Wham! Bam! Islam!

Naif Al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist by training, is far better known as the creator of THE 99 -- the first comic series to include multicultural superheroes inspired by an Islamic archetype. His cast of 99 characters, all of whom derive their power from Allah's 99 attributes, are on a quest to find legendary, mystical Noor Stones needed to save the world.

[Characters in THE 99 include Noora the Light, 18, (a former university student in Sharjah—the third-largest emirate in the UAE—who is now “a light to overcome the darkness”); Mumita the Destroyer, 17 (a street-smart runaway teen from the UAE who is being recruited by both the forces of good and evil to fight), and Dr. Ramzi Razem, 35 (a psychologist, historian, and UNESCO official who lives in Paris as a sort-of Arab version of Indiana Jones, hungry to mobilize the 99 for global peace). There also is Jabbar the Powerful—a 19-year-old whose online profile says he was once “an average Saudi Arabian teen” until he stepped on a land mine and was transformed by hidden gem shards into a “man-mountain, a giant standing over two meters tall and weighing almost 200 kilograms.” The good guys, led by Dr. Ramzi, seek to keep Jabbar out of the control of those who have an extremist agenda. How powerful is Jabbar? If he sneezes, his profile says, Jabbar “could level a house.”]

Al-Mutawa, who once worked as a therapist for torture survivors at Bellevue Hospital, says he hopes the comic books will spread a moderate, modern image of Islam to the world and create new role models. “The Islamic world has had suicide bombers as heroes and needed new heroes,” Al-Mutawa says.

So far, so good: since their debut in 2006 in Kuwait, THE 99 series has been translated into eight languages and sold in more than 20 countries; the first of five planned 99-based theme parks opened in Kuwait in March of last year. Meanwhile, a three-season, animated TV series is in production and Teshkeel Comics, Al-Mutawa's company, just signed a multimillion dollar deal with the global entertainment TV company, Endemol (Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), to produce it.

We first interviewed Al-Mutawa two years ago, after seeing him at the Skoll Global Forum in Oxford, England, and caught up with him again last month after being asked by PopTech editors to interview him for the PopTech blog.What follows is an edited transcript of that latest conversation, being re-posted here with PopTech's permission:

Last April in Washington, President Obama commended THE 99 in a speech he gave at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship that sought to welcome new ties between U.S. and Muslim entrepreneurs. He said your comic books “have captured the imaginations of so many young people with superheroes that embody the teachings and tolerance of Islam.” In 2008, Forbes magazine described THE 99 as “one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe.” Yet today, in 2010, in New York City, do you think — or hope — that one of THE 99’s magical Noor stones emitting the powers of tolerance and strength will be found somewhere near the proposed Muslim cultural enter and mosque in lower Manhattan?

AL-MUTAWA: Question One: grab the bull by the horns, yes? [laughter]

Indeed. [laughter] But seriously, in your view, what does the current level of controversy here in New York say about the global climate for civic engagement and tolerance – what you’ve been working toward with THE 99?

There’s an old Kuwaiti saying that says if you get bit by a snake, you become afraid of rope. And another thing is that one’s body is set up in such a way, that if anything foreign is introduced into it, good or bad, white blood cells attack. That happens, also, in the mind – not just in the body; if a foreign idea comes in, one immediately might try to defend against it, and I think with regard to the proposed cultural center in Manhattan, it’s a very complicated situation. Let me just say that the Imam behind the place is someone for whom I have a lot of respect; he is someone who is a role model for what Imams should be like. It’s very disturbing for me because he is someone who people should be embracing. His work and his words have been twisted. I have heard Imam Feisal say that the United States should be a symbol for what the Muslim countries aspire to, so it’s troubling for me that even somebody who has an interfaith approach is seeing his words being twisted.

So returning to the rope and snake scenario – obviously, I understand that some people who are upset about this project think its construction would be akin to telling the bad guys that we [the good guys] didn’t win but in fact, the bad guys did win and that’s why there’s all this uproar. It really is a very sensitive and a complicated situation.

And it’s not just about how Islam is being positioned here; you have said recently that you’re also concerned about how Islam is being positioned to itself.

Yes. After 9/11, moving back home to Kuwait, I became more and more alarmed at how Islam was being positioned to itself. How Islam is being seen by the West is a very important thing, but I think as important is how Islam sees itself. What happens is, every time something terrible happens, that understanding of Islam goes toward the extreme, and kids grow up and they’re immediately fixated on the bad things. You have kind of a regression to the mean, and that mean is very, very mean.”

THE 99 is being read in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, countries outside the Arab Middle East where Islamic culture and history are widespread. Your company, Teshkeel, has opened a theme park in Jahra, Kuwait, based on the action figures. Since speaking to Poptech last fall, THE 99 also has launched in China and Turkey. Meanwhile, DC Comics — the creators of Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman — are teaming up with THE 99 to fight global evil in a special six-book series that debuts October 27. And yet, THE 99 are still banned in Saudi Arabia, isn’t that right?

Banned and unbanned and re-banned again. We’re allowed in English now but not in Arabic.

What is the fear there?

I don’t think it’s fear. What happened there is that is our distributor in Saudi Arabia was overzealous and thought he’d be able to sell a lot of these copies and in his excitement portrayed that these comics were about God and the 99 names of God and, well, to censors there, this was as if we had walked in front of a bull wearing red. The job of Saudi censors is to keep out anything that has to do with religion and so I think he assumed we were something different than what we are. I think he thought we were subversive – kind of like the whole thing here, with “I am the Walrus” played backwards – so I kind of feel sorry for the guy who banned it. The censor had a family to feed and a paycheck and a thankless job to uphold. That’s the kind of atmosphere that exists there.

It’s been said, of course, that with the Internet and the continued evolution of social networks, we are all so much more connected now than we’ve ever been — and yet in some ways, we’ve never been more distant.

The way I swing intellectually, I have always written in English, not in Arabic; there was nothing that captivated me enough to read in Arabic and enable me to write in Arabic in a way that would differentiate me, and so I prefer to write in English. Back in Kuwait, before THE 99, my friends would make fun of me, asking me, Who are you writing for, the ex-pats, the people who read English newspapers? It was sad to hear but true. At the time, I was writing in English in Kuwaiti newspapers. So the evolution of the Internet really made me. It helped me to get my voice out there, globally, to people who weren’t simply ex-pats and who wanted to hear what I had to say – no matter where they were geographically. I’m not a New York Times writer so I didn’t have the access but the Internet gave me that. The social media aspect to it for us happened when The New York Times covered us in the midst of the Danish cartoon controversy [in which a Danish newspaper and other European publications displayed 12 cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 and early 2006, triggering violent protests around the world; see video of PopTech talk].

What happened is that people started Googling to see what was happening in the world [with regard to cartoons and censorship] and then found me, too — and then all of a sudden, a huge amount of blogs and articles were written about me and THE 99 and the message of tolerance — to the point that it continues four years later. I wish I could take credit for this, that I planned it that way, but I didn’t. I did what I had to do to and then fate or luck did the rest.

What have you found to be the most surprising reaction to THE 99 in countries that have recently translated it into their languages?

One thing I shared in my [July 2010] TED talk was a photograph of a few kids holding up a few comic books of THE 99 but they were all photocopies, and it was in some part of Pakistan. It said that we, as a country – we, as an ideal — are not there yet but just kind of getting there. The most fun reaction was President Obama’s reaction.

You tell people that just before conceiving of THE 99, you had stopped writing childrens’ books; you said it had become very frustrating, given the censorship and other restraints at that time. Do you think now that you will go back to writing books? What’s next for you?

I’m now involved in writing my own story. There’s a film version of it coming out, to debut in the film festivals in the coming new year. It’s called Wham! Bam! Islam! and it’s the story of my life. PBS will be airing it. The film focuses on my building of this brand. Separately, I’ve been asked to write my story, so I’m also thinking about that now, too. PBS will air this film nationally within the next 12 months, and that’s obviously good for us at THE 99, because it helps to get our message out. But it’s also a story of my challenges. The filmmaker, [Frontline reporter] Isaac Solotaroff, followed me as I marketed THE 99 throughout the Middle East and interviewed people who supported me but also the people who would rather that my mother had not have given birth to me – to put it lightly. During many of the setbacks that I faced, Solotaroff was there with a camera, as I was negotiating with hardliners hardliners about the legitimacy of THE 99 in Indonesia. For the past few years, he’s followed me around Indonesia, the Middle East, Europe, the U.S. – including at mosques here and at mosques there. This is the story of some of the backlash I faced as well as some of the embrace. It’s all very first-hand.

So THE 99 is becoming ever-more globally exposed. As you look back at your work on THE 99, what has been the most significant measureable result? Certainly there has been engagement among children, but what kinds of changes are you noticing as a result of all of this, which were not occurring when you first conceived this project?

We have been, since my PopTech talk last fall, in China and Turkey. We’ve been incorporated in school curriculums and in at least two university courses for the fall semester – classes on THE 99 – and at least six others that will use it as part of the class curriculum. In Zurich, the international school is adding THE 99 to its social studies classes, so there’s more and more penetration. The thing we’ve been able to do is penetrate thought and make a dent intellectually into what Islam means, and I’m very proud of being able to impact this in my small way because I believe in averages; I believe that there is no proper average unless there’s proper representation. And going back to social media, you know, I talk about something called Islam 2.0. For me, it’s this: there are over a billion Muslims, and so there should be over a billion opinions. And it’s only when you have one billion opinions and you have an average of those that the extremes (in a society) can really be extreme. That’s fine – there are extremes in all kinds of places and societies. But if most people in a society don’t talk and there is no 2.0, there is a problem.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration: Cover art by Tom Derenick of the upcoming release of a six-part comic book series with DC Comics, in which THE 99's superheroes team up with Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to fight evil around the globe.]

Cities Calling

There's a new social innovation initiative that just launched called Code for America. It's a big deal; it was founded to help American cities innovate around paralyzing budget cuts, old technology and rising taxes.

Starting this month, Code for America is recruiting the brightest minds of the Web 2.0 generation to transform city governments -- to re-wire them for transparency, citizen participation and action. "Our cities are in major crisis," says Founder Jen Pahlka, yet this is a time of major opportunity for social innovation in cities across the country. Some 60 percent of municipal employees, she says, are set to retire over the next five years. "What if, instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities could leverage the power of the Web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory?"

Pahlka says her project aims to do for city governments what Teach for America has been doing for America's public schools -- creating a body of knowledge and context for how institutions need to rebuild themselves for the Digital Age. The initiative also represents a big step for the accountability-in-government movement; freeing up more of the information stored in city databases for public use "will catalyze new forms of problem-solving and service," Pahlka says, "and there is a huge community of talented technologists and designers who want to help."

Pahlka and her team have chosen five cities for Code for America projects -- Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Boulder, and Seattle. Pahlka is now recruiting people to work on those projects. Five fellows will be chosen per city; each five-person team will attend a short training program in the San Francisco Bay area and then travel to their various host cities to learn about each cities' unique challenges. The fellows then will return to the Bay area to build solutions; top social innovators in government and technology will be brought in to support the fellows in their work "and help them create this new ecosystem of open cities across America," Pahlka says. "We're looking at each of these cities as a new tech start-up." The year-long program will provide each fellow with a $35,000 stipend and cover all travel costs.

Interested? The application deadline is August 15.

(Illustration by Giovanni Merino for istock.com)

Diaspora, Crowdfunded

Diaspora, the pro-privacy social network being built as an alternative to Facebook by four NYU classmates, announced today that it was able to crowdsource its first round of funding on Kickstarter -- and then some.

The group announced its project on April 24 and gave itself 39 days to raise $10,000 using the online fundraising site. The group reached its $10,000 goal in 12 days, and today, the group announced that it has been able to raise all of the money it sought -- some $200,000, plus an additional $642 -- from 6,479 people (including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg), each kicking in $5 or more to the project.

The group, inspired by a desire to build a social network that wouldn't force people (involuntarily or otherwise) to surrender their privacy to commercial interests, says it will distribute the software it is developing for free and will make the code openly available so other programmers can build on it. [Diaspora software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, so they can control who-sees-what about their private data. Diaspora will aim to provide the same functionality as Facebook but won't rely on centralized servers.]

According to Max Salzberg, 22, one of the four co-founders, says the group began its work on the project in April, after hearing Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor, describe social networks as a form of "(corporate) spying for free." Diaspora has received much attention in the mainstream media in recent weeks amid Facebook's privacy woes. Diaspora also has been a buzz magnet across the social Web: there are now nearly 29,000 followers of "@joindiapsora" on Twitter.

"We're making Diaspora because we want to use it," says Salzburg.

Diaspora isn't the only "un-Facebook" social network that is being developed amid privacy concerns. Appleseed and OneSocialWeb also have been working on alternatives.

For more on the Diaspora project, see the four explain their objectives, below:

(Photo (from left to right) Diaspora Co-founders Rafael Sofaer, 19; Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Dan Grippi, 21, and Max Salzberg, 22)

Social Commerce

Silicon Valley's uber-VC, John Doerr, said today that "we are on the verge of a massive reinvention of the Web" -- one that will call forth social entrepreneurs in rising numbers to create "social commerce" around new devices like the iPad , which combine social media and on-the-fly mobile communication.

Doerr, interviewed by PBS host Charlie Rose at the start of today's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Manhattan, said the first great wave of social innovation came with the rise of computer power in the 1980s; the second great wave came in 1995, with the rise of the Internet as an information-sharing device. The third great wave is now, he said. "We've entered a whole new applications economy, where all sorts of new applications of Web technology are being driven by new relationships" being fostered by social media. "This is turning the world around in a really excitiing way," Doerr said. For example, the iPad "is not just a new fad but a new paradigm" for the way people create relationships and for new types of business products, cultures and strategies for social good.

"The iPad is not a computer; you do not need a mouse to operate it," said Doerr, a partner in the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "These are commercially new kindsof magical surfaces that are social. You can take the iPad to concerts, to church." He said the iPad and other such portable social interfaces also "lead to a new kind of social fluidity, a full immersive experience" for people "and a rich terrain for hundreds of new start-ups and social ventures that both make money and serve society." This new type of commercialism, Doerr said, will make one's friends "the most important driving factor in making purchasing decisions."

Doerr also predicted that the convergence of social technology and commerce will change the workplace, speeding the rise of new "missionary" business cultures, rich with new levels of collaboration and social consciousness. "Mercenaries are motivated by financial statements, and sometimes a sense of entitlement," Doerr said, "but missionary cultures are driven by value statements about contribution -- not simply the bottom line." Doerr added: "mercenaries lust for making money but missionaries lust for making meaning." He cited Apple founder Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, among others, as being among these new missionaries. "These guys have turned down opportunities to sell their companies because they're passionate about their products and their impact on society, where the product is the most important contribution."

Doerr said Zynga, the online children's games company, is the "fastest-growing social venture we've ever invested in." He estimated that about 2 percent of the 60 million daily users across the games the company produces want to "buy a better tractor for a farmer or give to a friend or raise money to send bicycle seats to Haiti" or "otherwise do important social things with this technology." This, says Doerrr, is part of the vision and promise of this fledgling new era of social commerce "and it calls forth social entrepreneurs in numbers previously not anticipated."

TechCrunch Disrupt continues through Wednesday. Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: TechCrunch Disrupt on Flickr)

Fight Club

Actor Edward Norton today officially launched Crowdrise, a new social media site and for-profit social enterprise that aims to transform the supporters of good causes into their most ardent fundraisers.

The site is the latest entry into what has become a crowded online field for charity fundraising. But uniquely, it offers its most active users "points" for their engagement. For every dollar raised for a cause earns users a Crowdrise point, which can be used to win prizes donated by top brands, such as laptops and iPods from Apple or windbreakers from North Face.

Crowdrise [its motto is if you don't give back, no one will like you] was developed by the 40-year-old star of movies including The Illusionist and Fight Club to give people and organizations "a new way to set up fundraising pages without having to spend great sums" (or having to buy fundraising software). "People use Twitter or Facebook because it's a way to share their personal narrative," Norton said in an interview. "We wanted to give people a chance to also share what they care about in the world, a platform to say, 'These are the causes I care about; I am volunteering. Sponsor me.'"

Each fundraising campaign that is created on the platform sets a fundraising goal and tracks progress in real-time. Once a campaign is created, the "host" then asks for donations using Facebook, Twitter and email to activate his or her social networks into donating any amount, of any size. Each campaign also offers non-members and non-supporters the chance to join the cause and help to fundraise for it using their own social networks.

The site originated out of Norton's Massai Marathon, an effort he kicked off last year to protect wildlife in Kenya and Tanzania, and which raised $1.2 million in less than eight weeks, mostly from small donations. "We want to convert social networking from just being social into substantive, productive communication with action," Norton told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. "Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful."

It's not the first celebrity fundraising-site-for-good: actor Kevin Bacon launched sixdegrees.org some years ago to offer people a new way to leverage celebrity-power for their causes. It's also not the first fundraising site to let anyone create campaigns and leverage their social networks for donations. [Think GlobalGiving, among others.] But Norton's site uniquely offers participants incentives in the form of points and prizes. The first round of prizes will be awarded July 31.

"Technology has allowed for a kind of engagement between people with a public life and the people who are interested in them, which is entirely new and potentially very powerful," Norton said. Organizations already signed up to use the site for fundraising include Oceana, City Year, the Alzheimer's Association, Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, and Malaria No More.

Norton is no celebrity-come-lately when it comes to social advocacy. His father, an environmentalist with the Nature Conservancy, was an attorney for the Wilderness Society when Norton was a boy; his grandfather was an early advocate for affordable housing and set up the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation in Manhattan to help the poor. Norton, himself, is on the board of that foundation and has been working quietly for years on environmental and anti-poverty issues. (In 2006, Norton founded Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.'s Solar Neighbors Program, which negotiated an agreement with BP Solar to provide solar-power technology to low-income homeowners in Los Angeles, helping dozens of families to cut their energy bills by more than half. Each time a celebrity or public figure buys a home solar system, BP donates a full system to a family. so far, the company has donated nearly 75 systems.)

A spokesperson for Crowdrise said Norton set up the site as a for-profit social enterprise, in part to insure its sustainability over time and to encourage other social businesses. "The things that seem monumental or monolithic are the ones that you have to take on, Norton told me in a 2007 interview for Contribute Magazine. "Sometimes, even just the act of beginning something is the integral first step because a good idea has a tendency to snowball."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Courtesy Contribute Magazine)

Call to Arms

Public health activist and social entrepreneur Paul Farmer is urging fellow social innovators attending the Skoll World Forum in Oxford this week to do more for Haiti as it moves into the rainy season, when "people in shelters on seaside slopes will be hit hard by acres of mud and waste."

"There are still hundreds of thousands of people packed into tent cities and public parks," Farmer said in opening remarks at the Forum, which convened here Wednesday night and runs through Friday. Farmer, whose public health work in Haiti was famously profiled in the 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, expressed concern about rising tensions in the camps, saying Haitians are "at the breaking point...Government and the international humanitarian community must do something to prevent an outbreak of mental illness among people who have gone without now for so long."

Farmer called on the nearly 750 social entrepreneurs attending the conference from around the world to turn their attention more fully to Haiti, and to help him brainstorm new ways to bring collaboration around aid to the nation in crisis. He urged conferees to devise innovative new ways to provide victims of Haiti's January earthquake with better shelter, land reforestation aid, safer drinking water, disability rights for those maimed by quake-related injuries, a new system of education -- especially one for girls -- and the creation of local environmental industry that will create alternative energy sources and green jobs.

Showing conferees photos taken three days ago by people who work for Partners in Health, Farmer's organization in Haiti, Farmer said "the international community has failed" to help Haitians well. "None of us deserve high marks for distributing food, water and shelter to people who needed it yesterday," he said.

In other highlights from Wednesday night's evening opener:

* Colin Mayer, the Dean of Oxford University's Said Business School, the venue of the Skoll conference, said that the new field of social entrepreneurship has "finally come of age," fueled by "deep-rooted skepticism" by the public and leaders of traditional institutions over "business-as-usual, which has valued cost-cutting above caring." Meyer added: "There is a widely-held belief that our institutions have failed us. We no longer trust them to do what they are supposed to be doing, much less what we would like them to do." Against that backdrop, Meyer said, the social entrepreneurship movement "is gaining momentum around the world."

* Jeff Skoll, the CEO and founder of the Skoll Foundation, said that in the seven years he has been hosting the conference, social entrepreneurship has gone from "a curiosity to a force." It is time now, he said, for the field to start collaborating more widely with groups also working broadly for social change, including governments and aid agencies. Added Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford: "While Skoll continues to celebrate social entrepreneurs, unless we can create a movement with our efforts, the impact we will have will be limited."

The Forum continues through Friday. Watch this space for more highlights.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Fotolia.com)

Do-It-Yourself School

Pop Quiz: What is the latest start-up to take on education-as-we've-known-it? [See School's Out.] Guess again. You get the gold star if you answered Supercool School, the latest buzz magnet in the noisy, online education start-up space. Founder Steli Efti, pitching at DEMO this week, says Supercool School is all about letting anyone create an online school to teach anything they'd like. Think of it as a kind of private social network, or Ning, in which so-called "citizen teachers" who want to fix what's wrong with the educational system can create a global classroom of their own. Subject and form is up to you. [One recent "citizen teacher" used the platform to host a conversation on the proposed start-up visa, which was attended by people in four countries; the instructor/facilitator used split-screen technology to bring some of his students, virtually, to the head of the class.]

Supercool School provides the platform for interactive, real-time virtual classrooms; you give Efti 20 percent of the tuition income for the virtual lecturn. "We create a white label platform the lets everyone create and customize an online school," he says. Efti also plans to start selling subscriptions for premium features. So far, there have been more than 100 Supercool Schools created since January -- including one called "Start-up School" in the company's beta testing program.

Efti says the San Francisco start-up has 2 million potential customers and a $450 million market opportunity.

But what's most distinctive about Supercool School is just how un-cool it seems to be, at least by reigning social entrepreneurial standards. Its founders come out of nowhere, its marketing materials aren't complex nor choreographed, its vision is huge ["We want to decentralize and democratize an entire industry," Efti says] and its backers aren't among those being knighted this year by either of the enterprise "world forums" coming up this spring on the conference circuit -- the Skoll World Forum gathering in Oxford next month and the Milken Global Forum in Los Angeles a couple of weeks later. On the contrary, Supercool School's message is totally "from the ground up" and direct and idealistic -- all the more reason it might actually make it to mainstream.

Here's a video of Efti explaining the concept:

What do you think?

(Illustration, above: Doodlemachine Studio for istock.com)

Jamie Oliver's War

'Tis the season of TED, that grand-daddy of social change fests, and yesterday, organizers formally awarded a young British chef and social entrepreneur their prestigious TED Prize, an honor conferred annually to someone with a big dream and the organizational management chops to pull it off, at least a bit.

This year, conferees chose to give the Prize's $100,000 cash award to Jamie Oliver, a 34-year-old host of the British TV hit, The Naked Chef. Oliver told TED-goers he will use the money to start a movement and social change enterprise to fight childhood obesity. It's a problem, he says, that will -- for the first time in history -- give today's children a shorter life span than their parents.

Oliver, the son of pub managers in Calvering, Essex, England, and a high-school dropout who parlayed his entrepreneurial skills into a best-selling cookbook and TV show in Britain, told conferees he wished for "a complete overhaul" of the American food system, saying processed food and industrialized agriculture are giving Americans poor choices, if any, of what to eat, decreasing their lives, and causing health-care costs to spin out of control. "This is a global catastrophe," he said in a passionate, 18-minute TED speech (see below) that has become the buzz and must-see of the conference this year.

"[Childhood obesity] is sweeping the world -- China, India, Britain, Japan, the United States--everywhere," he said. "And in America, obesity costs Americans $150 billion per year. In 10 years, it's set to double, and let's be honest, guys. You can't afford it."

Oliver called on conferees to help him raise awareness and start a global movement to stop the food industry from "taking advantage of people." Obesity, he says, doesn't just hurt those who are overweight, but also hurts their families and the communities around them. Further, the food industry -- from restaurants to agribusiness -- "needs to be stopped." Portion sizes are massive, he said, and food labeling "is a disgrace. The industry wants to self-police itself but how can people say something is low-fat when it's filled with sugar?"

"...My wish is to have a strong, sustainable movement to education every child about food, to inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity," Oliver told the TED gathering in Long Beach, Calif. "England is right behind you, America. We need a revolution."

Oliver says he will use his prize money to: establish a good-nutrition foundation with funding, office space and facilities; find partners to create a traveling food theater troupe to teach kids about better eating; produce teaching materials on healthy eating for use in public schools across the country; build a Web site and social media campaigns to build an international movement to fight global good giants for healthier food, and start an "honest labeling" campaign to better alert consumers of what is in the food they're buying.

And that's just for starters. Oliver, who begins a program for ABC-TV in March called Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, first caught the eye of TED conference organizers with his "Feed Me Better" campaign in the U.K. in 2005 to improve school lunches, during which Oliver presented a petition with more than 270,000 signatures to the prime minister's residence, calling for healthier diets for children and young adults. As a result, the British government also pledged to address the issue. Oliver's TV show will follow him to Huntington, W. Va., deemed the unhealthiest town in America for its high rates of food-related illnesses and deaths.

What do you think? Can one social entrepreneur create a global food revolution?

Here's Oliver's speech from TED:

(Photo, top, by Dave Sucsy for istock.com)

-- Marcia Stepanek

Global Upstarts

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

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

GEM's key findings on social entrepreneurship across the 49 countries it researched show that in 2009:

* Social entrepreneurial activity appeared to rise slightly with a country’s stage of economic development. “Individuals in richer countries, having satisfied their own basic needs, may be more likely to turn to the needs of others,” the study said. “In other words, the opportunity cost of social entrepreneurship may be higher in developing countries.”

* More men than women started socially oriented ventures.

* Social entrepreneurs tended to be active at younger ages than business entrepreneurs.

* Better-educated individuals were more likely to be social entrepreneurs.

* Social ventures were started in a variety of areas—notably education, health, culture, economic development, and the environment.

* The distinction between “social” and “regular” entrepreneurship was sometimes blurred. However, GEM says that social objectives (not-for-profit and hybrid social enterprises) still prevailed over more economic (for-profit social enterprises) and less innovative ones (traditional NGOS).

* Social entrepreneurial activity was much lower than traditional entrepreneurial activity in almost all countries surveyed, though in some countries (chiefly Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Jamaica), there was a significant overlap of social and business entrepreneurship, suggesting that 'social' and 'busines' entrepreneurship categories may be blurred.

* Social entrepreneurs differed widely in the type of organizations they launched and the kind of social or environmental problems they tried to solve. Social enterprises identified in the report spanned a broad spectrum of categories, including education, health, culture, economic development and the environment.

* There were differences in social issue focus among the countries, depending on their level of economic development. "Social entrepreneurs in (developing) economies tend to focus on more elementary issues and pressing needs such as basic health care provision, access to water and sanitation or agricultural activities in rural areas," the report said. "In innovation-driven economies, individuals are particularly active in launching culture-related organizations, providing services for disabled people, focusing on waste recycling and nature protection or offering open-source activities such as online social networking."

GEM researchers, to help measure activity, created four classifications of social enterprise: traditional NGOs (which, GEM says, have high levels of social/environment goals and not-for-profit status); not-for-profit social enterprises (which have high levels of social/environmental goals; not-for-profit status, and innovation); hybrid social enterprises (with high levels of social/environmental goals and earned income strategies either “integrated” or “complementary” to their missions), and for-profit social enterprises (which have high but not exclusively social/environmental goals and earned income strategies.)

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

And that's not all. While the rate of social entrepreneurial activity is dwarfed by traditional enterprise activity in developing countries, there is a “significant” component of social entrepreneurship in many innovation-driven, richer countries. “A significant minority of social entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries, appear to wish to have a profitable businesses that at the same time addresses social issues,” the report said. “This demonstrates that for many people, the categories of 'social' and 'business' entrepreneur are artificial, and more holistic definitions of entrepreneurship are needed if we are to capture the true extent of this phenomenon.”

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