experience.

Coordinating Millions to Make Social Change

2009-12-21T02:32:00.000-08:00

How do you coordinate the actions of millions of people in the world to make social change? Reid Hoffman, the angel investor and founder of LinkedIn, says you do it online, and this time in history is a great time to make such large-scale social action possible.

The future of cause movements, he says, will be the ability of small groups and corporations to boil up answers to social problems by crowdsourcing intelligence and new ideas from millions. “The Internet is more about people than it is about technology,” he told a Dec. 12 gathering of TEDx in Silicon Valley. “This is because everyone has a presence now. As you move to Web 2.0, you’re talking about movements, how real identities are beginning to interact with one another. It’s a large majority of people who care deeply about what impact they have in the world, so we’re in a period of time where bottom-up movements are just starting to be possible.”

Hoffman, who has been an investor in such startups as Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Nanosolar, Ning, Six Apart and Zynga, says that when he invests in a startup, he looks at three things: scalability, margins and the structure – the same attributes, he says, that make Web-based causes or philanthropic movements more effective. Hoffman cites kiva.org, donorschoose.org, and hybrid infrastructure organizations such as Mozilla and Creative Commons as examples of cause-wired organizations that use scale, margins and structure to make a difference.

He says what makes social-change dotcoms an interesting investment are their ability to leverage broad social networks at low cost to take concentrated action. Think social network creation such as kiva.org, the marketplace for microfinance, which link up crowds to crowds. A second way dotcoms become an interesting investment, he says, is if they provide an infrastructure for distributed collaboration, like Drupal, which allows nonprofits to create cheap community Web sites to coordinate their communities. A third area for social Web investment these days, he says, is the corporate sector. Internet corporations, he says, deal with communities and have interactions with millions of people that can be made part of a cause or philanthropic initiative. “Using badges or other forms of identity, corporations can convey that they all share a particular cause.” Hoffman says all three “arcs” for investment and innovation are made possible because everyone in these arcs are connected by their identities as participants.

“Mass action is now sustainable online,” Hoffman said. But the challenge now, he says, is how to use the Net to mobilize people and “get it right.” “Entrepreneurship now is not just communication of ideas but how you set up institutions to have impact around those ideas,” he says. “It’s not a command-and –control structure. It’s not one person telling everybody now to do this or do that. Where entrepreneurship on the Web will come in is that we can create lots and lots of micro-groups – this one targeted at clean water, and this one targeted at hunger, and so forth – and people can organize themselves effectively.”

“The future of social enterprise will be sooner and stranger than you think,” Hoffman said. “The key thing is that it won’t be top-down; it will be a bottom-up boiling up of coordinated intelligence that suggests what needs attention and that tackles it.”

Rothschild Heir Battling ‘Nature Deficit Disorder

2009-12-21T02:29:00.000-08:00

David de Rothschild, the 31-year-old British adventure-explorer, eco-activist and social entrepreneur says he’s often asked after one of his expeditions into nature what it is like “out there.” He says he usually returns the question, asking people what they mean when they refer to “out there.”

“We have a nature deficit disorder as a species,” de Rothschild told a gathering of social change activists Dec. 12 at TEDx Silicon Valley. “We are detached from our environment in ways we were not previously. Kids learn about the natural environment but they’re not really touching it themselves.” He added that, as adults, “we pay extra for an ocean view but we probably won’t go for a swim.”

de Rothschild, the director of Adventure Ecology, a British expedition group raising awareness of climate change, says he believes humans are “on a dangerous path” because we’re manufacturing nature rather than saving the nature we already have. He cited Japan’s Ocean Dome, which last month reopened as the world’s largest indoor water park in Miyazaki, Japan. Ocean Dome, with its artificial sand and world’s largest retractable roof, is “just hundreds of feet away from the real ocean and yet people actually prefer to go to the manufactured replica. How crazy is that?”

This waning sense of ownership of “real” nature, de Rothschild says, has motivated him to step up his eco-activism. In 2004/2005, he became the youngest Briton to traverse Antarctica and then went on to be part of a team that broke the world record for the fastest-ever crossing of the Greenland ice cap. This spring, he hopes to begin his journey across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, in a 60-foot catamaran made of used, two-liter plastic bottles and other recyclable materials. He’s called the vessel the Plastiki, a play on the name of the small raft, Kontiki, that Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl used in 1947 to sail across the Pacific from South America to the Polynesian islands. QUOTE from david here about kontiki.

“We’re entering an era of scarcity and so we really have to rethink waste as a resource and how we use our materials, what we use them for and how we dispose of them,” he said. “After seeing the accumulation of plastics in our ocean, I felt we needed to call for action.” But pollution is only one thing to focus on, he says. So is global warming. “After seeing temperatures of no more than 1 degree below zero and sweating in my tent up at the North Pole” during a recent expedition, he says. “makes it very clear to me that we have to do something.”

During his Plastiki voyage, de Rothschild will sail with the support of a handpicked crew of leading scientists, adventurers and creatives on what they call “a mission to inspire, educate and activate individuals, communities and business’s to start moving towards a smarter more sustainable planet 2.0 way of living.” One of the goals of the trip will be to investigate and document parts of the famous “Garbage Island” made of plastic waste that is the size of Texas and is floating in the remote waters of the Pacific, along de Rothschild’s route.

“Humanity has always wanted to tread the path of least resistance,” he says. “But all of us, going forward, can no longer afford to do that. We need to stop hiding from the challenges that confront us and work harder to make change in the real world rather than try to manufacture better or more detached versions of the one we’ve got. It’s not too late.”

For more about deRothschild’s passion for the environment, see his video (below):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImbBGO5fTHE

Daunting for Nonprofit Enterprises

2009-12-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

According to a recent survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the nonprofit world is about to face the toughest year in its history. By every measure, the trade publication says, 2010 could be the most painful year charities have known.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual ranking of the 400 nonprofits that raise the most money found that, by year's end, these groups expect a median decline of 9 percent in donations, meaning half will see giving drop even more starkly.

“At the same time, need is growing fast — some 49 million Americans now don't get adequate nutrition every day which is an increase of 13 million over last year,” the paper says. “And the demands from the nation's most-vulnerable residents fall not just on emergency food and shelter groups, but on other organizations, such as health clinics that must serve the uninsured and colleges overwhelmed by demands for student aid.”

Meantime, the survey says, nonprofit organizations have had to lay off thousands of employees this year, even at places like Stanford University, where jobs once seemed protected forever. Meanwhile, workers at organizations around the country are taking pay cuts and cuts in retirement pay and health benefits. “Some groups told Congress this fall that their very survival was on the line as they sought to meet federal pension rules and keep their organizations afloat,” the Chronicle says.

Here’s what the Chronicle says are 10 trends that will shape how nonprofits – including a wide range of social enterprises – will fare in 2010:

1. Governments in Crisis – “Nonprofits that rely heavily on government grants and contracts will find little relief in 2010 as the recession continues to take a bite out of tax revenues,” the Chronicle says. More than 40 states have reduced spending on services, including health care, education and help for the elderly and disabled.

2. Strains in the Safety Net – “While the economy is improving, the recovery from the recession is expected to be long and difficult,” the Chronicle says. “Nonprofits can anticipate a continued surge in requests for food, housing, and many other social services as recovery from the recession is expected to be long and difficult.”

3. Modest gifts – As nonprofits face cutbacks in state aid, as well as in grants from foundations and corporations, they are turning more intently to individuals and focusing more seriously on small and medium-sized donations.

4. Lower grants -- Hit hard by investment losses, many of the nation’s largest foundations and corporations will probably trim their giving next year or keep it steady at 2009 levels.

5. Weakened charity workforce – “Many nonprofit employees will enter the new year under conditions ripe for burnout,” the Chronicle says, as 2009 was marked by layoffs, salary freezes and other cutbacks in pay and benefits. “Employees who have retained their jobs will take on expanded workloads with no additional compensation.”

6. Cuts in nonprofit salaries

7. Rising donor-nonprofit tensions

8. Rising demand for ROI for each donor dollar spent

9. Volunteerism becomes cool – More people will donate their time to nonprofits as fewer are able to donate cash.

10. Online revolution slows: Nonprofits will continue to strain to figure out how to raise money using new social networks.

What are your predictions for the nonprofit landscape in 2010?

CHARITY OFFICE PARTIES

2009-12-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

After this rough year, some companies are looking to celebrate the holidays differently. Not only are their budgets tighter than ever, their employee head count is far lower than it was last year. What to do?

According to John Challenger, chief executive of the outplacement-consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, just 62 percent of companies are planning holiday parties this year, down from 77 percent a year ago and 90 percent in 2007. Allison Linn, a reporter for msnbc.com who wrote a recent story on the trend, said some companies are opting to scrap their parties this year and instead use their party funds to help others less fortunate.

At Taylor Gregory Broadway Architects in Washington State, the company’s partners asked employees to come up with a plan for their holiday party this year. But instead of a party, the staff voted to buy gifts for a needy local family. “As difficult as it is for them, they all recognize that it may even be more difficult for people elsewhere,” Lois Broadway told Linn for her story.

Other companies are organizing volunteer efforts rather than hold a party for their employees. PECO, the largest utility in Pennsylvania, set aside a day for employees to volunteer with local charities and told Marketplace Radio’s Jeff Tyler that turnout was better than expected. “We took the money we’d normally spend on a party and donated it to different organizations that feed the hungry,” HR director Mary Krick told Marketplace. In all, PECO is giving about $65,000 to local charities.

And on a recent Friday at KPMG offices around the country, employees assembled teddy bears for disadvantaged kids. KPMG spokesman Mark Hutchins said his Los Angeles office spent more than $20,000 to have 700 employees stuff teddy bears – but it was “way less” than a holiday party would have been, he said.

Sometimes, you don’t have to be a start-up to think out of the box. Will the charity office party become a permanent fixture at some firms? Should it? What do you think?

Current Climate is “Great” for Startups, says Flickr CoFounder

2009-12-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Getting discouraged by the slumping economy and a lack of money to start the social enterprise of your dreams? Don’t despair, says Caterina Fake, the businesswoman, angel investor and entrepreneur who co-founded Flickr, sold it to Yahoo! and ran the Technology Development Group there. At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Fake shared some of her early startup experiences and gave assurance to attendees – mostly startup owners and entrepreneurs like herself.

“We had no money – no cash when we started up Flickr” in 2002, Fake told attendees. “We started the company to build a video game but it ultimately failed and we ran out of money so we were running on fumes when we came up with the idea of Flickr. Talk about resource-constrained! We really and truly had no money – about three months of gas left in the tank, and none of us were taking salaries. Ninety percent of the features you see on Flickr were built with a team of six people. We were based up in Vancounver at the time, but even though we were highly under-resourced, those constraints were the things that made us more creative. We had to do creative things to get the word out about Flickr. It seemed counterintuitive at the time to be able to post your photos on your blog or on other parts of the Web but we saw that bandwidth constraints were rapidly declining.

“…We thought up stunts to recruit people and get publicity on BoingBoing, which we may not have done if we had money to hire a proper VP of marketing,” she told attendees. “And the design of the site at the time was seen as very minimalist.”

But Fake said small is good. “You can accomplish a great deal with a very small team,” she said. When Flicker was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, it was an 11-person team, which moved to Sunnyvale and got absorbed a much larger company. “It was a bit of culture shock,” she recalls, “but the basic principles of innovation in a big company are the same as they are on the outside. You need to be agile, you need to be able to get obstacles out of the way, you need to be able to fund things quickly, to take risks, to allow experiments to fail and to allow things to grow for a sufficiently long time to see if they bear fruit.”

Fake is undaunted by the credit crunch, saying she thinks it is a “great time to start up a company.” A few years ago, she said, “I was seeing so many ‘me too’ companies, especially in Silicon Valley, which were rehashing the same ideas, with people not really doing anything novel or adventuresome or new or taking risks,” Fake said. “There was too much money and not enough creativity, so I saw that time as a bad time to do a startup. But times have changed. Everybody is tightening their belts, you need to be more creative, there isn’t much money. We started Flickr in 2002, which was a time, as you may recall, when everyone was saying the consumer market was dead. But looking back, that crunch time was when a lot of great startups got going. I think 2010 is also a great vintage year, a great time to start a company because it’s got a lot of the same things going for it – lots of talent to be had out there, not a lot of money to get people sidetracked or unfocused, and a creative environment that is incredibly rich right now.”

And New York, she says, is especially fertile ground for creative ventures. “One of my clear beliefs is that creativity really emerges from disparate elements coming together, different schools of thought, and the act of exposing yourself to different ideas,” she said. “You don’t find a better place than New York for that to happen. I love Silicon Valley but I do think there can be a bit of … an enclosed way of thinking there. The special sauce is New York culture; it’s also a media town with a very strong arts community, so I think it’s a very good petrie dish of different kinds of ideas.”

To see Fake’s full presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, click here for the video.

Fake currently serves as Chief Product Officer at Hunch, a new startup which launched publicly in June. Hunch is a decision engine that attempts to help people make a decision through a question-and-answer interface online. Fake also is a board member and investor at Etsy.com.

Poll Shows UK Public Optimistic About Social Enterprise

2009-11-30T03:35:00.000-08:00

A new survey and a new poll out in the past week by the UK’s Social Enterprise Coalition, a British organization of social enterprises and related organizations operating in the UK, shows optimism and fast growth in the sector, despite the recession.

In the organization’s poll, conducted by YouGov for the advent of Global Social Entrepreneurs’ Week November 15-21, nearly three quarters (or 71 percent) of 2,000 British citizens surveyed said they believe that social and environmental values of business are as or more important now than before the onset of the credit crunch. The poll also showed that people want more social enterprises in the UK. When asked what is needed to ensure a sustainable economy in the future, some 42 percent of respondents chose social enterprises – ahead of government institutions, charities funded by donations, and traditional business.

Results of the Social Enterprise Coalition’s first-ever “State of Social Enterprise” survey, a separate study of member organizations, show there is “optimism and growth” in the sector, chiefly when compared with other businesses. According to the social enterprises surveyed, social enterprises are twice as confident of future growth as typical small to medium enterprises (SMEs), with 48 percent of social enterprises responding positively versus 24 percent of SMEs. The survey also found that social enterprises challenge the so-called “glass ceiling” in that 26 percent of social enterprises could be described as “women-led” – almost twice as many compared to small businesses (26 percent compared to 14 percent, respectively.) Further, some 41 percent of all board members are women, compared to just 11.7 percent of board members in FTSE 100 companies and 4.9 percent in AIM-listed companies.

Other findings include:

* Social enterprises are motivated by community. The most often-cited reason cited for starting up or working for a social enterprise was “putting something back into the community” – which accounted for 45 percent of all responses.

* Social enterprises are as capital-hungry as small business. One-third of social enterprises have sought financing over the past 12 months, with 60 percent of it required mostly for growth.

Jonathan Bland, CEO of the Social Enterprise Coalition, said the finding that social enterprises are doing well overall despite tough economic times “is very heartening, as this is an incredibly tough climate for all businesses.” Bland added: “Business models that are built to be sustainable and accountable to a wide variety of stakeholders are often better able to withstand economic uncertainty. Additionally, it is evidence of a shift towards more people engaging with businesses whose bottom line includes social and environmental benefit.

Paper Tigers

2009-11-18T01:48:00.000-08:00

Hayat Sindi is an unlikely social problem-solver. The oldest of eight siblings, Sindi left her home in Mecca at the age of 17 and, not speaking a word of English, went to Britain to receive a medical education that she was unable to get in Saudi Arabia. “I wanted to be a scientist,” she says, but “girls didn’t get scholarships.” Even in Britain, there were some who told Sindi that if she insisted on wearing her traditional hijab Muslim head coverings, that she’d fail in the West. But these types of challenges only motivated Sindi, who went on to graduate with honors from Kings College and win a scholarship to get a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge. Three years ago, Sindi came to Harvard as a visiting Saudi scholar to work with Harvard chemistry professor George Whiteside in his social problems lab.

It was there that Sindi and Whiteside created Diagnostics For All, a nonprofit built on their technology innovation enabling people to use tiny, disposable bits of paper to test bodily fluids for signs of illnesses like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. It’s a technology that Sindi believes will help tackle the severe shortage of health workers and medical equipment in developing countries. DFA’s invention enables point-of-care diagnosis using microfabricated paper—tiny square cards that will ease the need for expensive medical labs and personnel who know how to use that equipment. Sindi’s paper solution is accurate, costs practically nothing to make, and can be used to test for a range of different diseases. Use it to screen a drop of blood or urine, sweat or saliva for liver troubles or other ailments, and people can adjust their own medications or more quickly be able to help those in need, Sindi says. “This will help save people’s lives,” she says. Doctors can use these paper devices as well as others with minimal training.

How does it work? A drop of bodily fluid wicks up into tiny wells embedded into the paper and reacts with chemicals in those wells, changing color to signal, for example, the presence of protein or glucose. “Millions of people are dying around the world because they can’t afford access to diagnostic tools to monitor their health,” Sindi told people attending the PopTech 2009 social innovation conference last month in Camden, Maine. “People in the developed world have been sending lab equipment to developing countries to manage their health but [much of this equipment] is old and bulky and [lab] conditions are unsanitary. This approach doesn’t work. Diagnostics For All … can put the power of an entire diagnostic lab at the patient’s fingertips.” Additionally, multiple fluid samples can be tested on the same paper card because there are many wells per card that don’t overlap, connect, or leak.

The first application of the paper test devices is a liver function test. “There are huge numbers of patients who are taking medication for HIV and TB who suffer from liver damage as a side affect of these drugs,” Sindi says. “Here, in the West, doctors do constant blood tests to monitor patients but what is happening in the developing world? It doesn’t happen.” In the United States, some 5 percent of patients being treat with medication for HIV develop liver failure. In the developing world, that figure is 25 percent. “That means that 700,000 will die eventually” if they are not treated or monitored, Sindi says. “And that’s only for HIV. If you add TB to the mix, that number jumps to 2.3 million people who would die – not because of the disease but because of the drugs meant to save them.” She says better diagnostics can solve this problem “head-on” and enable people to screen entire villages in the time it would usually take doctors, in the past, to examine a few patients.

Sindi and her team also are developing a suite of paper diagnostic tools to test for kidney disease and other illnesses. And down the road? Sindi and team want to get involved in applying their invention to the fledgling field of telemedicine. It’s about empowering the voiceless and the powerless, she says, by putting health care tools in the hands of the patient. “Society and science can work hand-in-hand,” she says. “The power is us doing it together.”

What TED didn’t get about India

2009-11-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

TED, the highly vaunted, undisputed king of thought leader conferences globally, held its first gathering in India last week, but not every attendee felt the conference lived up to its hype—nor felt it fairly portrayed the potential of India’s dynamic social entrepreneurial landscape. Writer Manjeet Kripalani, a former BusinessWeek colleague and now the executive director of Gateway House, the Indian council on global relations, was among the most outspoken. She wrote in a controversial post Wednesday in The Financial Express that for starters, the 1,000 global VIPS who attended TEDIndia were mostly westerners and non-resident Indians. Secondly, she said, the conference focused on people who had “created charter schools in India, those who sheltered and rehabilitated the wretched and trafficked in society, and those who recently discovered that cheap cell phones married to corporate social responsibility was the new cool.” Kripalani said that this “is noble but it is not TED. For those fed on TEDs past, it was a let-down.”

With a couple of exceptions, she said, TEDIndia – which she expected would showcase India and what the world might learn from it —instead passed over the nation’s mobile Internet entrepreneurs. “None of them were on display,” she said. Instead, conferees missed the real story of India’s social enterprise, she said. “It was clear what people had learned [instead],” she wrote – that “India is still a poor country and that their [western] charity was welcome. Funds were raised for education and for helping to rehabilitate girls who are trafficked and abused in India.”

But Kripalani said that was hardly enough – and missed the point. “After 15 years of software revolution, of being at the frontier of globalization through outsourcing, of making the most of virtual infrastructure, of cellphone egalitarianism, inventing the Nano and fighting for overseas market share with one hand tied behind our backs, is this, then, still the image of India that the West—and NRIs—continue to cherish and feel comfortable with?” she asked her readers.

But Kripalani’s no-holds-barred review of the conference wasn’t all critical. She lauded a session run by Reuben Abraham, an associate professor of the Indian School of Business, which focused on the commercial potential of opportunities just above the so-called “bottom-of-the-pyramid.” “The new discovery,” Kripalani wrote, “was that those who are still technically poor have stepped beyond the bottom of the pyramid into its center. There’s new market being created here in India for high-quality, low-cost products and public services.”

For more on TEDIndia, click here http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/tedindia_announ.php

and here http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/

For the complete text of Kripalani’s comments, click here: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/column-what-ted-didnt-get-about-india/539729/0

What do you think? Is Kripalani’s report fair? If not, why not? If so, what points can you add to the conversation?

Poverty, Interrupted

2009-11-11T22:43:00.000-08:00

French economist and MIT Poverty Action Lab founder and codirector Esther Duflo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Duflo
loves the United Nations’ goal of ensuring that all children worldwide attend school. But as an economist, she knows that many programs designed to achieve this goal don’t work. Sure, she says, people still think – wrongly -- that if you give away school uniforms and provide kids with free meals, attendance will skyrocket. “Sometimes, ideas that become conventional wisdom are erroneous and need to be rethought,” she says—especially because the budget for poverty-fighting is so limited and will likely remain so.

Duflo, whose research has helped change the way governments and aid organizations address global poverty, is a professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and founder and co-director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Earlier this year, she was named a Macarthur Foundation Fellow. In a recent speech to attendees at the PopTech conference for social innovation in Maine, Duflo urged new approaches to alleviating poverty around the world.

“The temptation is to look for a single, silver bullet to make poverty go away,” Duflo said. Some people blame foreign aid, but poverty has many facets, she said—including lack of health, lack of education, and lack of choice for self-realization.

Applying scientific methodology, Duflo and her colleagues and students at the MIT Poverty Action Lab approach projects of well-intended governments and NGOs with a fresh eye. “We have a spotty and scattered idea of the most effective ways to deliver social impact,” Duflo says, so evaluating what works is critical. The 37-year-old Duflo’s weapon of choice is the randomized trial—the technique used to discover new drugs—to find what works and what doesn’t.

How does it work? So far, so good: Duflo’s researchers, for example, compared a program that aimed to improve children’s school attendance through a program of de-worming, with a program that paid kids to go to school. Testing these projects – by forming treatment groups and control groups – Duflo found that the $3 per year de-worming program resulted in dramatically higher increases in school years attended than did the $6,000 per year program of paying kids to go to school.

Another study in India by Duflo showed that schoolteachers were much more likely to show up for work when they participated in a monitoring system that offered them financial incentives; the system also led to better student achievement.

“We, as a community [of social entrepreneurs and innovators], need to take rigorous, scientific methods of evaluation and apply them to problems in development, not to declare some programs failures so much as to encourage experimentation and innovation around new and more effective solutions,” Duflo told the PopTech crowd. Farmers in poor countries know a lot about agriculture, for example, but they are unlikely to experiment with innovation. Why? Says Duflo: “If you fail, your family dies. You can look at what your neighbors do but if everyone’s looking, no one is innovating. You need people in the business of experimenting and sharing the results of those experiments in order to succeed.”

Still not convinced? Consider Duflo’s approach to tailor aid programs to local cultures and economic practices. Giving a kilogram of lentils with an immunization shot to people in a poor Indian district recently raised the rate of immunization from 5 percent to 37 percent. “It’s cheaper to give out lentils because it keeps the health workers fully occupied,” Duflo added. Similarly, telling girls of the risks of HIV among older men versus younger ones reduces their risky sexual behavior by 67 percent. Why? Duflo says girls so informed tend to avoid sex with older men. “This compares to no impact in a normal HIV education approach,” Duflo says, “which simply tells girls that all sexual behavior is risky,” she says.

What’s the most successful way of getting farmers in Kenya to use optimum amounts of fertilizer? Give them modest incentives in the form of free fertilizer delivery soon after harvest.

“If we’re talking about 1 billion poor people, are we really making progress by distributing lentils and warning girls about sugar daddies?” Duflo asked. “Yes. We are. These aren’t silver bullets but they’re a strategy for transforming the ways we do development and encourage innovation.

“…Innovations like these will never be generated by the market,” she added. “Only community efforts will do that job.”

Battling Climate Change with Agricultural Waste

2009-11-06T05:02:00.000-08:00

Climate change has triggered the creation of a variety of social enterprises in the past couple of years. Jason Aramburu’s re:char -- a fledgling renewable energy technology company that’s working out of a warehouse in a shared artist’s loft in Brooklyn, New York – is among the most innovative. “Right now, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is at about 387 parts per million,” Aramburu, 24, told Justmeans in a recent interview. “Leading scientists like James Hansen [the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies] say that if we don’t get below 350 ppm in the next two or three decades, we’re going to see some of the really catastrophic effects of climate change – things like drought, flood, and famine.”

So which existing energy technologies can get us below 350? That’s a question Aramburu, a 2009 PopTech Fellow, asked himself when he was working in the clean coal tech lab at Princeton a few years ago. “I realized that clean coal is an oxymoron,” he said. “Just getting it out of the ground is dirty.” Nuclear, he says, is expensive and wind and other renewables won’t do anything to take carbon out of the air. “So I thought to myself, why don’t we take these technologies and apply them to a cleaner fuel like biomass and make energy – while sequestering carbon?”

After a couple of years of research, Aramburu and his team developed biochar -- a highly porous charcoal that Aramburu says is just like the carbon charcoal you find in your barbecue grill except that it’s made from organic waste, like woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, or even chicken manure.

“In the traditional agricultural carbon cycle, plants take in CO2,” Aramburu says. “You harvest those plants for food and we’re left with biomass; farmers take that biomass and mulch it or compost it and eventually, the CO2 that those plants took in gets back into the atmosphere by decomposing. But if we really want to fight climate change, we have to short out the system. We take those plants, turn them into biochar and then bury that biochar in the soil, the soil from which it came.”

To test the idea, Aramburu and his team went to Brazil to research the Amazon basin. Some 1,500 years ago, indigenous farmers there would take their agricultural wastes, turn them into charcoal and bury the charcoal in the ground. “You can go to those sites now and see that carbon they took out of the atmosphere is still in the ground, 1500 years later,” he says. “To me, that was proof that this works.”

The indigenous farmers didn’t bury their charcoal wastes because they knew about climate change, Aramburu said. They did it to fertilize the rainforest’s nutrient-poor soil. Biochar contains high levels of nutrients vital for plant growth, like nitrogen, phosphate, and calcium. “We’re finding that in the developing world today, in a trial we just did in Cameroon involving maize plants, that adding biochar to the soil actually improves crop yields by 200 to 250 percent,” he says. Biochar also locks carbon dioxide away, possibly for thousands of years.

How does it work? Aramburu and his team built a biomass processor for about $15,000. The unit, in a process called pyrolysis, can produce about 25 kilowatts of energy just from waste, enough to power a village in Africa. It also can produce about 120 tons of biochar per year and sequester 430 tons of CO2 annually. The pyrolysis process yields hydrocarbons, which can be made into fuel.

Aramburu and team just completed a pilot demonstration in Cameroon proving the technology. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Michigan are working with re-char to test a prototype based on Aramburu’s design, and a working prototype on a small farm in Norfolk, Connecticut processes waste wood from trees that were destroyed in an ice storm last winter. ARamburu says the Brooklyn location gets several requests per week from farmers, ranchers and vineyard owners from across the United States, as well as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Canada.

Aramburu’s next goal is to roll out his re:char on three continents. “We want to show this technology is applicable in Africa, Latin America and places like the Midwest of the United States,” says Arumburu. “Our current goal is to get 100,000 tons of CO2 out of the air. From there, we want to roll it out across the globe. If we can get 2 billion tons of CO2 out per year, we can roll back emissions to pre-1982 levels in just 10 years. I was born in 1985, so for young people like me, if we can scale this, we can see a world that we’ve never experienced.”

Why Not an Islamic Comic Book Enterprise?

2009-11-06T04:57:00.000-08:00

Storytelling doesn't have to be digital to catalyze rapid social change. It can also be the basis for a social enterprise. Consider the fastest-selling comic book in the Arab world, called The 99. Since its debut in Kuwait in 2006, The 99 has been translated and published in several languages, and was recently named one of The Top 20 Global Trends by Forbes. Decidedly un-Western, The 99’s cast features 99 Islamic superheroes on a quest to find legendary, mystical Noor Stones needed to save the world.

Why 99? All characters are based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. One past issue of The 99 follows some of the superheroes as they race to stop two planes from colliding at a New York airport.

I first caught up with the creator of The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa, in Oxford in 2008; I ran into him again late last month at the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine. http://poptech.org/2009schedule. Al-Mutawa says he's been a fan of America's Marvel comics and The Hardy Boys mysteries since he attended summer camp in New Hampshire as a child.

Al-Mutawa is now 38, a Columbia University Business School graduate with a PhD in Clinical Psychology and a Masters’ Degree in Organizational Psychology. After attending college in the States, he worked as a translator for torture survivors, and decided Muslims needed positive role models. In 2005, he founded Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait City, where he was born and raised. In July 2007, less than a year ago, Teshkeel began publishing The 99 (as well as select, Arabic versions of Spiderman and other Marvel comics) in the United States and across the Middle East.

Al-Mutawa, the father and stepfather of seven children, all born in New York, says he hopes the comic books will spread a moderate, modern image of Islam to the world and create new role models. "The Islamic world has had suicide bombers as heroes and needed new heroes," Al-Mutawa said. “…I heard one too many stories of people who’d grown up idolizing their leader as a hero, only to grow up and be tortured by him. Imagine that it’s the hero who’s torturing you—the person you’ve been aspiring to become.”

Al-Mutawa told PopTech conferees that he was motivated to make a business out of the comic books because superhero stories tend to either come out of the United States or out of Japan, and American superheroes often arise out of a Judeo-Christian mold. Superman’s message comes from another place entirely. “I told my investors I was going to repackage the Qur’an” — to repurpose it to tell positive, multicultural stories, al-Mutawa said. “I told them that this was going to be [as big as] Superman, or not worth my time and money,” Al-Mutawa said it wasn’t easy at first. “Imagine going to NYC after 9/11 and telling them you wanted to make comics based on Islam,” he said. He now has investors in 15 countries interested in educating the world about the positive aspects of Islamic culture and traditions; in 2005, Teshkeel established a partnership with Marvel Comics to publish the series.

Characters in The 99 include Noora the Light, 18, (a former university student in Sharjah—the third-largest emirate in the UAE—who is now "a light to overcome the darkness"); Mumita the Destroyer, 17 (a street-smart runaway teen from the UAE who is being recruited by both the forces of good and evil to fight), and Dr. Ramzi Razem, 35 (a psychologist, historian, and UNESCO official who lives in Paris as a sort-of Arab version of Indiana Jones, hungry to learn more about the Noor stones and to mobilize the 99 for global peace).

There also is Jabbar the Powerful—a 19-year-old whose online profile says he was once "an average Saudi Arabian teen" until he stepped on a land mine and was transformed by hidden gem shards into a "man-mountain, a giant standing over two meters tall and weighing almost 200 kilograms." The good guys, led by Dr. Ramzi, seek to keep Jabbar out of the control of Muslim extremists. How powerful is Jabbar? If he sneezes, his profile adds, Jabbar "could level a house."

In recent weeks and months, Al-Mutawa has been busy launching The 99 in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, countries outside the Arab Middle East where Islamic culture and history are widespread.

For a short video on The 99 , see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-KH1rX8A_Q

Breathing Life in Himalayan Regions

2009-10-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

Climate change is affecting ecosystems all over the world and the Himalaya mountain range is no exception. Due to the rise in carbon footprint, approximately 700 million people living in the Himalayan region are facing serious issues related to food, water and livelihood. Their quality of life has declined to a great extent due to the constant damage being caused to the environment. At a time when environment degradation is having adverse effects on the existence of people, social enterprises such as Grassroots come as a relief to Himalayan states such as Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. This is a voluntary non-profit organization that works for the promotion of sustainable development at the village level.

Regions across the Himalaya are facing acute shortage of clean drinking water. Due to the effects of climate change, streams have dried up and the traditional system for water collection is not enough for local needs. To solve this issue, Grassroots assists local villagers with grants to create infiltration wells. Traditional food security has also got affected due to the destruction of Himalayan forests. Since many families are finding it difficult to make a living, Mahila Umang Samiti was set up with the help of Grassroots women in 2001. Umang is helping thousands of women from the Kumaon region make a living by selling pickles, fruit preserves, knitted wollens, natural spices, beeswax and natural honey.

Started by Kalyan Paul and Anita Paul, Grassroots has given hope to thousands of young people who would have otherwise migrated to big cities for income. Governments have also started adopting sustainable development projects in Himalayan regions with Grassroots as the advisory or monitoring agency. Grassroots’ aim of forming a collective, empowering it and letting it work has been successful so far in the form of ‘Umang’.

Child Relief and You (CRY) – Bringing Back Smiles

2009-10-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Social enterprises in India are mostly non-profit organizations that raise funds either through services or products. The term social enterprise is not used widely for organizations involved in fund raising for non-business activities in India. Child Relief and You (CRY) is a similar non-profit organization in India that has been working towards the restoration of children’s rights in India. Child Relief and You (CRY) started by Rippan Kapur in 1979, acts as a link between people who can provide resources and fieldworkers who require these resources to make a difference to the society.

CRY receives donations from organizations and individuals which are used as revenue. It is notable that approximately 36 crore Indian Rupees were collected as income by CRY through donations in the year 2004-05 out of which 17 crore were disbursed to 120 organizations, 2.3 for other expenditures and 14 crore for income mobilization.

More than half of India’s children don’t get their fundamental rights to education and good food. Millions go to bed hungry every night and the constitutional rights continue to get violated. CRY makes an effort to support all such children who also have the right to lead a good life. Unlike a charity organization, CRY does not run dispensaries, orphanages or schools for needy children. Instead it establishes partnerships with non-profit organizations working for children’s rights at the grassroots level. Thanks to social enterprises like Child Relief and You, some transformational changes are happening in thousands of slums and villages of India.

Can Social Enterprises Fight Competition From Private Sectors?

2009-10-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why social enterprises are limited in number? Majority of companies are working with profit making as the sole objective. There are very few enterprises that take up social and environmental causes, re-invest for community development and provide training and employment opportunities.

Experts believe that if a social enterprise is not able to handle strict competition from private firms, social clauses might prove harmful for its existence. But at the same time, fierce competition can also act as a blessing in disguise for several non-profit organizations that are trying to be successful in the tendering process. Recently, a social enterprise in UK won a contract worth 500,000 pounds with the Liverpool City Council for the second year in a row. The contract had a social clause according to which the successful bidder from the private or social enterprise sector will have to deliver social benefits.

Many social entrepreneurs are of view that adoption of social clauses does not place social firms in the safety zone, far from fierce competition posed by the private sector. It is interesting to know that fulfillment of social causes which used to be the unique selling point for social enterprises is now becoming an essential condition for bidders from private sectors. This is the time for non-profit organization to fight competition from the private sectors, reduce costs and create better training and job opportunities for the community.

Have You Been To Café Sunlight?

2009-09-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

Experts have tried to define social enterprises as businesses that create employment and training facilities and re-invest a part of their profits for community welfare. Café Sunlight seems to be doing the same by being one of the leading social enterprises in the UK that re-invests its total profit into projects for community development in Medway and beyond. More than serving social causes, café sunlight is also about affordable good quality food.

This café is the trading name of Sunlight Social Enterprises CIC that provides training and jobs to local people. The products used in this café are fair-trade products and it also supports the organic food revolution. Currently, four public cafés are run by café sunlight in Rainham, Gillingham, Lordswood and Rochester. This social enterprise has also been helping young people get jobs. It runs several volunteering and training programs along with vocational placements. Almost anyone interested in the training programs can contact café Sunlight.

In order to take social enterprise initiatives further, CAN Mezzanine and Café Sunlight recently struck a deal within which the café will provide catering and lunch services to three office blocks in London. Organizations occupying offices of CAN Mezzanine will be catered by Café Sunlight. With this deal the social enterprise plans to provide the residents of CAN’s third sector with healthy social enterprise lunch and also offer training to people who will otherwise get marginalized by the employment market. It is always great to come across enterprises that realize their social responsibility and strive to maintain it.

Rural BPOs –Social Enterprise or a Profit Making Venture?

2009-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

Rural BPOs have brought winds of change in Southern India. By making a significant commercial and social impact these enterprises are giving thousands of men and women a reason to live with dignity. These BPOs have employed young people who would have otherwise been forced to migrate to bigger cities to make a living. It is notable that the present economic scenario has led urban BPOs to put their hiring plans on hold but rural BPOs don’t seem to be getting affected. These centers are springing up at various locations, generating hundreds of employment opportunities. From services like data entry and transcription to secondary research and translation, the idea of a rural BPO has resulted in better living conditions for people who were otherwise surviving on less than 2 dollars a day.

More than 50%employees in such centers are women and working in rural BPOs has helped them pay off debts, save money for marriage and even start a small business for their family. Rural BPOs usually seek college drop outs or candidates who have studied till class XII. They are provided training in English speaking, processes and other soft skills in order to make them prepared for taking up assignments.

The rural BPO model has not managed to come this far only on the basis of social merits. Besides the fulfillment of social causes, these centers are also commercial in nature. Experts believe that in order to make these centers successful, a hard core business proposition is required. Since these centers run on the basis of a revenue generating model, will it be right to consider them a social enterprise?

The Beth Uriel Family –Bringing Back Smiles

2009-09-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

When it comes to creation of employment opportunities, welfare of local communities and enhanced public services, the role of social enterprises can’t be ruled out. Beth Uriel, the “House of Light” can be considered one such social enterprise in South Africa that has been successful in giving hope to several teenage boys of Cape Town. Home to disadvantaged young men, Beth Uriel has been committed to the cause of fighting poverty, effects of AIDS on youth as well as the lack of education. It is like a large family currently headed by Lindsay Henley who is an American social worker.

Beth Uriel, started in 1987, was the vision of Hudson McComb and Angela La Grange who wanted to work towards the upliftment of disadvantaged children in Cape Town. An old fire station became home for children who were picked out of troubled homes. The family hasn’t grown beyond 26 members in order to keep the personal environment of the house intact.

It is notable that Beth Uriel has helped young men with secondary as well as tertiary level education opportunities. Members have formed the Me’Kasi team that makes products in the Me’Kasi lab at the Beth Uriel house. These products include t-shirts, hoodies, ear-rings, key chains, cigar boxes, coffee table books and funky buttons. When someone buys a Me’Kasi product, the profit is used for supporting the family and the projects they are involved into. End of the year gifts from supporters and monthly donations has helped the organization plan for a better future. Volunteers at local and international level are also helping Beth Uriel make a difference to the lives of many such young disadvantaged boys.

Grameen Phone-Turning Local Women into Telecom Entrepreneurs

2009-09-14T06:19:00.000-07:00

Grameenphone has shown how new markets can be opened in developing countries with the combined efforts of big business and social enterprises. It was started in Bangladesh in 1997 and since then it has been replicating the Grameen Bank co-operative model. By training operators, handling service related issues and supplying handsets, Grameenphone has tuned thousands of poor Bangladeshi women into successful telecom entrepreneurs.

As a part of the village phone program, women are granted a loan from the Grameen Bank to buy the cellular phone to operate it as a business and sell the use of it on the basis of per call. The program is spreading into more than 35,000 villages and over 150,000 village phones have been distributed in 61 out of 64 districts of Bangladesh.

It is remarkable how villages are benefitting from this business venture. Technology is not readily accessible in the rural areas of Bangladesh and more than 60% of the population in these areas is poor. But the access of phones through the Grameen Phone program has not only helped farmers keep up with market prices for their products but local women have also managed to gain self respect and financial independence.

The concept of using telecommunication to fight poverty has been widely successful and now this largest cellular company in South East Asia is also serving communities in Rwanda and Uganda.

Healthcare Link- A Sustainable Social Enterprise

2009-09-09T05:51:00.001-07:00

Once the rainy season starts and the weather turns hot, Zimbabwe will remain at the risk of a fresh cholera outbreak. Due to the failure of sanitation and health systems in Zimbabwe, the 2008-09 cholera epidemic killed thousands of people. At a time when healthcare facilities in the country are declining, a social enterprise like Healthcare Link comes across as a ray of hope for many affected families. Started by Charles Takawira, the primary focus of this enterprise is to reduce health disparities that prevail between developed and developing countries. Healthcare Link has established partnerships with charities, healthcare agencies and the health ministry to help the poor population with medical facilities.

The enterprise gathers new and unused stock of medical supplies and refurbished equipment reclaimed from wholesalers, manufacturers and the UK healthcare system. The entire stock is then re-distributed to a network of clinics and hospitals that work with limited resources and serve poor people in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and DR Congo.

The public and social services infrastructure in several underdeveloped countries is becoming obsolete. Due to this, thousands of people are dying from curable diseases like dysentery and cholera every year. The present need for government and healthcare organizations is to encourage social enterprises like Healthcare Link by sponsoring their health benefit programs and providing them required medical supplies.

TOMS Shoes: An Innovative Social Enterprise

2009-09-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of creative capitalism? Can companies make money yet make a difference to the world? Good work has always been associated with non-profit organizations but TOMS Shoes has been following the concept of creative capitalism since it started in 2006. Blake Mycoskie started the company with a One for One movement on a simple premise. If you purchase one pair of TOMS shoes, the company will give a pair of new shoes to a needy child. During the first year in business, the company sold 10,000 pairs. With the support of its customers, TOMS Shoes plans to give more than 300,000 new shoes to kids all around the world in 2009.

TOMS Shoe Drop initiative is more than just giving away shoes to needy kids. The volunteers prefer hand placing them on children’s feet. Blake’s visit to Argentina was the inspiration behind this initiative. He was moved to see poor kids moving around without any shoes. After starting this company in May 2006 he returned to Argentina in October with 10,000 pairs of matched shoes to distribute among poor kids.

I have participated in several shoe drop initiatives by TOMS and the experience has been overwhelming. A simple One for One concept has made a huge difference to the lives of children and brought a smile on their faces. Social enterprises like these will be more encouraged when consumers extend their support and help such companies do good work.

Can a Big Business Learn from Social Enterprises?

2009-09-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

The expertise and knowledge of social enterprises can be influential for a resilient economy. With the rate of unemployment expected to rise to 4 million by 2012, the importance of public intervention can’t be denied. Business organizations and economies all over the world need a new approach to equip people in local communities with means of distributing and creating employment and wealth. By supporting new business expansions in this sector, more green jobs can be generated to bring back wealth into the local communities. The key to success lies in having more value-driven organizations that are ethical and socially responsible.

Companies like Welsh Water, the Co-Operative and John Lewis have been initiating good work for years. Over 55,000 social enterprises in the UK are trading for social purposes, generating 27 billion pounds and employing 500,000 people. The profit generated by these enterprises is used for public benefit in the local community. Large business organizations can learn from social enterprises on ways to turn assets like industrial parks or retail outlets into productive ventures and reinvest the benefits by creating more wealth and jobs. One such example is the Coin Street Community Builders that was established in 1984 for preventing the eviction of local people along the river. It transformed 13 acres of London’s South Bank into a neighborhood with community space, housing, social services and businesses for the local community. They have continued reinvesting their profits to the community they are serving.

Not all successful business ventures can be created by the government. But it can provide the right conditions for enterprises to flourish. The present need is to recognize the significance of social enterprises and move it to the center stage of economic policies.

Chocolates + Social Enterprise = Good Work?

2009-09-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

Do you consider chocolate as one of your guilty pleasures? Well, I do. This is second most important reason for me to write this post. The first is –social enterprise. Now you must be wondering what chocolate has got to do with corporate social responsibility or good work. Even I thought the same before coming across an interesting write up about certain chocolate companies making a difference to the society by being a successful social enterprise.

While searching for sustainable food items and organic chocolates on the web, I came across a chocolate company named Divine Chocolate. This social enterprise is co-owned by cocoa farmers co-operative in Ghana. These farmers are not only 45% share holder of the company but they also receive a fair price for the cocoa they produce. We would like to consider this as a great step towards doing ethical business and being socially responsible, isn’t it?

The main aim of a chocolate company will be making profit by offering great tasting chocolates to its consumers but this doesn’t stop it from doing good work and being socially responsible. Cadbury, one of the major chocolate companies has a user friendly site with which the company tries to promote the concept of CSR. They have been doing this in order to establish communication between the company and its audiences. The need is to innovate and try new things so that the business activities not only support environmental sustainability and fair trade but also help in making a difference to the society.

Social Enterprise

2009-07-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

The Dragon’s Den is a popular show in the UK that showcases pitches by entrepreneurs to a group of big-wig investors, aka, the Dragons. Last fall, a TV-star chef, Simon Boyle, promoted his idea for ‘Beyond Boyle,’ a social enterprise that would employ homeless workers to prepare tasty food. The Dragons seemed touched and quite interested, but as the commentator points out, ‘Simon’s social entrepreneurship model simply wasn’t right for profit-led investments.’ In the real world of profit and investment, can social enterprise actually gain a hold? To see this segment of Dragon’s Den, go to: