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)

TextAid: The New Normal?

Much has been said about how the mobile Internet is helping to imbue our everyday lives with a restless sense of urgency, for better or worse—what Twitter tummler Jeff Pulver calls "the State of Now." But this week, given Haiti's troubles, it's clear that there's one upside of this "nowism" that has become irrefutable: mass-mobile, location-aware micro-donations to people in need around the globe.

Not convinced? "Never before have people donated money to disaster relief at the scale and speed and ease as they have in response to the Haiti earthquake," nonprofit consultant Lucy Bernholz wrote today on her blog, Philanthropy 2173. "Technology changes so quickly, that we have almost entirely new platforms to deploy for each new disaster; each (disaster) is the 'biggest, fastest' example ever of using the platform of the moment (to give aid)."

This time around, Twitter, texting and social networks led and created swarms of instant-givers. And what a mobile outpouring it's been: according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, donations made via mobile phones to Haiti rescue efforts during the first 36 hours after the quake had topped $7 million. That tally included all the short message codes managed by the organization, and it's a mobile giving record for funds raised for a single cause. Meanwhile, the American Red Cross—despite the criticism it got during Hurricane Katrina for telling donors their money would be used in New Orleans, when it sometimes wasn't —says it has raised $7 million so far for Haiti through $10 "text" donations. It is coordinating its first-ever texting campaign with a mobile donations firm called mGive, and the outpouring is part of a larger surge of money flowing into international Red Cross coffers for the devastated nation: nearly half of Red Cross donations to Haiti since the quake have come in via texting. As of Thursday night, the Red Cross had raised some $35 million via mobile texts and Twitter blasts and Facebook appeals.

And that's not all. Everyone's now joining the mobile aid party, aware that speed-of-giving is critical as hundreds are now dying in Haiti by the hour. Mashable is reporting that Skype has sent $2 vouchers to all of its customers in Haiti, allowing them to make up to one-hour's worth of calls to the United States. T-Mobile, meanwhile, has dropped all charges for calls and texts to Haiti through the end of the month, while other carriers are waiving charges for "donation texts." Text-message donation campaigns will, no doubt, become the first line of response for many more cause activists in the months and years ahead.

But donor, beware: according to Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, SMS donations speed up donations, but they don't necessarily hasten money to the cause. Verclas told Public Radio International earlier today that it can take up to 90 days for some text donations to make their way to those in need. "SMS makes it quick to give but longer to collect," Verclas says—though Verizon and some other mobile carriers are pledging to bypass their usual accounting procedures in this case, so as to get the texted amounts to Haiti right away. [Jeffrey Nelson of Verizon Wireless told The New York Times' Bits blog that the change was not permanent and that Verizon would return to its regular accounting practices after the Haitian crisis had passed. Sprint, meanwhile, said it would speed 80 percent of amounts texted to Haiti and AT&T said it is looking into speeding up donations , according to Times reporter Matt Richtel.]

To be sure, "old-fashioned" online giving will still outweigh mobile giving this year. But the takeaway here? Mobile giving is reaching whole new legions of people, from many who may not have given anything before texting made it so easy. Text-donations are giving the "urgency" trend in the marketplace—and donors, at least—a whole new way to define "instant gratification."

For more on mobile aid to Haiti, see MobileActive.org's post, Earthquake in Haiti: How You Can Help , which is all about managing your inner "now" for Haitians who need all the urgency you can muster.

How are you and/or your companies using mobile to help Haitian quake survivors? Is it tapping donors who might never have given before? Let us know and we'll share your work in a later post.

— By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Crowdsourcing Aid: Haiti

The earthquake in Haiti is becoming another important test of social media in advocacy: Catholic Relief Services is using Skype and Facebook in its efforts (phone service is down), while Oxfam is making use of the audio blog site ipadio, so its people can broadcast live updates about their efforts in and around the disaster zone.

Ushahidi, a social media platform that crowdsources and maps crisis data, also got off to a running start, deploying a site for Haiti—Haiti.ushahidi.com—within hours of the quake. Ushahidi's goal in Haiti: to provide people with real-time information about any quake-related violence as well as up-to-the-minute data on where to find the closest doctors, supplies, medicine, and shelter.

Ushahidi—which means "testimony" in Swahili—was initially created as an early-warning system amid the savage, inter-tribal violence that followed the Kenyan presidential election in late 2007. A government ban on live media throughout that crisis made Ushahidi one of the only places where citizens could share information about the attacks.

In Haiti, Ushahidi is again producing "heat maps"—visualizations of places where civic passions overheat or where help is most concentrated and available. If Haitians can "see" where violence or aid is concentrated in real time during the crisis, says cofounder David Kobaya, they can manage their survival more effectively. Further, those sending aid can target it more precisely to the areas that need it the most.

Ushahidi asks citizens to call, text, or email site editors with eye-witness reports or accounts passed along from people on the ground; the nonprofit then aggregates the reports and makes a map, which is posted and updated in close to real-time. The more people who send in information, the better; Kobaya says more information tends to verify itself over time.

For more on Ushahidi, see "Mob Protection," a Cause Global profile of Ushahidi from September 2008.

For other examples of how social media are coming to the aid of earthquake survivors in Haiti—and to some of the aid groups trying hard to get medicine and supplies into the devastated capital of Port-au-Prince, see the following:

* Haitian singer Wyclef Jean sent out the following appeal on Twitter before most aid agencies knew whether their people on the ground were safe: "Haiti needs your help if you r in the US text Yele to 501 501 and 5 dollars will go toward earthquake relief in Haiti. International donations can be made @ http://www.yele.org."

* techPresident reports that SMS donations to the Red Cross are being passed through without any carrier fees or processing fees, with the Mobile Giving Foundation and MGive handling the transactions and declining to take a cut. Texting HAITI to 90999 sends $10 USD to the Red Cross. Donations are flooding into the Red Cross by text message: within a few hours of operation Wednesday, the program had raised $750,000 from about 75,000 individual contributions, according to Red Cross officials. According mocoNews.net, a news blog covering digital media, mGive's co-founder and chairman, James Eberhard, was awakened in Pakistan by U.S. State Department social media advisor Alec Ross to get the short code up and running. Since then, #Haiti and #RedCross have all become major trending topics on Twitter, mocoNews reports.

* The State Department is tweeting updates from the ground and from Washington.

* Partners in Health, led by Dr. Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains), is leading an aggressive online fundraising drive for the country in which it has been working for many years now.

*Hundreds of tweets per minute have been pouring into Twitter's #haiti hashtag feed, providing added perspectives to the digital narrative of the suffering, and Twitter user @troylivesay, based in Port-au-Prince, has been posting updates of the aftermath. His tweets have included: "Leaving to look for a list of people; will try hard to report back" and "church groups are singing throughout the city all through the night in prayer. It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy."

* GlobalVoicesonline.com, a crowdsourced news site from citizen journalists around the globe, has been providing first-person accounts from the ground and independent news stories since minutes after the quake.

* Twitpics—photographs taken on mobile phones and transmitted instantly around the world via Twitter—are helping to provide a visual narrative of the suffering, both to the public at large as well as to established news organizations, including CNN, which otherwise would not have had access to immediate video and photographs of the devastation. @CarelPedre, the Twitter handle for Carel Pedre—one of Haiti's most popular radio and TV hosts—has been sending out dozens of photographs (including the one illustrating this post, above). Check updates on his Twitter feed.

* Dozens of Twitter lists have been created to share detailed information from the ground. See, for example, @georgiap/live-from-haiti

* Msnbc.com is providing a list of #charity organizations active in Haiti

Watch this space for updates.

(Twitpic by journalist @CarelPedre courtesy Mashable)