Posts tagged ‘social change’

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June 16, 2009

HUGE News!!! The @Extraordinaries Wins a 2009 @EchoingGreen Fellowship!!!

by Ben Rigby

Press Contact: Jacob Colker
(773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org

Eglogo San Francisco, CA – June 15, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce today that we have been awarded a 2009 Echoing Green Fellowship!!! Echoing Green received nearly 1,000 applications for these 14 spots, and we are incredibly honored to join the ranks of the Echoing Green Fellows community.

This year’s fellows are an incredible group of people. Among the fellows are Former First Daughter of the United States Barbara Bush and her project Global Health Corps (http://www.ghcorps.org), Esra’a Al Shafei and her project Mideast Youth (http://www.mideastyouth.com), and our good friend Stephane de Messieres and his project Citizens Market (http://www.citizensmarket.org). But really, they’re all incredible people, and thus we list them all at the bottom of this post.

“After seventeen rounds of review, three rounds of cuts, four rigorous personal interviews, background checks, reference checks, supporting research, and more, we’re honored that our project has made it through and met the standards of such an incredible organization,” said Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. “Echoing Green is in the business of dreaming with us — and then helping to make those dreams possible. It’s an extraordinary opportunity.” Colker continued.

With the 2009 class, Echoing Green has now invested over $28 million in 471 fellows since 1987, providing critical seed funding, health insurance, training, and the full backing of the entire fellows community to make these projects successful. Many organizations which Echoing Green funded at their early stages are today internationally-recognized: Teach For America, Working Today, Genocide Intervention Network, Citizen Schools, JumpStart for Children, College Summit, the Global Fund for Children, and City Year. A full description of the 2009 Echoing Green Fellows can be viewed at http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/year/2009 and a list with brief project summaries is attached below.

To get a better sense of the class of 2009, watch the three-minute video that is viewable from the home page of http://www.echoinggreen.org


Named after the William Blake poem, Echoing Green is a global nonprofit that supports emerging entrepreneurs who enact innovative solutions that address root causes to social problems. It is one of the only organizations solely dedicated to investing in early-stage social entrepreneurs. To drive transformative social change, Echoing Green identifies and assists some of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs launching new high-impact organizations. Through the fellowship program, Echoing Green supports this community of visionaries as they develop new solutions to society’s toughest problems. Founded by the leadership of the private equity firm General Atlantic in 1987, Echoing Green has supported more than 470 leaders sparking change in forty-one countries and forty-one states. 

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OTHER 2009 FELLOWS
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Natalie Bridgeman – Accountability Counsel
San Francisco, California

The Bold Idea: Partner with communities harmed by international finance and development projects to hold international institutions and corporations accountable and develop new accountability systems where none exist. Accountability Counsel partners directly with communities seeking redress for harm caused by development projects and works to create broad, systemic change through the creation of a new Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism (“FIAM”). At the grassroots level, Accountability Counsel conducts trainings regarding accountability tools and assists communities with strategies to implement those tools, including claims to accountability mechanisms and litigation.  

Stephane de Messieres – Citizens Market
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Bold Idea: Leverage crowd-sourcing tools and citizen journalism to better inform consumers seeking to engage in ethical consumption and enable these consumers to use their full market power to influence environmental and social issues. Citizens Market is a user-generated website where anyone can contribute a review and a rating for any company’s performance on a social or environmental issue. Consumers can access a company’s scores by searching the site or by using text messaging or a barcode scan for the product when purchasing. Citizens Market’s aim is to host a vibrant online community of 1 million information contributors.  

Bethany Henderson – City Hall Fellows, Inc.
Pasadena, California

The Bold Idea: Incentivize and empower diverse, top college graduates to tackle social ills from within existing government institutions, thus ensuring our cities have leaders capable of confronting cities’ myriad challenges. City Hall Fellows serve as special assistants to senior city managers working on substantive projects. During their Fellowship, Fellows engage in an extensive curriculum to explore how their city works, why it works that way and the people, organizations and issue that impact local policy making. City Hall Fellows received over 400 applications for its inaugural cohort of twenty-one Fellows. Bethany has plans to expand to multiple cities in the US and to increase the Fellowship class size to between 250 and 500 Fellows per year. 

Eric Glustrom – Educate!
Boulder, Colorado

The Bold Idea: Empower high school students in Uganda to become the next generation of socially responsible leaders through a two-year leadership curriculum and long-term mentoring that equips students to create social enterprises. Educate! disrupts the rote memorization-based education system in Uganda by equipping high school students to create social enterprises through a two-year socially responsible leadership curriculum, long-term mentoring, and an alumni network. 

David del Ser – Frogtek
New York, New York

The Bold Idea: Boost the productivity and income of small shopkeepers in the developing world with affordable business tools that can be run on mobile phones. Frogtek develops simple business tools using touchscreens and barcode readers that uneducated microentrepreneurs can use. The organization partners with local community organizations, microfinance institutions, and mobile carriers to distribute the tools. 

Julie Carney and Emma Clippinger – Gardens for Health International
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Bold Idea: Enable HIV-positive individuals to improve their nutrition and health through low-cost sustainable agriculture practices. Gardens for Health International (GHI) provides legal support to communities of people living with HIV/AIDS, enabling them to form small business cooperatives and to gain access to arable land. GHI provides micro-loans to the cooperatives, delivers nutritional training and identifies and provides the initial investments for high impact agribusiness opportunities, such as tomato greenhouses, fruit tree nurseries, mushroom production and animal husbandry. 

Barbara Bush and Jonny Dorsey – Global Health Corps
New York, New York

The Bold Idea: Build the next generation of global health leaders and improve the quality of healthcare services for the poor by connecting outstanding young professionals from around the world with health-focused organizations. Global Health Corps (GHC) partners with organizations with proven success but limited resources to host international teams of young professionals for a yearlong fellowship. GHC recruits outstanding fellows from the U.S. and abroad who possess skills that will add immediate value to the organization and who show strong leadership potential. 

Sarah Hemminger – Incentive Mentoring Program
Baltimore, Maryland

The Bold Idea: Empower struggling teenagers to break the cycle of poverty, drugs and lack of education by surrounding them with “families” of mentors who fill critical gaps in academic and social support. The Incentive Mentoring Program (IMP) families coach life skills through activities based on three elements: academic assistance; community service; and team building. Without overburdening individual volunteers, a team of six to twelve mentors led by an experienced “head of household” can form customized solutions to the challenges these children and their families face. 

Veena Ramanna – IndiaGoverns
New Delhi, India

The Bold Idea: Change the nature of political discourse in India by providing constituency and Members of Parliament performance information to voters, citizen activists, and journalists. IndiaGoverns focuses on collecting, analyzing, and organizing development data, such as investments in infrastructure and schools, and performance data in politically meaningful terms. IndiaGoverns then uses community partnerships, mobile phone technology, and the internet to disseminate the information to the electorate. 

Angie beatty and Shawn Mckie – The J.U.I.C.E. Project
St. Louis, Missouri

The Bold Idea: Combat disease mortality in inner cities by reimagining the corner store as a one-stop shop for nutritious yet affordable food, free exercise training/activities, media/health literacy education, and art programs. Situated in a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood, The J.U.I.C.E. Project provides free and on-site programming that blends media/health literacy education with physical exercise and art for social change. They empower youth to make healthy lifestyle choices by helping them understand how food, physical activity, and behaviors (e.g. heavy television, alcohol, and tobacco consumption) impact their physical and mental health.

Esra’a Al Shafei – Mideast Youth
Manama, Bahrain

The Bold Idea: Connect youth from the Middle East and North Africa online to promote human rights, religious freedom, tolerance, and free speech. Mideast Youth provides the only creative space for youth to freely express themselves, and exchange information, experiences, views, and opinions, visibly involving various minorities who have been persecuted, censored, and violently discriminated against for d
ecades.  

Dhruv Lakra – Mirakle Couriers
Mumbai, India

The Bold Idea: Create meaningful and sustainable employment opportunities for low-income deaf adults in India, thereby increasing their standard of living and making them economically independent. Mirakle Couriers is a full-service courier company that offers delivery and tracking services to clients in Mumbai. All delivery and back office functions will be performed by deaf employees. In addition to providing job training, Mirakle Couriers provides life skills training for their employees including personal financial management. 

Adam Stofsky – New Media Advocacy Project
New York, New York

The Bold Idea: Empower defenders of human rights and social justice by integrating video and internet social networking into their advocacy strategy, enabling them win their legal cases and organize communities. New Media Advocacy Project will pioneer strategies for using video in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities. It will use social networking to give advocates an unprecedented connection to their client communities, allowing them to locate the best witnesses and gather evidence.

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March 20, 2009

Social Media for Charity Versus Change?

by Ben Rigby

Thanks to Beth Kanter for a detailed report-back from the "Social Media for Social Good BBQ" at SXSW. Kanter sums up a lot of sentiment from many conversations that I had at SX: that many campaigns of late have focused on fund-raising/charity – with little connection to systemic change on the ground. Of course, as Kanter notes: 


"I think there is some indirect social impact when we use social media for charity.  It happens through the organization that receives the funding. Of course, it depends on the capacity of the organization and its programs."


This is clear. In every fund-raising campaign, we're assuming that the funds will be spent to make conditions on the ground better. But it seems that there's a growing skepticism that these bettering acts take place in practice. Perhaps it's tied to a general distrust of organizations that are not entirely transparent – in the wake of Madoff, Enron, and AIG. We might reasonably apply skepticism to nonprofits as well. This sentiment is heightened when we hear about campaigns that focus on building lists and raising money – with little mention on what they're doing with those lists and funds. The campaign isn't tied to action on the ground (at least not from what we hear about it). This sentiment was neatly summarized by Lina Srivastava as quoted by Kanter:

"As a sector, we still have work to do to clarify the distinction between charity and social good/systemic change. The "Social Media for Social Good" panel, in particular, led off with stories of fundraising and good deeds on behalf of individuals, as opposed to scalable social change. I'm not making a value judgment against fundraising here (had they titled the panel "Social Media for Fundraising," I would have had less of a problem with the focus– though I will continue to argue the prevailing system of fundraising needs a major overhaul). But I and a few other attendees later voiced the view that charity is an entry point, not an endpoint, in sustainable social change."


Having run a nonprofit for five years – I can tell you that fundraising comes at the expense of making change. It's a direct suck of energy that would go into action. For this reason, we've been exploring alternatives to the nonprofit structure for The Extraordinaries. And we've found it in Dr. Yunus' vision of a "social business." See Jacob's post on social business - along with some of our research and thinking into entity types. The structure proposed by Dr. Yunus solves a lot of the problems and frustrations described in Kanter's post. It offers a way to create a business focused on systemic change while free from the suck of fundraising. Of course, it's open to mis-use, like anything – but it provides a framework and many examples of how it can work well. 

Beth, thanks for getting this conversation going. Looking forward to focusing on these issues over the next months and years.

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February 6, 2009

Games for Extras: Expensive Distraction or Enhanced Civic Impact?

by Ben Rigby

We've been having some really interesting conversations via email with various folks about the value and possible structure of The Extraordinaries qua game. Thought I'd bring these issues/questions to the blog b/c I'd *love* your feedback and ideas on these questions.

First, I'll set my ground assumptions, so that you know where I'm coming from.

1. I think the field of games for social change and civic action is one of the most exciting and promising areas for exploration and experimentation in the social-good sector. I say as much in the conclusion of my book. In particular, I think that ARGs have tremendous, as of yet unrealized, potential. GroundCrew and Akoha may start to realize this potential very soon (My Akoha cards came in the mail today!).

2. I'm not a gamer. Although I had an Asteroids addiction one summer when I was 10, burned my thumbs on Super Mario a bit later, and spent 2 weeks holed up in Brooklyn playing GTA, I woudn't consider myself a gamer as gamers do. After reading my friend Heather Chaplin's book, Smart Bomb, I know what gamer is and it ain't me.

3. The Extraordinaries is about civic impact. Our mission is to apply
crowdsourcing models to social good – making it easier for people to give back – thereby increasing the degree and spirit of civic engagement.

Since the beginning of The Extraordinaries, we've been calling it a "game." However, we haven't yet paid too much attention to the game design. As one astute critic said in an email discussion: 'adding points to an application doesn't make it a game.' How true. I'd been thinking that we'd get to it later – once many of the other pieces were in place. But this comment made me realize that we've got to do some hard thinking and design work now, if we've got any chance of this thing being a successful game.

That line of thinking took me to this question: do we want The Extraordinaries to be a successful game or a successful tool for civic engagement and is there any need to make this distinction?

In a lot of cases, there's no need to make this distinction. In games like Darfur is Dying, the purpose is to raise awareness (and generate donations), so the better the game is: the more people play; people play longer; and thus, the better it achieves its social impact objectives. There's a linear relationship between the quality of the game and the outcomes.

But in The Extraordinaries, our desired outcome is for more people to do more tasks and to stay engaged over time. We want the person to "play" The Extraordinaries whenever they have spare time. In fact, from a branding perspective, we want them to associate 'spare time' with 'doing good,' and to think of The Extraordinaries in the same mental breath.

At first blush, it seems that the same positive linear association exists here. The better our game is, the more viral and addictive it gets, so more people play and the more they're engaged over the long term. At least, this was my initial thinking…

There are a few factors that make the relationship not entirely positive:

1. Creating challenge
2. Winning
3. Time & Resources

1. In order to create ongoing challenge, we're going to want to hold back some of what we got. For example, if this thing were a game, we might give you 3 relatively easy tasks to accomplish when you start off. And after tagging 500 images for the Smithsonian, you might advance a level, at which point you'd get a more difficult task – such as critiquing resumes or bird spotting, for example.

But do we want to limit what people can do? What if one player is an adept and enthusiastic bird spotter and we loose her in the initial level b/c she doesn't find anything of interest. Creating challenge (at least in this manner) seems inversely related to our objectives.

2. At some point, you should be able to win the game. This poses a problem, b/c we want people to play this thing for ever… whenever they have spare time. This doesn't seem like a huge problem b/c we can turn winners into 'guides' and recycle them into the game in other ways. However, it will take a hellova lot of design, planning, and management to make sure that there's a great narrative, leveling, and winning experience. Which leads to the final point:

3. To create a great game takes a lot of time and resources, neither of which we have. To plan and manage a great game experience is going to take mega-work: design, art, strategy, coding, and management. I can see how this thing would take shape as a game. It's amazing. It's beautiful and compelling. But it's expensive and would mean that we don't get to market until much much later.

So, is it worth it? Can we achieve our social objectives without a game? If there's no narrative and meager game mechanics (closer to GWAP than GTA), does this thing still work? Is it compelling enough to be able to do real work for real causes on-the-spot and on-demand? Will people still tell their friends and come back to volunteer time and again?

Is there an alternative? I posted the other day about a "salon" I attended about the future of independent media. What if, instead of taking a game approach, we took a media approach? So, the lead in to each task is a narrative about a social issue – and then you get to do something about it on-the-spot. For example, you watch a short film about the ongoing travails of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and then you get to act, right then. It's a new way of getting your news and social-interest stories. It's News with a Purpose.

Although I'm not a frequent gamer, I'm a believer in the power of games. But after diving deep into these thoughts, I'm wondering if it's the right step for us…

What do you think?

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January 7, 2009

On Transcending An Organization. And Creating a cost-free market for information transfer.

by Ben Rigby

I've had a couple of interesting/pithy discussions over the last couple of days about the nature of nonprofit social work and wanted to bring this topic to the fore with a blog post. The first discussion was with "SJ" who posted a great comment to my post about "The New Volunteer Workforce" :

"What is the purpose of a given non-profit? If you manage to gather a team of 10,000 or 500,000 contributors working towards your original goal, is the precise structure of the original concept (a non-profit, incorporated in such and such a place, led by this governance structure) important? Can it change?

What happens when the new growth of voluntary collaboration has more experience and better connections than the small core of staff? How are the next level of strategy, challenges, programs, processes defined?

If the answer remains "the non-profit defined the community in the first place, all else is valuable but subsidiary", you are losing what may be the greatest value of any really successful entity or network: its capacity to transcend its origins.

Great networks can spawn new focused clusters (which may or may not have any of bylaws and directors, corporate status and budgets, and staff). They can dissolve or reshape the form of the original seed without disturbing the growth of the whole.

When you explicitly work with contributors to pursue a greater goal, they have an extra opportunity to develop their own strategic plans."

And yesterday I had a conversation with Anne Marie Burgoyne from the Draper Richards Foundation – we were chatting about their fellowship program and she mentioned that they don't fund technology – they fund movement building – organizations and individuals that can create wide reaching social change. 

These two related conversations struck a chord with me. As someone who builds software for a living, it's easy to get caught up in the intricacies of coding and functionality and such. In college, I actually spent quite a lot of time studying the so-called "Oppenheimer Effect" – where engineers get so wrapped up in their work that they neglect the wider social context of their efforts. And I suppose there's a corollary in social good software, where one does, in-fact, consider the social context, as it's the motivation for creating the software in the first place, but then fixates on the idea that making great software is the end-goal.

So, it's good to get a little nudge every now and then to consider the broader picture – to put software in its place as the spark that can facilitate social movements – that can bridge people – that can provide a mechanism for distributed and loosely coordinated social work – but that, in the end, like the nonprofit organization itself, is secondary to the broader social change movement.

I think we, at The Extraordinaries, can define our broader social change movement more clearly. From my perspective, the goal is to create a cost-free market for expertise transfer. Today, there is a high cost for someone with expertise to offer that knowledge to someone who needs it. This cost is usually time. As a result, more than 75% of people don't offer their expertise to anyone but their employer. And yet, there is a percentage of this group who would offer their expertise for free, to someone who needs it, if the cost weren't so high. 

Why is this important? Because information is the currency of our modern era. If you want to raise the standard of living for an individual – if you want to give back to your community – you give information. At it's core, social change work is dedicated to improving quality of life for individuals and communities; creating a cost-free market for information transfer could play a transformative role in rasing the quality of life for millions of people. And, of course, the result isn't all for selfless purpose. Higher standards of living for any given group has a trickle-up effect. Less poverty results in less crime and less extremism, for example. Beyond the cool mobile phone application and desire to craft elegant code, it's this idea that drives me to work.

Readers/partners, what do you think? Am I on the mark here? Do you agree/disagree about my theory on information-transfer and quality of life? Comments please.

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November 18, 2008

Notes from Mobiles for Change Session

by Ben Rigby

These are a little late in coming, but here they are – notes from the session that I facilitated on mobile phone application development at the M4Change conference in San Francisco on Nov 4, 2008 (organized by Katrin Verclas from MobileActive.org). We had a strong contingent of developers there – some who had recently built mobile apps for some of the leading companies in the valley. So, lot's of good information was shared.

Prime takeaway: Due to various factors, the best foot forward right now is to develop an app for the iPhone, but to rely heavily on the platform's Web-integration tools so that you can be ready for a quick transition to other platforms when those platforms become viable.

So, ok, what are these various factors?

#1: Distribution & montetization
Even though many other phones are in the hands of many more people, when it comes to mobile apps, the iPhone is #1. People use their apps more on the iPhone, consumer more data, and download more apps.

#2: Controlled Platform.
Love it or hate it, the iPhone platform and system is dependable. gPhone is not really a gPhone. It's a gOS bundled with tMobile – and without Jobs the dictator, things do fall apart. For example, I followed a link on Google's site to purchase the gPhone a few weeks ago and I got to an area of tMobile's site where they had me login, which i did, and then they told me that the gPhone was not available for me to purchase. Just one example of how when the Dictator is not in charge, the process isn't as smooth. Developers in the group said that they had had similar experiences.

Other stuff we talked about:
* It would be cool to have a Yahoo Pipes for mobile apps. [The Extraordinaries project that we're working on comes close, actually]. Yahoo's Blueprint and Tarpipe.com were mentioned.

* We mentioned TacticalTech's Mobiles in a box. It's a lot of great info about running mobile apps and campaigns.

* The problem with developing just a mobile web site is that you don't get access to any of the nifty phone APIs

* We talked about developing countries – saying that there really wasn't anything significant you could do with mobile apps quite yet.

* Someone mentioned that in Japan people use their apps primarily to consume – while in the US, people use their apps more as utilities, for doing.

* Someone noted that iPhone penetration among lower income brackets in the US is increasing.

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