Xerosphere

 

Ashoka Peace intern Cecilia Chen profiles Jerry White's Campaign for Healthy Homecoming

Jerry White – global survivor activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-founder of Survivor Corps, and author of I Will Not Be Broken – continues his remarkable work to help victims of violent conflict all over the world. 

At the age of 20, Jerry lost his leg, and nearly his life, after stepping on a landmine while hiking in an area forested with waterfalls in Northern Israel. His experience as a survivor led him to co-found Landmine Survivors Network, now Survivor Corps, in 1997, which is dedicated to “helping people around the world who have suffered war and violence rebuild their lives and rejoin their communities.” In fact, not only does Jerry enable survivors to reintegrate, he empowers them to become active contributors and leaders by changing their self-perceptions from passive victim to active participant. 

In 2009, Survivor Corps teamed up with leading veteran services, nonprofits, government, businesses, and universities to launch “The Campaign for Healthy Homecoming,” the first plan of its kind in the U.S. to actively ensure that veterans will have a healthy homecoming and reintegration after war.

According to the campaign, over 1.8 million service members and veterans have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without an effective program to reintegrate these members back into their communities and help them rebuild, there has been a drastic spike in unemployment, substance abuse, domestic violence, failed marriages, homelessness, and suicides. 

“The Campaign for Healthy Homecoming” strives to provide concrete and diverse solutions and services to tackle these difficult issues. The campaign adopts a multi-pronged strategy that facilitates reintegration by assisting veterans with employment opportunities, preparing universities to fully integrate veterans, and providing access to quality healthcare and affordable housing. Additionally, the campaign champions the importance of a robust peer support system, a strong, resilient family, and community engagement in the veteran’s homecoming.

For more on this, watch this short CNN interview with IED survivor Captain Scott Quilty

 

Furthermore, Survivor Corps continues to propel their goal of eliminating and banning landmines by calling on all citizens to urge and encourage President Obama to sign the Mine Ban Treaty. They are close to the 200,000 signatures goal – 183,569 and counting! You can add your name here.

 

 

The financial crisis has not, thus far, cast a clear death blow t0 Milton Friedman's idea that the only responsibility businesses have to society is to maximize profits. That said, the last couple years have seen a steady mainstreaming of "social entrepreneurship," particularly within vertical industry categories such as Fair Trade. I believe both the verticalization and mainstreaming of the field will continue, creating a higher need than ever before to understand just what the broader designation of "social entrepreneurship" has to offer.

Social entrepreneurship tends to refer to the space in which companies and nonprofits use market and business objectives to achieve social aims. While there is some debate about whether the term refers exclusively to one legal business model over another, the core point for most of the people I tend to agree with is that "social ventures" as opposed to regular for-profit entities have an explicit focus on solving some social or environmental problem and maximizing social or environmental good alongside (or sometimes even at the expense of) pure, short-term profit maximization.

In this way, it is different from corporate social responsibility, which at its best is about giving back, improving employee culture and conditions, and reducing environmental impact. The difference is the fact that social entrepreneurship suggests that there is a core social or environmental value created every day by the products or services at the center of the very business. This does not mean that social ventures are "better" than non-social ventures -- there are lots of great companies that simply happen not to focus on solving social problems and which are still wonderful employees, community members, and philanthropists -- but it does mean they are different.

Social entrepreneurship is, however, a slightly weird field, in the sense that it is not an industry, but a term which applies to a number of (sometimes unrelated) industries, and a similar approach to business that places a social or environmental value at the center of the mission. Most people come into contact with the broader field of social entrepreneurship through one of the industries that it touches.

I think there are a few clear examples of  these "vertical" fields that connect with the larger banner of social entrepreneurship that have gotten increasingly mainstream over the last few years. Cleantech is perhaps the most obvious, becoming one of the most invested in areas of venture capital ($1.9 billion was invested in Cleantech companies in the first quarter of 2010 alone). Microfinance is another clear example. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Grameen Bank founder Muhammed Yunus and the explosive popularity of Kiva are two of the more important historical moments for the prominence of social entrepreneurship, and the recent IPO of SKS could be another. Fair Trade, Organic and Local Food movements are all racing to the mainstream, as well.

Being based in Silicon Valley, I'm particularly interested in industry verticals that can attract tech talent to start new companies. I think we're going to see big booms in education startups (see: Udemy, Enzi, Grockit, DonorsChoose, Supercool School) and I hope that many will learn to work within instead of solely outside the current education system. Healthcare seems like an obvious area that mixes social good with the potential for immense profit, but there are still too few web tech companies working on the issue, a problem that programs like Hacking 4 Health are trying to redress. And although they are a little bit different in terms of their potential for financial gain, there also seems to be a mini wave of "government 2.0" startups (see: Code for America, CitySourced, Gov2.0 Summit) that are trying to change the way municipal services are deployed and how governments interact with citizens.

It makes sense that social entrepreneurship would mature into verticals like this: startups need accumulated bodies of knowledge and connections to be successful, and ultimately, what works in Fair Trade may not work in Education. At the same time, I think the common element of trying to maximize a social or environmental good takes as much managerial discipline as deploying a successful revenue model, and for that, the broader field of social entrepreneurship has much to offer.

Photo credit: Chuck “Caveman” Coker

By Bill McKibben, posted Sep 7, 2010:

An activist caravan to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back to the White House symbolizes not only the time the U.S. has lost in developing new energy technologies – but also the urgent need for taking action on climate.

As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.

The bad news everyone knows. The strongest attempt ever to pass climate legislation through the U.S. Congress came up short earlier this summer. The inside-the-Beltway green groups took what seemed to be the route of least resistance: a very tame piece of climate legislation larded with special prizes for special interests. They worked it as hard as it could have been worked—and in the end it didn’t even come close. The fossil fuel industry and their allies in D.C. barely had to break a sweat shooting it down.

So—barring some unforeseen development—we’re not going to see significant action on the federal level about climate for at least the next two years.

The solar panels need to be up on the roof, as visible as the White House garden.

And that means we’re far less likely to see significant international action on climate, since it’s hard for other governments to muster the political will to make tough choices when the U.S. is punting.

So what do we do with those two years? I think we use them to build a movement, which explains the solar panel we’re hauling south from Maine.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn’t make it through the next decade—it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we’ve trod ever since.

But not everyone went along. Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China’s leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China—he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

There’s no question what we should have spent the last few decades doing. But there’s no point now in crying about why we didn’t: the only job is to try to get back in the game, to start catching up.

Some of that means spending the money so that we can make the next technological discoveries. Many, including the Breakthrough Institute and Bill Gates, are calling for big increases in R and D funding, which might help us somehow claw our way back toward the front of the parade.

But catching up also means making use of the technology we already have, in ways both practical and symbolic.

President Obama is up against tough odds in Congress. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

We’re headed for the White House with this old panel, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want—as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them. George W. Bush, amazingly enough, actually put some solar back in the White House grounds—on the roof of a maintenance shed, and on, who knew, the Presidental Spa and Cabana. But since he didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t do much good. We want them up there on the roof, as visible as the White House garden, which helped boost seed sales 30 percent across the nation the year Michelle planted it.

So far, we haven’t heard a word from the White House about whether they’ll accept the gift and make the promise or not—which, frankly, surprises me. I can’t think of a clearer win for the president, a better reminder to the legions of young people who worked on his campaign that he is still focused on the future. He owes environmentalists more than he’s given them—by all accounts he decided not to push for the Senate legislation. He’s up against tough odds in Congress, of course, given the obstructionist GOP. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

What’s especially poignant is that we have gotten promises from other, much less likely, world leaders—Mohammed Nasheed, for instance, president of the entirely Muslim and quite poor Maldive Islands, the low-lying Indian Ocean nation that faces inundation from rising seas.

The point of the solar panels is to help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

He took the Sungevity offer, and he’ll be putting solar panels on his roof on October 10 (10-10-10), the same day that thousands of groups around the world will be participating in a massive Global Work Party, putting up wind turbines and laying out bike paths. The same day we want Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, out on his roof with a wrench.

The point of all these panels, of course, is not that we’re going to solve climate change one roof at a time. (Obama is doing lots of good practical things already—his “greening the government” effort is retrofitting federal buildings across the country with insulation, for instance). The point is that they help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

Environmentalists lost sight of just how big a movement that would need to be. Too many groups convinced themselves that they could slide some legislation through Congress, make deals with industry, get things going without a fight. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work—the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise known to man, beat us. And they will beat us again and again until there’s a real, broad-based, popular, noisy movement underway in this country, a movement that can provide a currency (bodies, passion) equal to the currency the billionaire Koch Brothers can pony up to defeat climate legislation.

Some of that movement will go on at the local level, as we transform cities and towns and show what can be done. Some will be done on college campuses like Unity College, or Middlebury where I teach, which are showing the way forward. Some of it will be done in jails—I’d be very surprised if civil disobedience doesn’t become a bigger part of this battle in the years ahead, if only because it’s the tool we use to show our society how urgent, morally and practically, this crisis really is.

But some of it must be done symbolically. And there’s no more symbolic piece of real estate on this continent than the White House. Let’s hope that on the 10th of October it, at least, is transformed. It’s been a long, hot summer, in the capitol as in much of the northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that next year that heat is put to some purpose—heating the Obamas’ bathtub, and helping power up a movement.

Photo credit: Mark Tardif - The Carter-era solar panel in Maine, being readied for the trip back to the White House.

Originally published at Yale Environment 360

By Rob Hopkins, posted Sep 7, 2010:

Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival. Embercombe is a fascinating evolving project, describing itself as “a charity and social enterprise established to champion a way of living that celebrates the opportunities inherent in this challenging time and that inspires people to energetically contribute towards the emergence of a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on earth”. It is also a stunning place, a mix of woodlands and fields. Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine. So, this year, the land team at Embercombe experimented with growing cereals, planting blocks of oats, rye, wheat and spelt. The previous year they had grown a traditional variety of wheat, which was a long-strawed type, but in the wet and windy summer we had much of it fell over (‘lodged’). This year’s wheat variety was a shorter stemmed one, and, like all the other grains grown, grew well. The field was rotavated with a tractor, and then the seeds were hand-broadcast. A few months later, they were harvested by hand, using scythes, and stacked up, waiting for the thresher.

The threshing machine that came is one of only a handful of such machines left in operation. Powered from a tractor, it is a beautiful piece of equipment, lovingly maintained by enthusiasts, and fascinating to observe in operation. The harvested crop is fed into the top of the machine, which separates the grain from the chaff, and both of those from the straw. Only the wheat and the spelt were going through the thresher, the oats and the rye were going to be dealt with differently.

Oats are tricky old things. When we buy porridge oats we think of them as an unprocessed, natural product, but actually to get from what you harvest in the field to something you can make porridge from takes a few different processes, dehusking, steaming, rolling… as friends in West Cork found out when they had harvested the West Cork CSA oats they had organised. Without access to machines that can get the husk off them, oats are really only usable as animal feed. At Embercombe, however, they are planning to try an imaginative alternative, rather than feeding their prcious crop to the chickens, they are going to experiment with making oat milk from them (currently bought from wholefood shops in tetrapacks…). I’ll be fascinated to hear how that goes….

I don’t remember the plans for the rye, but what was focusing minds when I was there was the difference between wheat and spelt. The wheat was going through the machine fine, coming out as clean grains, but the thresher was unable to take the husks off the spelt (see left for the picture, the top hand is the wheat, the bottom hand is the spelt). The guys working the machine adjusted the settings, tried various things, but every time the spelt emerged with its husks on.

Spelt is a fascinating crop. In this part of the UK, and as we head on down into Cornwall, less wheat is grown, as the soils become less and less suitable for the high gluten varieties that large bakeries favour. Spelt, however, grows well down here, and is a grain that can be eaten by people with an intolerance for gluten. Not much use though if no-one can get the husks off!

There is something fascinating to me about experiments such as those being conducted at Embercombe. The now seminal Hirsch Report argued that it would take at least 10 years, ideally 20, ahead of peak oil in order to be ready for it, to have successfully managed a ‘crash course’ of breaking our oil addiction. In terms of local food, it seems to me that the process of dismantling the infrastructure that local food production needs has been underway for some time. As I often say in talks, it was easy to turn Totnes’s last working flour mill (see right) into a Tourist Information Office, much harder to turn a Tourist Information Office back into a working mill again.

The conversations taking place as different grains spilled from the thresher were about rediscovering something just about still within reach, but only just. Even if you get the husks off, how do you store grain so it doesn’t go musty, how do you keep the rats away from it, how do you mill it… a whole chain of knowledge, sophisticated knowledge acquired over thousands of years, rendered obsolete by cheap energy and the “biggering and biggering” of agriculture. One of the nuggets I gleaned was that if you harvest wheat and just pile the crop in a heap, and it gets rained on, it is ruined. If you ’stook’ it, make it into bundles which stand up, you can leave them out in the rain and they are fine. At Embercombe they couldn’t find anyone who knew how to do that…

We often use the term ‘The Great Reskilling’. As I stood by the thresher at Embercombe, I realised that as well as the passing on of skills, we also need “The Great Practicing”, trying things out. We can learn a certain amount from books and from courses, but the best way to learn, the way that has you thinking around problems and solving them on the hoof, is by having a go. Even the small patches of grain that had been grown had been hugely instructive. It also gives you a sense of the infrastructure you need to create, the infrastructure that a local food economy needs. As Aldo Leopold put it, “who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering”. I found it very inspiring, in the sunshine, listening to whirring and clacking of the thresher, to watch some dedicated people who have picked up some of those seemingly useless parts and are trying to work out how to make them work again.

Originally published at Transition Culture

Here's a little idea and its big implication. The idea is that in a world of increasingly robust information about social networks, simply being able to connect people is more of a "commodity" than at any time in history. The implication is that to be seen as a real "connector" --- a designation incredibly valuable in just about any type of business -- you have to think more expansively about what it means to help people.

Connectors are a business archetype that most people are familiar with. They are the people who always seem to know the right people. They're the folks you talk to when you know you have a problem, but you're not sure who is the right person to help -- or even who is the right type of person to help.

Connectors are intensely valuable, particularly in industries that rely on networks. An example is venture capital, in which networks are deployed to find great investment deals as well as to help portfolio companies find the particular resources and relationships they need to succeed. Another example is nonprofits, which rely on social capital in the place of financial capital, and in which networks are called upon every day to help the organization move forward.

Super connectors tend to be really good at three things. The first is that they keep track of lots of details about lots of their friends and professional contacts. This is the area in which the average person is catching up to the super connector. While it still takes diligence, its never been easier to keep track of who you know, the sorts of things they like and dislike, etc.

This is the social glue that is making the ability to generally connect people across your network more of a commodity. Better information about who you know means a better ability to connect people who should know each other. This is a good thing; connecting people shouldn't be the provence of a special class of people, it should just be the way we think to help each other day in and day out.

The second thing that super connectors tend to be really good at is that they keep track of lots of details about what their communities need. Really good connectors are constantly thinking about how they can help, which means figuring out ways to acquire information about the specific resources and information their people are seeking. Although the social communication infrastructure has made this easier, figuring out how to know what people need is still difficult, and great connectors still do it better than the rest.

The final thing that super connectors have is a high personal reputation that makes the people they're connecting take notice. I'm in the process of fundraising for my startup, and it had completely reinforced this fact. As I try to get access to investors, I'm not just searching for people their connected with to introduce us, I'm searching for people who they're connected to in a relevant context, and who have a high enough personal brand that the investor is going to give us a serious look. The implication of this third piece is that to truly kick ass at helping, you have to be the type of person who has a general reputation for excellence.

So, to sum up, information in social networks has made it easier for most people to keep track of, and connect, their friends and colleagues. Information about needs isn't perfect, but it will get better (Assetmap is going to solve this problem).

But the third piece -- having serious personal brand equity -- is something that technology will never really be able to supplant. That's a reputation that comes from diligence and general excellence. In the 21st century, most people will get better at making connections; the super connectors will be those who have cultivated such a high reputation that the connections they facilitate become self-fulfilling prophecies of collaboration.

Photo credit: bengrey

By Ryan Schuchard, Manager, Research & Innovation

I’ve just returned from China, where I attended the launch of BSR’s Energy Efficiency Partnership (EEP), a group of 11 member companies working with 80 of their suppliers on energy management.

Participants discussed the many reasons why this is an important—and urgent—issue for their companies. Starbucks’ Director of Ethical Sourcing Kelly Goodejohn explained in an opening presentation that climate change poses a substantial threat to coffee, the company’s core business, and that energy management is the most direct thing they can do to stop greenhouse gases (GHG).

Felix Ockborn, a member of H&M’s Far East CSR Program Development team, relayed that working with suppliers to mitigate climate change impacts is vital to H&M’s CSR strategy because the issue is important to its customers. He also said that it is a fundamental part of working toward sustainable use of natural resources in H&M's value chain.

The one issue, however, on everyone’s mind was the recent pressure from the Chinese government to curb energy waste, which resulted in the mandatory closure of more than 2,000 factories and the shutdown of power to companies in major manufacturing provinces like Jiangsu and Anhui. This obviously has a major impact on companies: An auto-components maker reported that it had to slow production, and a cement factory said it would have trouble meeting orders and likely lose work in progress.

The shutdowns are part of China’s efforts to meet its current five-year plan commitment to reduce energy intensity by 20 percent from 2005 levels. All signs indicate that such pressure will increase: The next five-year plan (due out soon) is likely to include even more stringent targets, and last year’s goal to reduce GHG emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 will also warrant additional measures.

EEP member, HP, has been keeping a close eye on these kinds of developments. Ernest Wong, Manager of HP’s Social and Environmental Responsibility Supply Chain program, said it’s important for factory managers to have tools for energy management so that they can understand their exposure and communicate their situation. In turn, explained Wong, it’s important for companies like HP to have a good picture of how suppliers can have better energy-saving plans and use energy management to minimize their carbon footprints.

We have a lot of exciting work to do. From helping executives in the board room understand the impacts of and options for energy efficiency to enabling managers on the shop floor to take action, I look forward to working with EEP to explore how companies can get the most out of energy management and raise awareness about the importance of working with suppliers to conserve energy.

This past weekend, the Kauffman Foundation sponsored an education focused "Startup Weekend." But at the same time, last week, one of my fellow Change.org authors wrote a piece sharing frustration with the focus in the education sector on "entrepreneurship" as a cure-all. In her estimation, that focus can distract education reformers from implementing already proven solutions more effectively. It's a valid point, but instead of suggesting we shouldn't focus on entrepreneurship in education, it simply means we need to get smarter about what education entrepreneurship opportunities actually look like.

1. Access to funding for higher education: One of the biggest crises around the world is the access to funding for advanced degrees. In the US, student debt has actually surpassed consumer debt. Americans owe $830B in student loans vs. $827B in credit card debt. That's insane, and something has to change for the system to sustain itself. This can be even more problematic for international students, where there simply aren't as many scholarship or loan programs. One startup to watch in this area is Enzi, which is tying student loans to future income, and was awarded a 2010 Echoing Green fellowship.

2. Supplemental learning tools: It is generally accepted that boredom in the classroom is a major, major problem. Students don't feel like the work they're doing is related to their real life, and the way material is presented tends to be all about getting through tests. There is a huge opportunity for supplemental learning tools that work in the classroom or out and supplement the work that teachers are already doing. One interesting example is TeacherMate, a handheld computer designed to engage hard to reach learners and sync directly with in-class lessons that is being used by 40,000 students in 35 states.

3. Efficiency tools for teachers and administrators: It's not just students who have a hard time with schools as they're structured today. Teachers and administrators deal with a ton of students, each of whom deserve individual care but who get dumped in with everyone else. Startups like Drop the Chalk are trying to make it easier for teachers to measure student progress and understand how different types of lessons impact students in different ways.

4. Supplanting educational structures: Many of the problems of education have to do with the school systems "monopoly" on learning. Put differently, most people get in the mindset that they're only supposed to learn while in school. The internet is an incredible platform for distributing knowledge. Platforms like Supercool School and eduFire make it easy for people to teach and learn together. Another online learning platform, Udemy, recently released a collection of 600 lectures from top universities. TED Talks have been viewed a few hundred million times. And so on.

5. Tools for parents: I don't know much about activity going on in this domain, but parents are an essential part of the educational experience. There is a definite opportunity for startups focused on supporting parents with pre-school education, and there is probably also an opportunity to make it easier for parents and teachers collaborative to help customize student learning.

Bonus: Vocational training and other alternative curriculum: When students don't feel like there is any coherent relationship between what they're learning and what they'll need for the real world, it significantly reduces their incentives to participate in their own education. I think there is a very compelling argument to be made for introducing more career-job centric training into regular school classrooms -- including things like basic business accounting, computer science, etc. More broadly, I do think that rethinking the entire structure of curriculum and experimenting with new structures is a good thing.

The point of all of this entrepreneurship is not to undermine what we know about how to improve learning outcomes already, or challenging how essential great teachers are to the educational experience. The point is to dramatically shift access and quality of education in a world that frankly, can't afford a glacial pace of reform. That will take innovation from both outside and inside the system, and entrepreneurs do have a roll to play.

Photo credit: bonnie-brown

By Tom Whipple, posted Sep 1, 2010:

Headlines were made recently when it was announced that in July China's GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the world's second largest economy. This was immediately followed by a passel of stories speculating on how long it would take China's domestic output to surpass that of the U.S. and thus become the world's largest and by inference most influential economy. The mean estimate of the prognosticators seems to be about 20 years so that by 2030 China could be #1. This estimate is derived, of course, by assuming that China's economy will continue to grow at circa 10 percent each year and that the U.S. in turn will suffer from decades of stagnation.

If only it were so simple.   There is no question that China has had 40 good years. Once the Chinese got over celebrating their revolution, the cult of the personality (Mao worship), and the more onerous features of Marxism-Maoism (such as shooting capitalists), they came up with a political-economic system, which while not democratic, served well to harness the country's strengths and set it on the way to rapid economic growth. Blessed with a good endowment of natural resources, a long tradition of selecting and educating the best and the brightest for leadership, a reasonably homogeneous population, and the developed world as an example of where they would like to go, China has assembled a mixture of capitalism and socialism that undeniably yielded decades of impressive economic growth.   By moving tens of millions of peasant farmers into industrial enterprises where they worked long hours, under harsh discipline, for poor wages, China soon became the world's preeminent factory producing an inordinate share of the globe's manufactured goods. The question of the day is "How much longer can this last?" Rapid economic growth requires every increasing quantities of fossil fuels and other minerals. After forty years of hyper-exploitation of its domestic mineral deposits, China is now in a position where it must import half of its daily oil demand and is starting to import coal and other minerals as domestic sources become thinner and more difficult to produce.   The key question in all this is how much longer China's economic miracle can continue before the realities of finite mineral resources force a slowdown? Another five years of 10 percent annual economic growth will result in Beijing increasing its oil consumption by another 2.5-3 million barrels per day. This alone would likely mop up much of the world's spare capacity to produce oil and result in very large price increases. When China's ever growing demand is added to that of India, Brazil and the oil exporting states, the likelihood that we will see a substantial increase in oil prices within the next five years becomes very high.   Although China still has large reserves of coal, they have now begun importing which suggests they are having trouble producing it fast enough from deeper, aging mines to keep up with demand. Some believe that Beijing will only be able to keep increasing production for another 15 or 20 years before peak coal production is reached.   Recent events suggest that China may suffer disproportionally from the effects of global warming. This year the country was ravished by droughts, dust storms, and floods as increasing global temperatures worked their way on the weather patterns affecting China. If these changed patterns prove to be permanent feature of China's weather, droughts, floods, tropical storms, falling water tables and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers may force China into a survival mode where the struggle for food and water will trump industrial growth.   Although climate change, decreasing exports, and depleting mineral resources will all eventually impact China's ability to grow economically, the availability and affordability of oil is still likely to impact first. Despite the current oil glut, all indicators suggest that global oil supplies are likely to start running short in the next three to five years. Although China Incorporated may be in better shape to weather the initial stages of a price spike than the average American consumer, it is doubtful if China can grow its economy at 10 percent annually without increasing supplies of oil.   Beijing clearly recognizes all this and is moving to build a more efficient, less energy-intensive economy that can grow with less fossil fuel. Moreover, China's leaders are catching onto the notion that the costs of ignoring air and water pollution may eventually be prohibitive. The precept that China can keep growing its emissions until they reach the per capita level of the industrial nations may eventually fall as climate aberrations start to take an unacceptable toll on economic growth.   There are many unknowns and variables in all this, but it is a good bet that China's miracle of 10 percent annual economic growth has a half-life far shorter than many suspect.   Originally published August 31, 2010 at Falls Church News-Press

There is a perception out there that there is a tradeoff between social responsibility and financial responsibility. You can't do both, people say. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Well, very fortunately the data just doesn't support that perception.

Can you actually be more socially responsible and increase shareholder value at the same time?

The Only Social Responsibility of a Company Is To Increase Profits for Shareholders

In 1970, Chicago-school economist Milton Friedman proclaimed in an article for New York Times Magazine that a company's only social responsibility is to increase profits for its shareholders. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and the Ayn Rand star-pupil Alan Greenspan turned this credo into de facto policy gospel.

There is passionate and meaty debate whether externalizing environmental damage and exploiting a work force is okay if there it no law or regulation against it. There is another debate whether these practices actually maximize long-term profits or the present value of future cash flows.

For a moment, let's take this 1970 proclamation at face value and assume that an executive's responsibility is to increase returns for company shareholders. Let's agree that executives and board members do have a fiduciary responsibility to seek to gain a return on the capital invested in their organization, particularly if they work for a publicly-owned company or a company that is not a wholly-owned private corporation.

So this begs the question, can you do both--increase social return and increase financial return?

Can You Be More Socially Responsible & Financially Responsible?

Raj Sisodia, David Wolfe, and Jag Sheth recently published "Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose." In the book, they share the results of a study in which they looked at companies that were especially socially responsible--they call these firms "Firms of Endearment" or FoEs. They compared the shareholder returns of these socially responsible firms with the S&P 500. What they found was that the firms that were socially responsible outperformed the S&P 500 by 9x.

These Firms of Endearment grew shareholder value 1025% in the last ten years while the S&P 500 returned 122%. Eve when you compare the Firms of Endearment vs. the blue chip success stories profiled in Jim Collins' Good to while the firms profiled in "Good to Great" by Jim Collins returned 316%. Here's the graph from their web site.

Financial Returns of Socially Responsible Firms Vs. S&P 500 and Good to Great

Now, by no means does this data prove conclusively that more socially responsible firms create higher shareholder returns. The data show only correlation, not causation. The reality could simply be that firms that happen to be socially responsible happen to be in more profitable industries and so they can afford to give more to the community and create better work environments. But nonetheless, the point is clear-- investing in being a socially responsible company certainly does not by definition go against shareholder interests and in many cases enhances shareholder returns.

iContact Case Study

Earlier today, I published a case study of social responsibility at iContact. In it, I shared the why and the how behind our social and environmental efforts at iContact over the past year including examples of how iContact has reduced costs and increased employee engagement through our efforts. As I wrote in the case, the benefits to date from our social responsibility efforts included:

1. Vendor cost reductions of $40,000 driving estimated net savings of $19,000 per month.
2. Increased employee engagement and excitement to be working at our company (which we believe will lead to greater passion in people's work, additional discretionary effort from team members, increased productivity, lower regret employee turnover, and an increased ability to attract the best and the brightest).
3. Increased customer acquisition and customer retention from customers who are coming to us and sticking with us because of our social responsibility programs.
4. Additional press coverage from Entrepreneur, INC, and the Raleigh News & Observer that is helping us recruit the best and brightest and gain additional customers and partners.

So in fact, at least so far, we have been able to show both tangible and intangible benefits that connect the investment we are making in social responsibility with direct economic net benefits to our financial results and thus to the increase of shareholder value.

A False Tradeoff

While it would be nice to have even better data and employee surveys comparing before and after our work at iContact, there is substantial anecdotal evidence supporting a conclusion that in the case of iContact, increasing investment in social and environmental responsibility so far has increased profits, and will contribute very positively to increasing shareholder value in the many years to come.

So does increasing social and environmental responsibility always increase shareholder value? No, it does not. But in many cases it can and does and the Firms of Endearment study provides a fascinating basis for a likely connection between the most socially responsible firms and those who produce the highest return for shareholders. Investing in being a socially responsible company certainly does not by definition go against shareholder interests and in many cases enhances shareholder returns.

There does seem to be substantive and significant evidence showing there the tradeoff between social responsibility and financial responsibility is false and in fact social responsibility in many cases aligns with increasing financial profitability.

Comments/Thoughts?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments on social responsibility, effective CSR programs, whether being more socially responsible helps or hurts a business, and whether your shopping decisions could be influenced by whether a company is responsible or not.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

By way of a social responsibility case study that I've been close to, let me share our experience at iContact over the last year...

Wanting to Experience More Meaning at Work

In October 2009, I went through some challenging experiences that caused me to realize that life can be very short. Out of these experiences, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to align my values with my work at iContact to the extent possible. I wanted to see a direct connection between the work that iContact was doing and making a positive impact in our community and the world.

As Chip Conley writes in "Peak", I wanted to be able to experience and see "meaning" at work and in my work. The humanity within me was dissatisfied with the comm only-held belief that the sole purpose of business is to maximize short-term profits, regardless of the impact on the world as long as one stays within the law.

I saw the purpose of business as creating value for humanity and profits a result of successfully pursuing this purpose but not the purpose itself. This extreme dissatisfaction with the Milton Friedmanesque view of the world could be a Gen-Y or Millennial phenomenon as our generation has grown up learning we cannot build a prosperous, stable, and secure world by externalizing environmental costs and exploiting other parts of the world.

While our generation may be particularly attuned to social and environmental issues, I think seeking meaning at work is a higher-order, but universal need. It is simply reality for the large majority of workers (particularly the smartest and most driven talent) that they want to be able to be part of something meaningful--in their contribution to the company, in what the company achieves with its business, as well as the ways in which their business goes about creating that value for society.

Helping small and mid-sized companies communicate more easily with their customers and reducing paper usage from direct mail had a positive value to society, but could we create meaning in other ways, perhaps in how we went about building our business, the culture we created, and how we gave back?

I could no longer compartmentalize my life between the for-profit financially-focused work I did and the not-for-profit charity-focused work I did.

And so, going into 2010 I made it one of my priorities to substantially expand our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts at iContact.

Case Study: Social Responsibility at iContact

Since 2007, iContact has been giving away 1% of it's payroll to 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations in our communities locally and globally, but just giving away money was the easiest thing to do--and not nearly enough. We also had an annual Habitat for Humanity company house building day each July and and we adopted a handful of foster children each winter to provide gifts for them. But again, this is the basics of what every company does--almost as a check-the-box whitewashing effort to just be able to say "well, we do something."

These initial efforts were a start, but not enough. If we were going to make CSR a key differentiator for our company for attracting and retaining A+ talent and attracting customers who care about the world, we needed to do so much more. If our culture was going to be centered around creating a tangible direct connection between the work our employees did and true-meaning and value creation for the world, we needed an integrated CSR program.

iContact's Corporate Social Responsibility Program

And so, taking a page from the playbook of Marc Benioff, we created the 4-1s CSR Program, modeled in part after the 1/1/1 Integrated CSR Program that Salesforce.com has so successfully implemented after Marc's experiences at Oracle in the late 90s left something to be desired for corporate service.

The 4-1s CSR Program added giving 1% of product, 1% of time, and 1% of equity to our original program of giving 1% of payroll.

On January 8th, 2010 we rolled out the 4-1s program to our employees at our annual kickoff meeting. We explained that each team member would receive 2.5 extra days of Paid Time Off per year to volunteer in the local community which we would track via an AppExchange add-on called VolunteerForce, that we were taking 1% of the shares of the company and pledging them to the iContact Foundation, that we would give iContact away from free to any non-profit in North Carolina, and that we would continue our program of giving 1% of payroll away and matching employee contributions up to $300.

I was thrilled to have a formal CSR program in place. When Entrepreneur Magazine wrote an article about the 4-1s program in April giving us our first major press about the effort, I was careful to share that this was just the beginning for us. We have so much to learn about CSR.

Who knew if this was the right or best structure for integrate corporate philanthropy. What mattered is that we had something formal and significant in place and could learn and improve as we went.

Becoming a B Corporation

In May, we took our next major leap in our effort to turn iContact into a leader in social responsibility for venture-backed companies. After speaking with Drew Tulchin at Social Enterprise Associates, I knew if we really were going to be a Triple Bottom Line company, we had to have some type of external help putting in place a tracking system for our social and environmental impact. The next weekend I serendipitously met Matt Kopac at at Sunday brunch with a group of Durham friends. Matt had just finished up an MBA at Yale and was looking for work in the area with a non-profit or socially responsible enterprise. He had done work with VisionSpring and had been in the Peace Corps in Benin. We brought Matt on, initially as a half-time consultant.

Matt's assignment was simple--put in place a measurement system for social and environmental impact, manage our 4-1s CSR program, and help us put in place the changes necessary to become a B Corp. B Corps are are a new type of corporation that use the power of business to create public benefit.

When we first took the B Corp assessment, we scored 67 points. The assessment graded us within five categories: accountability, consumers, environment, employees, and community.

We then underwent an eight week process that Matt led to conduct an environmental/energy audit and supplier audit and put in place some needed changes to policies and sustainable supplies.

On June 30th, we finally passed the 80 point threshold needed. B Lab officially certified iContact as a B Corp! We had reached the next milestone for our process of becoming a leader in social responsibility and creating company culture that tied the work each employee did every day with meaningful impact, and we received a signed Declaration of Interdependence.

Tracking our Social & Environmental Impact

Once we became a B Corp, we needed a way to be able to track our social and environmental impact. Matt Kopac worked with our internal Salesforce.com administrator to install PULSE into Salesforce AppExchange, which is free for B Corps.

Below is a screen shot of PULSE showing a few of the environmental metrics tracked within PULSE for iContact.

In Salesforce PULSE we track the following social and environmental metrics in beautiful graph format in a location that is accessible to every iContact Employee. You can imagine how much easier this system makes it to track and view our triple bottom line metrics.

Current PULSE Social Impact Metrics Tracked

• Total Energy Consumed
• Energy Consumption Per Employee
• Total Water Use (Liters)
• Total Water Use Per Employee
• Total Irrigation Liters Used
• Sheets of Paper Used
• Recycled Paper Used as % of Total

Current PULSE Environmental Impact Metrics Tracked

• Dollars Contributed to Non-Profits
• Number of Non-Profits Contributed To
• Value of In-Kind Contributions
• % of Sales of Giving
• Number of Jobs Created
• Staff Turnover Rate
• Number of Non-Profits Given Free Product
• % of 4-1s Non-Profits as Customers
• New 4-1s Non-Profits Per Month
• 4-1s Non-Profits Emails Sent
• Number of Non-Profits Trained
• Number of B Corps as Customers
• Monthly Employee volunteer Hours
• Cumulative Volunteer Hours

Building Employee Engagement With Changemakers

To further our connection to employee-driven change we created an employee-led group called Changemakers. We now have a Social Changemakers Committee and an Environmental Changemakers Committee that meet monthly and come together once per quarter to make their recommendations to the company.

While putting in place the structure initially needed coordination and buy-in at the highest levels of the organization, to expand our efforts and integrate the values and ethos of our company permanently into our culture we need the energy, support, and word of mouth of individuals at every level of the organization.

Making the Connection to Meaning at Work

Back in November 2009 I was speaking to an iContact employee who told me, "If you can connect the work I do at iContact to making an impact in the world I would be so much more passionate about coming to work everyday." This was a key moment for me in making the immediate connection between 'meaning' at work and the incremental discretionary effort employees are willing to put into their jobs.

As Chip Conley wrote in Peak, If you can tie in "meaning" into the workplace you will get orders of magnitude more productivity our of your team. Too often companies are meaningful lifeless entities that are focused on short-term profit maximization rather than maximizing sustainable value creation for human beings, what actually maximizes long-term profits.

Meaning has three components to it--

1. Personal Meaning - how the job ties into to the individual's life goals.
2. Work Meaning - the significance of what the individual is enabling the company to achieve and the understood connection between their work and company success.
3. Organizational Meaning - the significance of what the organization succeeding means for human society.

So in the "Employee Hierarchy of Needs" money is at the bottom which creates base motivation, recognition is in the middle which creates loyalty, and meaning is at the top which creates inspiration.

What iContact Employees Think About Social Responsibility

So, has the social responsibility initiatives we've undertaken so far created added meaning for our team members, and can it for yours?

Here are a few examples of the comments we received from our employees so far either via Salesforce Chatter (shown above) or via the Culture Committee Meetings...

• “It makes me more excited about the company I work for.”
• “It's a rare opportunity to be a participant in a company such as iContact.”
• "iContact is a diverse group of individuals from all walks of life that come together as a team to both achieve and help others succeed."
• "iContact is a dynamic team-centric company that effectively balances customers, employees, and the world."
• "We have a holistic approach to business in terms of our impact on all stakeholders"
• "We do business differently, our employees are empowered, we work hard and play hard, and we are actively committed to helping others."

But the impact is not only in increasing employee engagement, but also increasing customers and partners that expressly seek out wanting to work with socially responsible companies.

Here is an unsolicited email we received from one of our partners to illustrate this...

"I was impressed by the iContact’s commitment to reaching beyond themselves to serve their community. to work toward making a positive impact on our community. It made my decision easier knowing I had found a company to work with that was like minded. As I work with my customers I make sure they know that we chose a company as a partner that would extend their reach.”

What We've Accomplished So Far

In the first eight months since we've expanded our efforts:

1. We've launched the 4-1s program (1% product, 1% payroll, 1% time, 1% equity)
2. Our employees have participated in 75 community service events logging 1,100 service hours tracked via VolunteerForce
3. We've installed Salesforce PULSE to track our environmental and social metrics
4. We were approved as a B Corporation
5. We conducted and published an environmental audit
6. We've hosted a non-profit workshop at our office
7. We've launched the Changemakers Group
8. We've launched the iContact Culture Committee

The Beneficial Economic Impact of Social Responsibility

So the hard-to-measure long term impact of improved employee retention and recruitment and customer growth and retention are no doubt positive factors in our long-term financial return models for our social responsibility program--but what about the hard-nosed measurable short-term economic analysis? Certainly this effort has to have cost us more money than it saved us, right?

In fact, this effort toward becoming a socially and environmentally responsible company will actually save us money, not cost us money.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY = COST SAVINGS

One of the ways this has been possible is because B Labs has a network of over 300 B Corps and companies that want to access the economic buying power of B Corporations. Once our current contracts expire and we're able to move to the discounted solutions, we expect to realize about $40,000 per month in savings from being a B Corporation while we are spending a total of $21,000 per month of all of 4-1s Program. Significant credit goes to Salesforce.com for offering a 75% discount off list price to B Corps.

So we've gained a quadruple benefit from social responsibility efforts of:

1. Mid-term existing vendor cost reductions of $40,000 driving estimated net savings of $19,000 per month ($228,000 per year).
2. Increased employee engagement and excitement to be working at our company (which we believe will lead to greater passion in people's work, additional discretionary effort from team members, increased productivity, lower regret employee turnover, and an increased ability to attract the best and the brightest).
3. Increased customer acquisition and customer retention from customers who are coming to us and sticking with us because of our social responsibility programs.
4. Additional press coverage from Entrepreneur, INC, and the Raleigh News & Observer that is helping us recruit the best and brightest and gain additional customers and partners.

Conclusion

We've got a long way to go still in working toward becoming an example for how other venture backed companies can invest in social responsibility. We've still got a lot to learn. It's been a great start and we look forward to much learning to come.

Thoughts/Comments?

I'd love your thoughts and comments. How has your company implement Corporate Social Responsibility? What other programs have you seen that have been responsible? Do you wish your company were more socially responsible? What impact would that have on your desire to put in full effort at work?

love to know your thoughts in the comments on social responsibility, effective CSR programs, whether being more socially responsible helps or hurts a business, and whether your shopping decisions could be influenced by whether a company is responsible or not.

The summer after my sophomore year, I hiked across northern Spain along a 1,200 year old pilgrim route known as the Camino de Santiago. For 30 consecutive days, my friend Christina and I walked about 20 miles a day, first through the Pyrenees, through the Medieval towns of Burgos and Leon, and ultimately into the ancient-feeling Galician town of Santiago de Compostela.

The pilgrimage leads to the cathedral where the remains of St. James supposedly came to rest after he fled the Holy Land. The trail began in the Middle Ages, as pilgrims from across Europe made the trek to atone for their sins and find grace. Its first peak was in the 12th century, when the cult of relics was highest, and literally tens of thousands made the journey.

Over time, the trail became not just a religious undertaking, but a right of passage for Spanish youth. In the 20th century, however, it fell into disrepair, the numbers slowly dwindling to the point that by the 1980s, only a few hundred people a year were walking it. In 1985, however, UNESCO declared Santiago de Compostela a World Heritage Site, and the government began reinvesting in the trail as a tourist attraction. By 2004 when Christina and I walked the trail, hundreds of thousands of people a year were coming.

Hiking the Way of St. James is like no experience I've had. Each morning, you wake up with the sun, walk an hour or so, stop in the first small village you come to for a cappuccino, hike for most of the morning following small yellow arrows that occur every half-mile or so, make a quick stop for lunch, hike a few more hours, and then end the day before it gets too hot. A shower, a nap, some dinner, reading, and conversation with people from around the world, and then bed.

Each night, you stay at Albergues, or Pilgrim's hostels that are only for those with official credentials that they are walking the trail. The Albergues are never more than 7 Euro a night, and most are more like 3 or 4. The economics of the journey are fundamentally disimilar from anything else I've experienced. There are plenty of ways to spend money if you'd like, but the trail is so powerful and overwhelmingly cerebral, emotional and experiential that there is little that purchased items could possibly add.

Today I'm headed to Burning Man, another community of seekers who create a truly alternative, albeit temporary, environment. For a week each August/September, tens of thousands of people come together to form "Black Rock City" in the desert of Nevada. Going means bringing literally everything that you need to survive -- food, water, shelter, lights, etc.

But the point is not survival, it's celebration and letting go. Burning Man began as a ritual among friends to let go of the past, celebrate the present, and look with joy to the future. People go all out preparing for the week, building incredible works of art, setting up massive dance parties, and more. No commerce is allowed during the week, with the exception of buying ice and coffee. The emotional culmination of the week is Saturday Night, when the man burns to symbolize a return to the earth. By Monday, every trace of the 50,000+ people is gone.

We get so use to commerce and transactions at the center of our reality that it is easy to forget that entirely different, deeply meaningful alternatives exist. They may not be permanent -- indeed, they may draw power from their impermanence -- but they are a reminder that ultimately the human experience is more complex and wonderful than the accessories that surround it.

Photo credit: Nathaniel Whittemore

 

Earlier this month I sat down with Dr. Craig Zelizer, Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution MA Program at Georgetown University and TechChange Advisor, to talk about the online professional network that he created in 2008 called the Peace and Collaborative Development Network (PCDN).

PCDN has grown to over 16,000 members, 250,000 hits a month and is one of the most well respected and utilized sites for the field of peace and conflict studies. The aim of the site is  “to foster dialogue and sharing of resources in international development, conflict resolution, gender mainstreaming, human rights, social entrepreneurship and related fields.” I was eager to learn about the network’s origins, successes, challenges and future plans. 

Nick: What inspired you to start Peace and Collaborative Network?

Craig: I’ve always been a networker and been interested in finding innovative ways to connect people and democratize access to information. When I was an undergrad I started an informal newsletter to inform people about social change activities on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After the Cold War ended I had the opportunity to study and work in Eastern Europe. While there, I found that information was generally kept in close circles and not shared widely. So I started an informal listserve through Yahoo Groups to distribute information about professional opportunities and events related to the field of peace and conflict. This list grew over time, to about 15,000 people. I was also part of an effort to start a fee-for service job site with the Alliance for Conflict Transformation. We made enough money to support the project but encountered a number of frustrations with the design and web development process.

So with PCDN, I wasn’t starting from scratch, I had been engaged in similar efforts for ten years or so and had a base of several thousand users. It did however take many years to find the right technology. PCDN runs using the Ning Platform. What Ning does is what I had always been seeking in a web-based social networking platform. There are some problems with platform but the company is committed to innovation, democratizing information, and is very responsive to feedback from users. And I don’t need to be a programmer to manage and maintain it. 

Nick: What are the aspects of the site that have been the most successful?

Craig: There are hundreds of social networking sites that have a lot of value – my vision was to try to fill a gap in the field and create horizontal networking and information sharing. When I first set out, I knew that to attract people to the site, there had to be a base of information so I invested significant time in creating core content. This helped to build a following.  The social networking component is essential but people often come to the site for the other features like scholarship, fellowship and grant information, resource guides, conference and training announcements, and many other opportunities. 

I think one of the most successful aspects of the site is its horizontalness - there is no hierarchy. It’s moderated to some degree but anyone can post. From graduate students to experts with 30 years experience, people of all different skill levels participate. 

Nick: What are the greatest challenges, both those you have overcome or those that you still face in administering PCDN?

Craig: One basic question I struggle with is: should the site be open or not? It used to be open but there were a number of spammers who joined and posted inappropriate content. As a consequence, the site is still public (meaning everyone can see the postings) but users can only post if they are registered. If someone doesn’t provide adequate information in their profile when registering they are not accepted in the network. 

Deciding what content to moderate and how to moderate it is also a challenge given that my time is limited. For instance, early on I decided that fundraising requests are not permitted as the site would be deluged. Additionally, there have been arguments in some of the network's subgroups that have been a challenge. I don’t have time to moderate these forums and have encountered situations where users have held me responsible as the site administrator for other users’ comments. I do have a few people helping me with the site, but it’s at the point where I need to develop a core group of people who are committed to administration and promotion of the network so that it doesn’t take too much time for me since I do this a volunteer. 

Another significant challenge is trying to measure the impact of the network.  There is a space on the site where over 300 members have posted clear feedback about the direct benefits they have received from their membership. But it is challenging to be able to develop indicators, and even more so the time to find an accurate measure. I do have a strong interest in exploring this question on a larger level, regarding how can the field more effectively measure the positive impact (and challenges) of sites that promote social networking and dialogue.

I think a final challenge is achieving the right balance for disseminating information.  Some users have said that the email alerts are too frequent while others have said that they would like more. 

Nick: What are some of your future goals with the site? 

Craig: I’d like PCDN to be one the premier social networking sites for sharing information in the field of peace and conflict studies. I’d like to grow the network to 50,000 to 100,000 members. The membership has been doubling every year. Business wise, it’s a social venture and right now it makes very little money (from the ads), not nearly enough to support my time in administration. If it ever got the point where the site was generating more revenue than it took to run, then half would go towards supporting the administration and half would be used to fund projects in the field of peace and conflict studies. 

Cross-posted from TechChange

For the last two weeks, the philanthropy blogosphere has been humming with near constant chatter about the Social Innovation Fund and a might-have-been controversy around the selection process for its first intermediary grantmaking partners. I've stayed entirely out of the fray because, frankly, I wasn't sure what to think.

Now that a little time has transpired and more information has come to light, it's easier to track the trajectory of the conversation. I think the story is ultimately a success for the field, in that the right sort of pressure for transparency opened up more and better information. In terms of keeping the tone of the debate where it needed to be, huge credit needs to go to Sean Stannard-Stockton, whose Tactical Philanthropy blog has been the smartest and most informative throughout.

Here's a chronology of the SIF controversy:

July 23 -- Wise Picks? Commentators Weigh In on the Social Innovation Fund Grants: In July, the Social Innovation Fund released its selected intermediary partners -- the funders responsible for matching and then distributing the $50m authorized for the fund by the Serve America Act.

Early August -- Questions of Transparency Cloud the Social Innovation Fund: The Nonprofit Quarterly published this piece, arguing that the Social Innovation Fund's standards of transparency weren't up to what they should be, or perhaps even what was required by the fact that they were a government agency, using taxpayer dollars.

August 9 -- National-Service Agency Explores More Open Grant Process: Responding to those critiques, the SIF announced it would release the applications of winning intermediaries, but not the rest of the applicants.

August 19 -- Stonewalling at the Social Innovation Fund: This piece by NYU professor Paul Light busted open the conversation from a debate about the general merits of transparency versus opaqueness to something with a far more sinister suggestion -- that the SIF didn't want to release the applications and review ratings to the public because it had selected organizations that were reviewed poorly in early stages because of pre-existing connections with those organizations. Another reviewer, Stephen Goldberg, hit back in the comments accusing Light of making sweeping generalizations and stirring up a hornet's nest with little evidence.

August 20 -- Social Innovation Fund to Release Details About Application Process Amid Questions: The SIF again responded quickly, pledging to release (redacted) comments and reviews of the 11 winning candidates for the fund.

August 21 -- Nonprofit Fund Faces Questions About Conflicts and Selection Procedures: The New York Times picked up the story, outing New Profit as the winning intermediary at the center of Paul Light's criticism, and suggested that the SIF's pledge might not go far enough to satisfy critics.

August 21 -- New Profit's SIF Application: The same day the Times published its piece, New Profit posted its full, non-redacted application. Sean Stannard-Stockton also pointed out that, as of that point, the only evidence of any wrongdoing was a general and unspecific implication in Light's piece.

August 23 -- SIF Publishes Finalist Applications with comments: As promised, the SIF opened up more information about the finalist.

August 24 -- Social Innovation Fund Application Repository: Although the SIF has said it will not make non-winning applications available, Sean decided to collaborate with the Chronicle of Philanthropy to create a repository of those applications voluntarily turned over by organizations. Only Social Venture Partners has participated so far.

August 26 -- How the Social Innovation Fund Selected Grantees: This post on Tactical Philanthropy clearly articulates how the decisions within the SIF were made.

So what do I think about this supposed "controversy?" I think a couple things. First, it increased government transparency, even if marginally, which is a good thing. Second, it highlighted this fields incredible obsession with transparency, which I don't believe is a fundamental requirement of private actors. Third, ultimately, the biggest story was the story itself. I think a comment on Paul Light's original post, written by David Bornstein pretty well sums it up:

What's so disappointing to me, reading this column, and the associated commentary it has generated, is how it reinforces the old narrative that government is unavoidably corrupt. There's a veiled accusation of insider trading, which is unfortunate. I didn't take part in the reviewing process of the SIF, so I can only judge the process by its outcome, which appears perfectly acceptable to me. The winners have demonstrated that they know how to identify organizations that are making headway on major social problems. I suspect that most of your readers here have no clue how well this $50 million will be spent. Sadly, many of them will come away with mistaken the notion that this is another example of government waste or hubris. And that is both unhelpful and untrue.

Photo credit: kevindooley

By Sandra Postel, posted Aug 30, 2010:

[Excerpt] It's getting harder and harder to blame Mother Nature for the disasters that befall humanity. While hurricanes, floods, droughts and storm surges are natural events, to be sure, the degree of disaster that unfolds when such events strike is often now heavily influenced by human activities.

When Hurricane Katrina smacked the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the protection from powerful storm surges provided by coastal wetlands and barrier islands had gradually been whittled away. Since the 1930s, Louisiana had lost 1.2 million acres of coastal wetlands. More than two dozen dams and thousands of miles of levees on the Mississippi River had trapped sediment that otherwise would have replenished them. At the same time, wetlands were drained and filled to enable oil and commercial development in the Gulf region. Even as the Army Corps of Engineers failed to adequately maintain levees to keep the floodwaters at bay, this loss of natural protection worsened the catastrophe.   Read full article   Originally posted August 20, 2010 at National Geographic as part of their Freshwater Initiative.

Banks ripe for disruption, better startup pitching, Wall Street Journal makes boring critiques of CSR (big surprise), and the potential for mobile technology to change justice systems around the world. All this and more in this week's weekend entrepreneur links.

In Hard Times, One New Bank (Double-Wide): The US consumer banking industry is waaaaaay up there on my "ripe for disruption" list. This article shows just how little space there has been for new actors to come in and change anything, recently. It profiles the only new bank to get new approval to operate in 2010. While there are interesting opportunities in creating entirely new banks, I actually think the first steps to changing the industry are going to be through companies that simplify and optimize certain parts of the banking experience, for example, Banksimple.net. Their whole value proposition is that they keep as many parts of the consumer banking experience free, only making money from two key revenue streams, which means a better overall experience.

5 Lessons from 150 Startup Pitches: I've watched a lot of pitches this summer, and performed a few myself, and one thing I can say for sure: no entrepreneur has the perfect pitch, and most of us (particularly in the social space) could use some work. This set of posts have been around for a while, but I've recently been re-engaging with these tips from Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software. The lessons are definitely more directly relevant for web entrepreneurs, but have lots of great insight for social ventures, as well.

"Bah! Humbug!" in the Wall Street Journal: Matthew Bishop and Michael Green use their Philanthrocapitalism blog to combat a set of recents pieces appearing in the WSJ. The first piece they sought to refute argued that the "Giving Pledge" was causing billionaires to focus on the wrong things when there would be more value if they just continued to make money. The second argued (poorly, in their estimation), that CSR was always going to distract companies and they should just give up, try to make profits as deviously as necessary, and have the government regulate. Not surprisingly, Bishop and Green have a few thoughts on both matters.

On the Potential of Mobile Justice: Stories about the potential of mobile technology to change health outcomes and improve economies in the developing world abound. Where there are fewer stories -- and as yet, fewer models -- is in how mobile technology can be used to help change the systems of justice that underpin free societies everywhere. This piece shares a few of the ideas and strategies that a working group convened by the State Department came up with this summer, particularly in the context of providing justice for rape survivors in eastern Congo.

Photo credit: The Consumerist

There has been an explosive conversation in the blogosphere this weekend about the under representation of women in tech entrepreneurship and web entrepreneurship more broadly. Is the situation better in social entrepreneurship?

This iteration of the conversation started off with a piece in the Wall Street Journal that rehashed many of the back-and-forths on this issue from the last few months, including the debate around whether the forthcoming TEDWomen conference was actually a step back for gender equality because of a sort of "seperate-but-(un)equal" thing. It also included a pretty lazy potshot at Techcrunch, the leading web 2.0 media publication.

Michael Arrington, the founder of Techcrunch, didn't like that one much at all and wrote a post titled: "Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men." In it, he effectively argues that venture investors, tech conferences and the media clamor for female entrepreneurs because they're eager to redress the imbalance and highlight more female innovators in order to inspire a younger generation of women to build companies.

The "debate" around this issue isn't about whether or not there is a gender imbalance in entrepreneurship. It's about why that is, and more specifically, which pieces of that why are structurally determined and could be shifted. It is also tinged by the supposed dichotomy between meritocracy and opportunity that colors debates about affirmative action, as well.

There is no shortage of theories about all of this. Right now, these particular set of posts are being debated on TechCrunch, VC Fred Wilson's blog, and Hacker News, among other spaces.

What's interesting to me is that in the world of social entrepreneurship, it seems like the balance is much better. I have no doubt that women in our field still deal with structural barriers, explicit or implicit assumptions about their capacity to lead, and other real hurdles to success. But it does feel to me that there are far more highly visible women social entrepreneurs and thought leaders in this field than in pure technology. Just as a proxy, in the last thee years, 24 or 49 of Echoing Green's prestigious seed fellowships have been awarded to teams led by women.

So here are my questions:

1. Is it true that social entrepreneurship has more women leaders than tech entrepreneurship?

2. If it is, how come?

3.  Are any of the reasons things that other entrepreneurial fields can learn from?

4. What does this field still need to do better?

Photo credit: TheGiantVermin

Last night saw the conclusion of the second annual Singularity University, a ten-week graduate program designed to help some of the globes best and brightest understand the implications and opportunities of exponentially increasing technologies. Their task? To use those new technologies to positively impact a billion lives.

"Singularity" refers specifically to a moment in the future in which artificial intelligence matches human intelligence. More broadly though, the conversation about the Singularity refers to the general implications of exponentially increasing technology. Put more basically, the idea is that technology is not just changing more rapidly, but the pace at which it is advancing is not linear but exponential.

This means that innovations that were recently unthinkable are now just around the corner. Our ability to fabricate nanomaterials, understand genomic code, and other similar advances all suggest a very different future. Some of the most notable implications have to do with the way we fight disease and customize medicine to our highly individual genetic makeups.

The man who initiated the movement around understanding the implications of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity is Near" and co-founder and Chancellor of the Singularity University. The graduate program came out of a conversation with X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, who became the Chairman of Singularity U and helped assemble the team and sponsors to get it off the ground.

The summer program is structured in three parts. In the first part, students learn about exponentially increasing technologies across all fields, from health to space to agriculture and beyond. In the second part of the program, students hone in on one key area from space, food, energy, upcycling waste or water. Their task is to learn about the specific technologies reshaping those fields, and form teams to address key problems in novel ways. The third part of the program is spent coming up with ideas that specifically leverage those exponential technologies to address key needs for a billion people or more.

At last night's graduation ceremony at the NASA Ames center in Silicon Valley, the students - representing literally dozens of countries - showed off their bold ideas. The remarkable thing about the program is not just that it produces ideas, however, but that it produces people with an entirely shifted worldview who are committed to putting those ideas into practice. Something like half of last year's inaugural class ended up staying in or returning to Silicon Valley to continue to build the companies that came out of the program.

The program and its students are a testament to the power of big thinking. While not all of the ideas that come out of the graduate program will end up seeing the light of day, a number of them will, and you can bet we'll be benefitting from it.

For those interested in learning more or in applying to next year's program, apply at http://www.singularityu.org

Photo credit: jurvetson

By Asher, posted Aug 28, 2010:

There's a lot to digest in Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine but I was particularly struck by a passage at the very end of the book, which I think aptly describes one of the major obstacles to properly understanding the costs and consequences of our globalized, industrial way of life — distance.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan there was no sign anything important had just happened. The force that would affect all of their lives was hidden from their view. That was the problem with money. What people did with it had consequences but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other. The teaser rate loans you make to people who will never be able to repay them will go bad not immediately but in two years when their interest rates rise. The various bonds you make from those loans will go bad not as the loans go bad but months later, after a lot of tedious foreclosures and bankruptcies and forced sales. The various CDOs you make from the bonds will go bad not right then but after some trustee sorts out whether there will ever be enough cash to pay them off, whereupon the end owner of the CDO receives a little note: "Dear Sir, We regret to inform you that your bond no longer exists." But the biggest lag of all was right here, on the streets. How long would it take before the people walking back and forth in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral figured out what had just happened to them. The Veil

This veil of time and distance is not just true for the consequences of the subprime mortgage scam, of course. It's true for many of the outcomes of our consumer-driven, globalized, and industrial way of life (those of us in North America, in particular). The obvious ones are climate change and the food system.

The specific qualities of the greenhouse effect make it incredibly hard to feel the causal links. The climate impacts of turning on the dryer, for example, couldn't be further removed from the place and moment you turn that dial; the four pounds or so of carbon dioxide produced are invisible and likely to spew from some coal stack hundreds of miles away, where they eventually dissipate to mix in with billions of other pounds of CO2 throughout the atmosphere for a period of 50-100 years.

Now if the result of turning that dial was, instead, to immediately spread an inch of sea water across the floor of the laundry room or raise the temperature in the room a degree or two, you probably wouldn't turn it on quite so often. But that's just the nature of fossil fuel addiction... The road trips my grandmother used to take to Vegas in the 1950s are now raising sea levels in Bangladesh while the coal being burned in China today is going to make my grand kids' August weather very different than my own.

The industrial food system, of course, has been intentionally designed to leave consumers as disconnected from the source of their food as possible. It's a lot easier to chow down that fast food burger when you don't realize that it contains meat from hundreds of different cows, let alone have to butcher them all yourself! And if you saw the conditions in which those cows were raised, well, you'd literally lose your appetite.

Thankfully it's easier to lift the veil when it comes to where our food comes from. For one, a lot of powerful documentaries and books have come out in recent years that bring the reality of the industrial food system to light. (And just wait for the forthcoming CAFO book by Watershed Media. I've had the, er, honor to see some of the images included in the photo book... If a picture is worth a thousand words, these pictures are worth a million livestock lives.)

That's not to say it's easy to change where our food comes from. Not everyone has access to fresh produce or can afford organic food. But the veil can be lifted. (It doesn't hurt when efficiency-oriented industrial food systems break down like here and here enough for the media to notice.)

The Boomerang

The veil of time and distance makes it that much more challenging to change the behaviors that cause or reinforce the energy, economic, and environmental crises we face. But that's only part of the story. Another is how we react as the dues for our long, fossil fueled, industrial growth binge actually come due. Because the causal links are so complex and global, when these consequences do finally boomerang and hit us smack in the ass a lot of people won't understand how and why they happened. One result is that we're more likely to continue doing the things that got us in trouble in the first place, without ever connecting the dots. But there's also the psychological impacts that come from confusion and dissonance, which can lead to anger or a sense of victimization.

History is littered with horrific examples of when widespread fear and uncertainty are channeled into organized rage. I'll confess a deep concern about the near- and long-term results from the collision of four realities here in the US:

1. The confluence of incredibly complex, interrelated economic, energy, and environmental crises whose particular impacts are impossible to predict.
2. An American culture — politically divided and ethnically diverse, with a long history of xenophobia and racial tensions — that is ripe for conflict.
3. A political system so corrupted by moneyed special interests and inertia that, while still ostensibly "democratic," is viewed with suspicion and cynicism by Americans of all political persuasions.
4. A fourth estate that is in the process of massive contraction and is, for the most part, utterly failing to provide the populace with the reasoned, fact-based analysis people need to make sound decisions.

And so I worry about the kind of collective response we might see when the boomerangs really start hitting people.

Goldilocks

Richard Heinberg wrote a fantastic op-ed for Reuters entitled "Goldilocks and the Three Fuels" that explored the possibility of a "just right" price range for oil, natural gas, and coal.

By mid-2009 the oil price had settled within a Goldilocks range—not too high (so as to kill the economy and, with it, fuel demand), and not too low (so as to scare away investment in future energy projects and thus reduce supply). That just-right price band appeared to be between $60 and $80 a barrel. How long prices can stay in the Goldilocks range is anybody’s guess, but production declines in the world’s old super-giant oilfields continue to accelerate and exploration costs continue to mount, which means that the lower boundary of that just-right range will inevitably continue to migrate upward. Meanwhile the world economy remains frail, so that even $80 oil could strain the recovery. When discussing the increasing perils of the current oil supply-demand-price balancing act, some commentators opine that the world supply of oil has peaked; others say it is demand that has peaked. It is a distinction without a difference.

Ever since, I've wondered if there's such a thing as a Goldilocks moment for the kind large-scale, collective action we need to avert collapse. If the metaphor is that we're on a runaway train, heading speedily towards a brick wall at the end of the tracks, then is there a "just right" moment to slam on the brakes?

Like a real train, there's an incredible weight and inertia in the system. This train will not stop on a dime. It's going to take a lot of force and enough track to stop the train before it hits the wall.

While there's a growing number of people who sense that the wall is looming — even before they can physically see it — there are not nearly enough of us to put sufficient weight on the brakes to slow the train down, let alone stop it. The closer we get to the wall, the more of us will see what's coming, but at what point will there be a critical mass to really punch the brakes, and will there be enough track at that point to avoid the collision?

I don't have an answer to this question. I'm not sure anyone does. What I can say, however, is three things:

1. Whether from the wall or the brakes, a lot of us are going to get whiplash. There's no scenario I see to avoid some measure of hardship. But I'll take whiplash over broken bones. How about you?
2. I know we're on a train here, but if you haven't already, you might want to think about putting on a seat belt. The seat belt in this case is personal resilience and community resilience.
3. We increase our odds of stopping the train in time (and reducing casualties) if we help more and more people understand there's a wall up ahead.

One way or the other, it's going to be an interesting ride.

By Aron Cramer, President and CEO

Now that oil has stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, it is time to consider the lessons that can be drawn from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Most of our collective attention has focused on what went wrong on the rig. We’ve also spent a lot of time wondering why the federal government couldn’t summon the wherewithal to plug the leak, and even whether President Obama was angry enough.

But any honest assessment of what’s gone wrong must lead us right back to ourselves. The common thread that runs from the spill in the Gulf to the mortgage crisis to the spate of suicides at the Chinese factory producing iPods and iPads is insatiable consumer demand for more and more, at lower and lower prices. We all like inexpensive gasoline, the latest shiny electronic gadgets, and mortgages cheap enough to let us trade up to a larger house. But as we have seen this year, neither our economy nor our planet can sustain this demand.

The good news is that a more promising commercial model—one based on “sustainable consumption”—is emerging as a viable alternative. This concept, which is being embraced by corporate mainstays like Nike, Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Co., and Unilever, boils down to one simple idea: delivering more value with less stuff.

For too long, sustainability has been understood to mean only limits and restrictions. Sustainable consumption turns this idea on its head, as a way to unleash business innovation to develop products and services that deliver better living standards without further burdening our already overtaxed planet.

Some companies have already figured this out. Best Buy is investing in home information-management systems that provide not only video on demand, but also data that help you reduce your home energy bill. Nike is exploring “closed loop” manufacturing models that take most of the waste out of its athletic footwear. Levi’s is calling on customers to wash their 501s in cold water (and turn used jeans over to Goodwill), slashing the energy used to clean your clothes, which in turn saves money. eBay’s business model, which essentially recycles mountains of goods, prevents the need to devote new resources to make new products.

The beauty of sustainable consumption is that it doesn’t rely on all of us becoming better or more virtuous people. Instead, it aims to make every consumer a partner with companies in constructing an economy that uses natural resources more wisely. This will limit the need to “drill, baby, drill” in every corner of the globe, and it will quell our hunger for ever more exotic financial instruments and Chinese factories that can pump out new products faster and faster.

Sustainable consumption is also the best possible safeguard against a systemic natural resource crash that could be every bit as disruptive as the crash of the financial system in 2008. The evidence suggests that the risk of that is real. It appears that 2010 will be the hottest year on record, heightening the urgency to solve climate change. The Global Footprint Network estimates that we are using 40 percent more resources today than the planet can supply, and that this will rise to 100 percent by the middle of the next decade. If we are to maintain advances in living standards around the world, it’s clear that we need new business models, as well as innovation and new public policies, to make the leap to a genuinely sustainable economy.

It’s tempting to finger BP or Goldman Sachs as the exemplars of all that’s wrong with the economy. But let’s not debate whether things went as they should have in the Gulf or on Wall Street: They didn’t. Instead, let’s focus on the cure. The post-recession, post-oil-spill economy should embrace a vision of business—and consumption—that creates value without causing blowouts either on oil rigs or in financial systems. If we do that, we will be one step closer to an economy that can deliver prosperity for a planet with seven billion people.