At Sparked, we're driven to make volunteering convenient, fun, and full of impact. We call it "microvolunteering" because you can do it whenever and wherever you have time. And now, with Sparked Enterprise, you can get your whole office volunteering together!
MoveSmart.org fosters vibrant and diverse neighborhoods by empowering housing seekers to move to opportunity.
Until now, information on neighborhoods has been buried in the back of academic reports, pinned to community center bulletin boards, and locked in data sets only available to planners, inaccessible to those who would benefit from it the most: housing seekers looking for a better neighborhood. MoveSmart.org will leverage the power of this information by combining these and other data sources into a single mapping engine built into a full-featured site that includes guides, tools, calculators, forums, and social networks, all designed to foster racial and economic integration.
Previous integration initiatives have proven costly and focused on families receiving public aid. Housing seekers with unlimited funds have always had the luxury of living where they choose. But for millions of families who have limited resources, finding the right neighborhood is difficult. MoveSmart.org will educate housing seekers about the benefits of integrative moves while at the same time providing suggestions on where to move, guides on how to move, and information on how to get involved in their new neighborhoods, inspiring pride in a new community and putting them on a path to true integration.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
MoveSmart.org has called in The Extraordinaries to help them compile information about communities nationwide.
One Degree Solar was founded to help governments and aid organizations expand access to basic health and education services. Our staff and advisers have backgrounds in international public health and years of work experience in post-conflict countries. We came together with the primary objective to provide durable, affordable, and clean lighting and energy options in areas where people are dependent on candles, kerosene, and diesel fuel. To support these causes, we provide customers that use our products for a variety of activities with the option to buy online.
As an organization, we aim to keep a low-carbon footprint and maintain end-to-end business practices that minimize our impact on the environment. We ship with recycled packaging by USPS, the only Cradle to Cradle certified courier in the United States. We use only recycled packaging while manufacturing and recycled paper for marketing and office materials, in addition to using Energy-star office equipment and computers with a minimum Silver EPEAT rating.
Products and projects designed by One Degree Solar have been receiving positive press and recognition from development partners. Data from a recent project in the most remote villages of Liberia, West Africa, has shown that our Solar Headlamps Kit is helping to improve the quality of and access to healthcare. Our proposals for solar lighting initiatives in Liberia have been selected as finalists in the September 2009 Ideablob.com/Advanta Corporation Competition and the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge, and have also been nominated by USAID for a $50,000 cash grant from the Tech Awards. Our work is scheduled to be featured in articles by Voice of America, Devex.com, and Africa Investor Magazine.
We are driven by customer service, product quality, durability, international development, and sustainability. A percentage of all profits will go towards our projects in developing countries.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
One Degree Solar has called in The Extraordinaries to help them document the positive usage of solar energy in communities throughout the world.
Autism is a general term used to describe a group of complex developmental brain disorders known as Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). The other pervasive developmental disorders are PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified), Asperger's Syndrome, Rett Syndrome and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Many parents and professionals refer to this group as Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Today, it is estimated that one in every 150 children is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes and pediatric AIDS combined. An estimated 1.5 million individuals in the U.S. and tens of millions worldwide are affected by autism. Government statistics suggest the prevalence rate of autism is increasing 10-17 percent annually. There is not established explanation for this increase, although improved diagnosis and environmental influences are two reasons often considered. Studies suggest boys are more likely than girls to develop autism and receive the diagnosis three to four times more frequently. Current estimates are that in the United States alone, one out of 94 boys is diagnosed with autism.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Autism Speaks has called in The Extraordinaries to help them document and raise autism awareness in communities around the world.
Nature Abounds educates and empowers citizens to sustain their community through environmental stewardship such as watershed protection, conservation of native flora and fauna, and overall "going green".
Nature Abounds takes a two-tier approach to achieving our goals. For example, while educating citizens of all ages about "going green" and "environmental stewardship" on the national level, we also work with local officials overseeing public lands, such as national and state forest areas and designated waterways, on preserving our local environment through community involvement.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Nature Abounds has called in The Extraordinaries to help raise awareness and create more sustainable, environmentally conscious communities
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to their community
via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for help reporting crimes and
identifying missing persons. Florida’s Broward County Sheriff’s Office
has posted photographs and personal items along with detailed
descriptions of unidentified crime victims on their website and is
asking anyone with information to please step forward and help them
solve these mysteries.
With more and more organizations turning to crowdsourcing as a tool
to complete important tasks, it would seem The Extraordinaries could
play a major role in the success of their endeavors. If the Broward
County Sheriff’s Office went one step further and joined forces with
The Extraordinaries, solving crime could be a click away. Creating a
mission that would allow the community to aid in identifying personal
effects and physical descriptions of otherwise unidentified victims
would be easy, simple, and engaging.
Fight crime while waiting in line
at the Post Office? Now that's extraordinary.
Want to create a micro-volunteering program for your organization? Apply now to join the pilot program:http://signup.BeExtra.org
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Kim Bale is the Community Outreach Intern for The Extraordinaries. She has also been published in Curve Magazine.
Press Contact: Jacob Colker (773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
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.
———————————— OTHER 2009 FELLOWS ————————————
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.
Produced
and hosted by Jon Gordon, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter based in
Silicon Valley, this daily "journal of the Digital Age" airs during
broadcasts of CBC's As It Happens and Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Edition.
As things ramp up more and more with The Extraordinaries, I find myself on more and more flights — attending business meetings, team meetings, conferences, and the like.
What's even more amazing are the opportunities that exist in these situations, because as technology develops, we can now get high-speed Internet access at 35,000 feet. I'm actually blogging right now from the 14th row on Flight 77 (Crazy!).
The flight from Washington, D.C. (IAD) to San Francisco (SFO) takes about five hours, and if you're lucky enough to get a seat on Virgin America, you're rewarded with an extensive array of entertainment tools through a system called Red. It's the perfect time to login and knock out some tasks using The Extraordinaries system.
What if, we could work with Virgin America (and Jet Blue, and others with these touch screen entertainment systems) to facilitate a section in these devices that allowed crowdsourcing volunteerism? Or allow Extraordinary users to connect their smartphones to the screens and rock and roll?
Here's the big one — what if the entire plane load of people could WORK TOGETHER on a task!?!? How amazing and unifying of an experience would it be to have 150 random people — brought together by the randomness of traveling to the same destination at the same time — do social good in unison? This is fascinating to me.
Hey Richard Branson! Give us a call — let's talk about this.
As Ben and I have felt for a while now, crowdsourcing is going to stratospherically shift the way we approach work in society, both employee/employer work environments, and community engagement/volunteerism.
The old Industrial Age work model places merit on the shoulders of those whose family ties have given them positions of strength. Legacy entrance to Ivy Leagues, the best tutors, family connections that help to rise through the ranks, and more. People who aren't necessarily the smartest or have the best ideas rise through the ranks based on credentials and not entirely based on merit. It’s the classic “who you know" system certainly still prevalent in our society.
But as we move into the Information Age, the dynamic changes. As access changes — as Harvard lectures become podcasts, as Wikipedia grows it’s database, as people reorganize themselves from walled classes of nobility to being one click away – we start to see a shift. The Internet especially in the last three years, has given birth to Crowdsourcing, which at it’s essence, is an ultimate “Meritocracy.” The smartest person with the best answer to your problem still writes with the same times new roman font into the same Gmail account. Whether someone is wealthy, upper class, Harvard grad, from a family tree with 30 more Harvard grads — or poor, from the inner-city, grew up on food stamps, and has three friends in jail – doesn’t matter. What only matters is the merit of the idea. Sure, there are barriers to entry (having a computer for example), but especially with programs like OLPC, and even more so with the introduction of cheap powerful smartphones, these barriers are being lowered everyday.
It doesn't matter what your race, income, or class status is, the only thing that matters is how great are your ideas. This approach was actually similarly applied starting in 1973 by ShoreBank, when they decided to invest in disadvantaged communities being avoided by other financial institutions.
A CASE STUDY
ShoreBank is a community development bank founded in 1973, on the south side of Chicago. A pioneer in profitably lending to underserved urban and rural communities, ShoreBank has grown to $3 billion in assets, operating in over 20 countries worldwide.
In 1985, ShoreBank was invited by then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to set up the Southern Development Bancorporation, a community development bank serving rural Arkansans. Their work helped to lay the foundation for soon to be President Clinton’s initiatives for community development financial institutions (CDFI’s). In a 1992 speech, Clinton called ShoreBank “the most important bank in America."
I can say with pride (and for full disclosure) that my dad is the Chief Learning Officer for ShoreBank, and over the last 10 years I’ve had a unique first hand perspective of the amazing work that this organization does. Further, while some father-son relationships revolve around baseball, my dad and I spend our Sunday afternoons and Thanksgiving dinners arguing about how we can change the world. We’re pretty lame in the cultural sense, but it works for us. As The Extraordinaries has evolved, our conversations have inevitably gravitated towards an exploration of how micro-action, micro-volunteerism, and micro-time can be applied to corporations and their engagement with the communities in which they serve.
Crowdsourcing has significant implications for community development. If we were to discover that disadvantaged communities actually already had all the people they needed to improve their stock, living within their communities to begin with, we would have a revolution on our hands. The notion that “we’re not good enough,” would be thrown right out the window. Forget waiting for smart people to come help us dig out from this hole, let’s find the people with good ideas that already live in our neighborhood, and get them working together. That’s crowdsourcing.
They say, “Love is blind.” I say, “Crowdsourcing is blind too.”
THE CHANGING PARADIGM OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?
I have a dear friend who works for a republican senator from a western state. We often get into heated arguments about the role of corporations in society. His conservative opinion is that “the only responsibility of a Corporation is to earn revenue for it’s shareholders.” From a purely capitalist perspective, he is right. However, as we have seen with the recent housing crisis (which has had a disastrous domino effect across the entire economy), corporations cannot only focus on their profit margins, running unchecked. There are those that would say regulation is the best approach. Maybe. But ultimately, I think that one way or another we need to reward, emphasize, and encourage community values in corporations. We don't live in one place, and work in another, we exist in both
places and our overall societal well-being is mutually interdependent. It’s not enough to simply make money off of a community — corporations need to engage, cooperate, interact with, and be a responsible member of a community. Until now, they have given the impression as such through their corporate social responsibility departments, but to truly engage with a community, I think that crowdsourcing is the best shot we’ve had in a long time to start to bridge the gap.
As we develop our product and deepen our thinking, I get closer and closer to the sense that social good and traditional companies need not exist in separate silos, but can coexist and mutually benefit each other in the same marketplace. Right now, corporate social responsibility departments are often glorified public relations departments. But, how can the concept of crowdsourcing and the way that it reorganizes societal engagement, start to redefine the old paradigm? How can corporations take the next step to being a responsible member of a community, or redefine how they work to empower the community, by leveraging skills, ideas, and micro-spare time from within that community to begin with?
This question fascinates me.
ShoreBank is a for-profit institution that invests in people and their communities to create economic equity and a healthy environment. In my opinion, ShoreBank is one of the best examples of companies trying to push the envelope. Their mission and values are deeply woven into the fabric of the communities they operate in, and they work to ensure that their work is adding value to the world in which they work and live, and not simply making a profit. They are a great starting point as an example of what is possible.
Connecting people in a community with a few minutes free, to other
people in a community with a few minutes of need, sponsored by
companies that work and interact within that community, ultimately
strengthens the entire community as a whole.
So how can we take crowdsourcing, volunteerism, spare-time, business, and community, and redefine the old paradigms? I’m not entirely sure. But we’re on to something here.
I’ve just put our new PPT presentation up on Slideshare. I’ve been trying to do an audio narration of it too, but I keep messing up! The first time I spoke it (without recording), it went so well. Pressing “record” totally ruins my speaking mojo. Here it is:
