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.]

Minding the Gap

Okay, so you're a change agent at a traditional nonprofit organization -- or you're a social entrepreneur who has just started a social enterprise. You've got your seed funding and a rock-solid business plan. So now what? How do you inspire people, from your CEO to rural farmers to consumers, to change their ways to do good (or at least better) for society?

Don't laugh. How to get people to care more about "doing good" is one of the hottest new topics making the rounds of this season's social innovation conferences. Referred to more clinically as "the neuroscience of change," the topic popped up for the first time last spring, at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, then again last month at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service -- and then again this past week, at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

Whether inspiring consumers toward fair trade, persuading corporate executives to care more deeply about labor practices or empowering women in a rural village, the challenge to influence behavior is a tough one, indeed. Neuroscientists, including Chris Frith, a professor of neuropsychology at London's University College, say that based on the circuitry of our brains and the emotional responses that direct our behavior, there is some practical knowledge that can be used by social innovators to be more effective in changing hearts and minds.

Here are four quick pointers about the people you're trying to influence (with apologies to conference presenters):

They/We Are Not Different. Neuroscientists say our brains have an "us-versus-them" default; individuals have a tendency to think they are special, or different, than the people in need of help around them. We all stereotype others, whether we do it consciously or not, as a sort of primal safety mechanism. Humans have a tendency to frame the world in terms of people who belong to our "in group" and those who do not. Social entrepreneurs need to fight that human reflex by honing in on the similarities that unite them to their constituents. Key are storytelling initiatives or strategic interactions that show donors and higher-ups that they're not much different than the people your "do-good" efforts are attempting to serve.

They/We Have Choices. Framing the challenges you are trying to ease is key in gaining support for your work. For example, 600 people are on a deserted island and are hit by a deadly flu. You have a life-saving vaccine. The catch? You can give people two options. Option 1: You have 200 doses of the vaccine and can give it to 200 people, guaranteeing their recovery. Option 2: You can try a new vaccine on all 600 people with only a one-third chance it will save them all. Most people will choose Option 1. But if you frame the dilemma differently -- that Option 1 will kill 400 people and save only 200 lives, most people will opt for Option 2. Stress positive outcomes.

They/We Are Not Helpless. Donors, people in need and frustrated social entrepreneurs need to avoid confusing frustration with the feeling of helplessness -- that sense that, in the face of challenge, nobody can really make a lasting difference. To avoid this, draw up clear goals along with a list of steps required to achieve them. Set deadlines. Start measuring your progress. Broadcast your accomplishments. Measuring incremental change sets up a continuous improvement loop. Also key? Invite the people you're trying to serve to be part of the process. Train them how to measure results incrementally. As long as there is knowledge of impact, the "we are helpless" syndrome won't stand a chance.

They/We Are Not Smarter. Neuroscientists on recent panels refer to stagnant thinking that tends to challenge donors and executives, who have self-wired their brains with data and categorizations. New thinking that challenges these categories tends to be dismissed or downplayed -- not so much because it is bad or good, but rather because it falls outside the categories that most people have already built for themselves to cope with their everyday challenges and to compensate for what they think they do well or poorly. The antidote? Don't ask people to take action. Instead, create situations in which people are expected to act in a certain way unless they take decisive action to behave otherwise. If they opt out, then rinse and repeat. [See the previous bullet point, "They/We Are Not Helpless."]

These are just four quick tips from the pros. What might you add to the list?

(Post by Marcia Stepanek; illustration by Mark Strozier for istock.com)

Summit Series 2010

This year's four-day Summit Series conference -- 24-year-old social entrepreneur Elliott Bisnow's invitation-only, GenY-focused, $3,500-per-head networking event for under-40 social entrepreneurs that ends today in Washington -- has once again lived up to its hype as one of social enterprise's newest gatherings-to-watch.

The New York Times described the first two national Summit Series events, in 2008 and 2009, as "MTV meets Davos" -- and this year's mostly Millennial gathering stayed true to form, with tracks on innovation, business, altruism, personal growth, arts and revelry (no kidding). Many of the estimated 650 CEOs, authors and start-up founders in attendance, some clad in T-shirts and Vans, used MingleSticks along with serial-texting and power-pitch networking to keep pace with who was who among them.

One attendee, consultant Pat Kane, the author of The Play Ethic, blogged that his "average Summit Series day this year has been something like a 360-degree civilizational radar search to find almost every possible opportunity for American enterprise ..." On Friday, he said, "I was faced with three possible morning sessions: one called Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, where the extraordinary Ishmael Beah was telling his inspirational story to a packed house of developmentally-oriented social entrepreneurs; another session was featuring two ex-NASA guys promoting commercial space travel, and a third session right next door, called The Greenest Economy, was all about new business models for cannabis production."

But not all sessions offered new take-aways, as speakers from Bill Clinton to Russell Simmons to tattoo artist Scott Campbell weighed in on topics ranging from rapid technological change to the stubborn challenges facing Haiti, the urgent need to invigorate the business world with innovation and the importance of keeping fit, mentally and physically, through it all. ["I don't like to hang out with old people if I can help it," Simmons told an opening-day panel, "and certainly none my age. Old people (expletive) things up." As if to underscore the point, authors Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone) and Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week) -- along with MindValley CEO Mike Reining -- recommended that attendees work hard "to keep yourselves blissful" because, said Ferrazzi, "happiness breeds productivity." [These messages weren't lost on the over-achieving crowd: conferee @luxlotus tweeted Saturday that "every #simmitseries person I meet seemingly has eight nonprofit projects, a VC firm & plays in a band."]

Unique about this #socent gathering (other than its profound shortage of mingling elders) was the urgency with which both speakers and attendees discussed the accelerating pace of Web-fueled social change and the unprecedented levels of cross-sector collaboration needed to harness it for good. Numerous attendees agreed, too, that exclusive, face-to-face meet-ups of top, NextGen executives are sorely needed, especially since most work in post-industrial work spaces that are more commonly centralized via Skype connections than common floor space.

Among program highlights:

* Former President Bill Clinton said the definition of citizenship is being altered dramatically "by the level of interdependence that we have" -- like it or not. Our growing, Web-driven adjacency with people from different nations, demographic groups, religions and value systems carries both promise and unprecedented challenge, he said. "The mission of humanity and the mission of America in the 21st century is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of our interdependence," Clinton added. Government cannot do it alone; record budget deficits have left many agencies and states too weak to adequately help the under-served, and philanthropy isn't enough, either. "In the best of all worlds," he told conferees, "you will have a continuous interface with what is done by the government, the private sector and the NGOs. We will always need citizen action and that is where social entrepreneurs can really take hold."

Clinton also said that communitarian values "are more important today than ever before, yet very much in debate" in recent months due to prolonged economic woes and ideological and political bickering -- what Clinton called "the psychic landscape of many people" who would stifle social innovation and collaboration. Clinton urged his listeners not to get discouraged. "Those of us with more yesterdays than tomorrows ought to be spending our time trying to figure out how to make more opportunities available to you to create the future," he said. Meanwhile, he concluded, "keep working with NGOs, keep aiming for social good (and keep working to make sure that) government gets into the tomorrow business." [An iPhone video of his speech, shot by Kane, can be watched here.]

* Kiva cofounder Jessica Jackley, a founder of the crowd-funding start-up ProFounder, won the Summit Series' pitch competition and the $50,000 prize that went with it. She and her new venture were chosen by the audience, not by voting but by a smartphone-powered "Live Market Venture Competition" game in which attendees traded shares of competing companies' stock on a mock social enterprise market. ProFounder is a site that helps new businesses crowd-source funding from among its social networks and communities of supporters, engaging them as micro-investors who share both risk and profits.

* Cameron Sinclair, founder of the nonprofit Architecture for Humanity, likened sustainability to survival and urged all NGOs to share their failures and successes so that the sector can collaborate and do far better to help those in need. His push for what he called "open-source best practices" is especially critical in global hot spots like Haiti and Nashville, he said, where "chaos" has replaced common sense and coordination. "The status-quo of cross-sector crisis management is not acceptable," he said.

* Craig Newmark (craigslist) spoke about how the Internet can facilitate representative democracy; social media, he said, will determine the outcome of November's mid-term elections. Newmark later said that lately, Facebook "may be stumbling a bit" around privacy issues but urged participants not to delete their accounts but to "work with them" at Facebook to "get the privacy thing right."

* Inventor Ray Kurzweil -- the man that Bill Gates considers the world's most brilliant and accurate futurist -- warned that the exponential evolution of technology is about to fundamentally change the human experience in irretrievable ways. "In the future, technological change will be so rapid and its impact so profound, that ever aspect of human life will be irreversibly transformed, so that there will be no distinction between machines and humans," he said in a dinner gathering. By 2050, he said, "we will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence. Technological change feeds on itself and gets faster and faster, and in 40 years, the pace of change will be so quick that you won't be able to follow it unless you merge with the technology that humans have created to keep up."

Kurzweil's message for social entrepreneurs? Businesses that aren't solidly organized as collaborative structures, highly networked across sectors and guided by leaders who understand the critical need for group-sourced innovation, won't survive. [For more on Kurzweil and his singularity theory, see this trailer of the upcoming film, Transcendent Man, shown at the conference.]

Were you at the Summit Series? If so, please share what we missed.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[This post first appeared on justmeans.com and is reposted here with permission.]

(iPhone Photo, above, by Cause Global)

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)

Greening Hope

Environmentalist Paul Hawken, the author of Blessed Unrest, urged fellow social entrepreneurs and green activists attending the Skoll World Forum in Oxford "not to despair" -- despite many challenges and barriers to building a more eco-friendly society.

"What you hear again and again in the environmental social justice movement is that we are too late, we're not doing enough, we failed at Copenhagen -- a litany of failure," Hawken said, then quipped: "I think this is the only movement that circles the wagons and shoots inwards, you know?"

Hawken, the CEO of OneSun Solar, a solar energy technology company, used his keynote address at the Skoll forum to caution its nearly 750 attending social entrepreneurs gainst losing perspective in their struggle for a greener planet. "The way you win," he said, "is not to be on a team where the coach is depressed by the difficulty of the endeavor. The way you win is to recognize that what you are doing is extraordinary." He added: "Copenhagen (climate talks) weren't organized to succeed. What did succeed was the information that got exchanged, the new people energized and organized around the issues and the catalyzing of new proposals, new solutions and new ideas."

Is the challenge to save the environment daunting? Yes, absolutely, Hawken said. But the goals are not impossible. He likened today's social movement leaders to the brave souls behind the abolitionist movement in 18th century Britain, who sought an end to slavery. It was a movement, Hawken said, that was started by "a couple of Quakers and Anglicans...What was so extraordinary about it was that it was the first time people organized themselveson behalf of people they didn't know and who they would never know." Such behavior was viwed as being odd then, he said, but is accepted widely today.

"The thing is that today, we (activists) have taken on the whole tamale," Hawken said. "It's not like we're trying to fix one thing. We're trying to fix the whole thing, the whole industrial system -- every node, every aspect, every part of it needs to be addressed and re-imagined. If we are winning, then we are doing something wrong because that would be playing too small. We are going to be defeated again and again. We are going to get laughed at. That's how we know we're on the right track. This is big."

Hawken ended his remarks by saying that "anyone can make despair possible but to make hope possible takes real genius and real heart." Hawken received a standing ovation.

The Skoll World Forum continues through Friday. Watch this space for continuing highlights.

--Marcia Stepanek

SkollFest 2010

This week, Cause Global is heading to Oxford, England, where the Skoll World Forum of social entrepreneurs convenes for its seventh year. Called the "Davos for social entrepreneurs," the gathering at Oxford's Said Business School has long been about celebrating up-and-coming entrepreneurs who don't simply want to prosper but also want to create new business and nonprofit models to help solve the world's most pressing problems.

But this year signals a shift in the conversation. Last year, the forum was held in what Skoll Oxford Centre Chairman Stephan Chambers called "the most chilling economic environment we've ever experienced." Social entrepreneurs talked about how their new field was finally gaining some mainstream legitimacy amid the failure of so many established institutions and organizations in the wake of the global financial meltdown. "The status-quo business model versus civil society is not a choice," Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management said in opening remarks last year, "but rather the root of a new model, a new set of solutions for our times."

This year, amid criticism from some global change-makers that the Skoll gathering has become elitist and insular, the conversation will be less about proving the legitimacy of this new field and more about pushing its ability to scale. "Catalyzing Collaboration" is the prevailing theme of this week's three-day line-up of panels and networking sessions. With a new "collaboration track" added this year that includes such panels as "Structuring Collaboration: Mergers, Parternships and New Business Models," "The Power of Many: Collaborative Impact and Measurement" and "The Colours of Money: Social Financiers Collaborating for Impact" -- the message is clear: social entrepreneurs need to start playing better and more often with others to wield greater impact, attract greater funding, and trigger lasting change. [This year's Skoll Awards also send that message: most of the winners are social entrepreneurs who have been leading change efforts for years, learning how to work in various ways with existing groups and established authorities and organizations rather than around them.]

Cause Global will be covering parts of the conference, looking especially closely at the various new approaches being taken by social entrepreneurs to grow their initiatives. It will be a rich conversation, given that this new field continues to face some daunting funding challenges -- barriers that stepped-up collaboration with others outside the field can significantly help to diminish.

Watch this space for highlights.

(Illustration by Rienk Post Graphic Design for istock.com)

Fail Fairs

Failure - or the notion that we should publicly share our stories about what doesn't work in our scramble to innovate - is becoming the New Cool. Rather than launch a quixotic war on failure, some social sector leaders are saying that we should be using what we've learned to fail better, to learn from the past so that we may, collectively, meet the challenges we share. [What has to die so that better initiatives might live?]

Sure, social innovation leaders have been talking for a while now about the importance of sharing what works and what doesn't. But now, as collaboration gains momentum across the social sectors, the notion of failure as a critical ingredient of innovation -- and cross-sector learning -- appears to be gaining a new sense of urgency.

Earlier this week, global thought and action network PopTech released the theme of its annual October gathering in Maine, something that many social entrepreneurs look to as an intellectual context for their work. [Last year's theme was America, Re-imagined.] This year, PopTech's theme is Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures and Improbable Breakthroughs. It's an opportunity to remind ourselves why failure is vital - and to gain inspiration and new energy around the kind of risk-taking that's required for innovation to occur. [Some of the questions PopTech will be exploring include: What do radically different disciplines and ways of thinking have to teach each other? Why do some ideas work at a grand scale, and others only locally? How can small changes to our 'default' options lead to breakthroughs? Every visionary starts as a heretic, so how do ideas and their champions move from the edge to the center?]

The failure theme also is getting impetus from mobileactive.org cofounder Katrin Verclas. Earlier this month, Verclas began inviting people in the mobiles-for-social-change space to share their failures, in preparation for Fail Faire, an event she is hosting in New York on April 14. Says Verclas:

"Projects succeed, projects fail. The successes are reported on, the failures are filed away -- or, in the case of most ICT 4 Development or Mobile 4 Development projects, pushed under the proverbial rug. Well, it's time to bring out the failures, with a sense of humor and with an honest look at ourselves."

Verclas, who has been a voice for innovation in the mobiles space for years, added: "If we understand what doesn't work in this field ... we can collectively learn and get better, more effective, and have a greater impact as we go forward."

Lucy Bernholz, a blogger, consultant and change activist in the philanthropy space, also has been voicing the need for nonprofit innovators to be more collaborative and open in their work -- chiefly more transparent about their hits and misses in their struggles to reshape their strategies in the face of the Web's continued radical evolution. Her recent Open Philanthropy: A Modest Manifesto urged the sharing of what works and what doesn't, triggering a continuing debate in the sector about risk and transparency.

Certainly, failure isn't just considered a value for start-up entrepreneurs, something to emphasize on a resume as proof of wisdom and experience. Talking about failure can have the effect of de-stigmatizing risk, catalyzing in-house innovators, and inspiring more of us to build systems that fail better.

How many of you are using social media to share failure stories as tools for collaborative learning, online and off? Does it trigger new levels of learning? What is needed in the storm of disruptive innovation to make people feel more secure about what they share?

Let us hear from you.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Andrea Danti for shutterstock.com)
(This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and appears here with permission)

Clout-sourcing

A widget unveiled by the Skoll Foundation's Social Edge today lets anyone search and add a real-time list of social entrepreneurs to their Web pages. The goal is to provide an exchange and transfer of information so as to avoid duplication in the "do-good" sector. "We want to help people find others in their field, specializing in their issue, or working in their geographical region so that they may learn from other business models, find new ways to collaborate and build coalitions for change," SE's announcement said.

The Social Entrepreneur API (application programming interface) is the first open database of information about social entrepreneurs who have won fellowships and awards from social enterprise funders. "It lets philanthropists, investors, press, and fellow entrepreneurs find leading social innovators based on keyword, location, cause area, population service and other factors," according to Social Actions, which convened the collaborating group and catalyzed the project with seed funding provided with a grant from the Peery Foundation.

The database was created by funders who have come together to pool their information on the social entrepreneurs they've vetted. Emerging social entrepreneurs can use it to find others in the field and vetted social entrepreneurs can benefit from increased exposure to themselves and their work.

Joining the Skoll Foundation in the effort are Social Actions, Civic Ventures (sponsor of The Purpose Prize), PopTech, The Draper Richards Foundation, and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

What do you think? Will this help to make the fledgling social enterprise sector less fragmented and more collaborative? How good is the potential for this to exclude more people than it promotes?

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Radical Investing

Today, three young social entrepreneurs -- setting a radical precedent in the social innovation sector -- announced that they are offering up a portion of their future income in exchange for immediate resources to scale their social enterprises.

The trio has created a Web site and a name for their request -- the Thrust Fund. They announced their bold move today on the Social Edge Web site in a post entitled, "Invest in Me, Take My Equity."

The three entrepreneurs are: Saul Garlick, 26, founder of ThinkImpact, a startup nonprofit that connects American students to rural villages in Africa to alleviate poverty; Kjerstin Erickson, 26, the founder of FORGE and a blogger on Social Edge, and Jon Gosier, 28, the founder of AppAfrica, a social venture investing in African software entrepreneurs to create jobs and build their own companies.

"(We) are announcing that we are ready to do something we had never heard of one month ago," the post reads. "We are going to offer equity in our life's earnings for an unrestricted infusion of cash today." Gosier and Garlick are each offering 100 shares in themselves, priced at $3,000 USD per share, to raise $300,000 each in exchange for 3 percent of each man's future earnings; Erickson is "selling" 200 shares in herself at $3,000 per share for a total capital investment of $600,000, in exchange for 6 percent of all of her future earnings. Interested investors are invited to fill out and sign a contract that further stipulates the terms of the unusual offer.

The idea of 1-to-1 investing isn't new in the nonprofit sector. But it's just starting to take off in the social enterprise space. The other week, in a piece for this blog entitled "Mainstream Medicis," I wrote about how one social investor had decided to give a young entrepreneur he believed in some investment capital in exchange for a percentage of her future earnings. That move, detailed by investor/entrepreneur/tech consultant Rafe Furst last fall in his personal blog, has spawned considerable discussion across the sector in recent weeks, but today's Thrust Fund announcement was the first time that any social entrepreneurs have stepped forward to offer themselves as candidates under the concept.

The idea isn't complicated. Instead of investing in start-up companies, angel funders could invest in individuals they believe in and then take a percentage of their life's income over time as the ROI.

"If we loved perpetual hand-to-mouth fundraising for our social enterprises, we'd never make this announcement," the trio wrote in their Social Edge post. "If the market were up to speed on the scalable potential of social entrepreneurship with engaged funders like the more advanced VC community that the exclusively for-profit sector looks to for scale, this discussion would be lame. But it's not and we are raising money hand-to-mouth when we know for sure that a modest infusion of capital would scale our social enterprises."

What do you think? Is the sector likely to see a flood of such investment deals, or is this idea still too new and untested to take seriously? Let us hear your thoughts.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Photoillustration, above, courtesy Social Edge)
(This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and is reposted here with permission)

"Do" v. Think

At Stanford University's TEDx Silicon Valley conference this past Saturday, Nancy Lublin, CEO of the youth empowerment nonprofit, Do Something, said we have gone too far as a society lauding social entrepreneurs and other leaders — and not far enough celebrating the people who follow them.

"All movements are led by the people in the middle," Lublin told the Dec. 12 gathering. Lublin, who founded Dress for Success in 1997, has since helped to evolve Do Something, a New York City-based youth empowerment nonprofit, from a debt-ridden, stodgy group into a high-profile magnet for teens. Lublin says 90 percent of teens say they want to make a difference but only 23 percent actively volunteer. Do Something, she says, works to transform talk into action; the nonprofit draws more than 1 million hits each month to its Web site while spending millions in grant money to support young people with good ideas ready to launch or to scale.

Lublin says she believes that the social enterprise sector "spends most of its time and money on helping the 1 percent" of change-makers. Meanwhile, she says, most of the work that is impacting those in need is actually being done by the less-heralded or less-privileged 90 percent.

"We are now obsessed with creating the new at the expense of creating impact," she said. "We have been told that social enterprise will change the world but no -- impact will change the world. Changing something is what really matters, not simply that we have created something new. We don't need another new cancer organization; we need the 300 new cancer organizations [that already exist] to learn how to work together."

Lublin added: "Scale is not necessarily religion. It ought to be impact." She urged conferees to "give permission to people to join something" rather than to encourage them to create something new. "Nothing happens in social enterprise without smart, talented, innovative followers."

What do you think? Is this fair? Does the social enterprise movement pay too much attention to innovative visionaries and not enough to the people or teams implementing the sector's big ideas in the field? Why do you think so?

(Photo: Suzie Katz on Flickr)

(This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and is reprinted here with permission)

Slow Money

There is slow food, slow design, slow cities, and slow photography.

And now? There is Woody Tasch. The former venture capitalist-turned-revolutionary, as he calls himself, is the guru of "slow money" - the name Tasch gives to his philosophy that combines a passion for social enterprise with the benefits of locally-grown food. Cause Global caught up with Tasch at New York University a couple of days ago, where he was speaking to social enterprise students about his new national campaign to persuade at least 1 million Americans to donate between $25 and $1,000 each to help create a grassroots, non-profit seed fund to support and grow local food businesses and family farms.

But it's not just healthier food that Tasch is after. He is traveling the country this fall, warning that money moves way too quickly. Billions and trillions of dollars zip around the globe, he says, as if disembodied from the people who invest it. "Investors don't know anymore where their money goes and more and more, they want to see an impact for what they give in their own lives and own communities," Tasch said. He says he wants to build and test the concept of something he calls "nurture capital" — a healthier and more sustainable alternative to venture capital for funding new businesses. It's time, he says, to shorten the distance between investors and their investments. It's also time, he says, to create new economic models that deliver a return but that also put community, soil fertility, and the environment at the bottom line.

"This is really paradigm-bending stuff," says Gabriel Brodbar, the director of NYU's Reynolds Program for Social Entrepreneurship. "Even the most traditional, free market capitalists like [philanthropist] George Soros and [National Economic Council director] Larry Summers have recently admitted in one way or another that our traditional paradigms have failed us."

Tasch is no out-of-left-field gadfly. He is chairman emeritus of Investor's Circle, the nonprofit network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations, and family offices that since 1992 has facilitated the flow of $130 million to 200 early-stage social enterprises dedicated to sustainability. Before that, he was the treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. Tasch's slow money movement, which was officially kicked off in September during a conference in Santa Fe, is an extension of that work.

"Right now, it's hard to believe that the Whole Foods Market down the street is still able to exist, given the damage we're doing to our soils, and it's hard to believe something bad is going to happen," Tasch told NYU students. "But [our food production system] isn't sustainable. It's time to slow down and start looking up close at what we are doing not just with industrial agriculture but what we're doing to ourselves on the planet in the name of sustaining our standard of living."

With slow money, Tasch is taking a page from the slow food movement, the 23-year-old movement that calls on consumers to treat the act of eating less as a hurried distraction and more like a family ritual that celebrates community and takes time out to reflect upon the labor involved in growing the food that we eat. "Money should move the same way," says Tasch. "This isn't just about finance but the relationship of finance to culture."

In short? Tasch wants to persuade grassroots investors to "take the power back" over their communities and start putting some of their assets into local businesses they can see and watch and [in this case] even taste. He wants them to measure growth not by numbers of dollars so much as the yield of a local crop and the health of a local community. He acknowledges that investing in sustainable local agriculture will yield below-market returns. But he says nobody will lose money; these returns, he says, will be solid - maybe a 3 percent profit or maybe 6 percent one over many years.

But the real dividend of slow money, says Tasch, is social, economic, and biological diversity. In an era of industrial agriculture, when millions of acres are planted with the same variety of corn and when millions of pigs are bred for their yield, small local farms are "the ultimate hedge fund," he says. "Fix the broken food system, and many other social, economic, and environmental benefits will follow." Tasch adds:

"Genetically-modified plants and organisms [GMOs] are like [financial] derivatives. GMOs are like finance scientists trying to trick the yield on a piece of land. Sure, people will say I don't know what I'm talking about, that these new GMO varieties of plants are crossbred for less risk because every wheat stalk planted is exactly the same genetically. But I don't know. I'm not alone when I say that we headed for a biological correction similar to the financial correction we just had. Why? You can't trick risk. The only way to mitigate risk is with diversity. Biological, cultural and economic diversity is the only answer for risk -- meaning lots of small-scale, diversified things of all kinds coexisting in a healthy relationship. We're talking percolation versus circulation; diversity versus monocultures, fertility versus profitability, and relationships versus transactions."

So far, Tasch says, his slow money movement has 700 members, including about 50 people who have sent in $1,000 checks over the Internet and small local enterprises such as Vermont's Butterworks Farm, a $1 million annual yogurt business, as well as Let's Be Frank, a Berkeley, Calif.-based hotdog company, and Sky Vegetables and Local Harvest. At the Sante Fe slow money convention in September, there were 450 attendees from 34 states and six countries, he said. "Now we're trying to get 1 million people to sign the slow money principles and from that, build capacity."

He admits that early investors may not be "big money people" but instead, small money investors who are "frustrated with philanthropic foundations [that can sometimes invest their endowments into places that don't help the environment] and frustrated as philanthropists." Says Tasch: "We must bring money back down to the Earth. It's time to restore a bit of reality back into all of our lives."

For a copy of Tasch's petition of Slow Money principles, click here. For more on Tasch's slow money philosophy, see his March 2009 YouTube video. (For more on the "slow movement" in general, see multimedia artist Douglas Gayeton talk about his new book, Slow, and the flat film techniques he uses to capture the stories of a village in Tuscany.)

— Marcia Stepanek


(Photo: Flickr)

Social Enterprise Elitism

There's a growing debate in the social enterprise world, not only about who's a social entrepreneur but about who's being left out of the club.

True, the exceptions and misconceptions abound, but the debate settles around two main points -- that unless you're a Caucasian and unless you're an MBA, it's tougher to get support for your good work trying to start a social enterprise.

Is that fair? Consider the arguments. The first point being raised by some across the sector is that MBAs seem to be preferred by social ventures and the foundations willing to fund aspiring social entrepreneurs. Employers, the argument goes, also seem to prefer MBAs, but the truth is that not everyone who can make a difference or start a social enterprise can afford business school—nor think they should have to get an MBA in order to get funding to develop their ideas. "I have no MBA nor do I want one," says Martin Montero, the founder of Austin Social Innovation Fund. Montero tweeted me the other day in response to one of my queries about a story in today's Wall Street Journal Online that cites the surge of interest by business school students in "socially-responsible money-making." The article also notes how business schools are being pushed to create a whole host of courses and study tracks to help MBA students sort out the best way to build companies that both make money and help to solve social problems. Montero and others, including a number of Justmeans community members who messaged me earlier this week, said the fuss over socially-minded MBAs tends to leave out a great deal of people who are not in business school but who already have been making a big difference in the sector. " We most definitely need more non-MBA social entrepreneurs," Montero wrote.

A second point I keep hearing is that the developing world is, more or less, being left out of the conversation. Justmeans.com community member Gerard Ww, in a comment responding to my introductory column as social enterprise editor of Justmeans, said that "no company, organization, or individuals (seems) willing to really get their hands truly dirty side-by-side with us (those people at the bottom of the pyramid) while trying to help the BoP!" Describing himself as one of the billions at the bottom of the pyramid, he said that "we are never included in the [potential] interventions; it's always the so-called academics and 'successful' business persons who dictate terms and conditions. Too few of us will ever be helped by the continued exclusion, but who else knows the conditions [at the bottom of the pyramid] better" than the people who live there?

Gerard isn't the only person posing the question. Rod Schwartz, CEO of ClearlySo, an online marketplace that aims to raise the visibility of social businesses, sparked a lively debate earlier this year when he posed on the SocialEdge blog the following question: "Are the only innovations in social entrepreneurship Anglo-Saxon?" Schwartz had asked the same question at the 2009 Skoll World Forum, which I also attended, asking fellow conferees what they thought of the fact that a majority of the speakers and panelists were Caucasian. Ashni Mohnot, who joins me as a contributing blogger at PopTech, wrote on that site this past summer that "many of the top socially entrepreneurial organizations work in international development, building products, services and social capital to improve lives at the base of the pyramid, yet they are often based in the UK or the US with founders and CEOs hailing from the Western world." She cited D.light Design, FORGE, FaceAids, and Kiva as some examples of social ventures that develop their products by native Westerners or those educated in the West. Mohnot wrote that while these social ventures "subsequently engage locals in pilots, distribution or marketing, the initial product design is often the sole realm of the US arm."

To be sure, it's not true that all social innovators have MBAs and that they're all "Anglo-Saxon" as Schwartz put it. But the debate continues over what some see as troubling trends in this new field of social enterprise.

What do you think? Do you perceive yourself to be in what Mohnot called an elite "social entrepreneur's club?" Or is the debate unfair or misinformed? Does it raise some important or long-ignored issues that should continue to be discussed across the sector?

—By Marcia Stepanek

(This was first posted on Justmeans.com and reposts here with permission)
(Illustration: fotolia.com)

Heat

Bill Clinton's fifth annual, star-studded thinkfest on philanthropy, technology, social issues and cause advocacy—the Clinton Global Initiative—kicked off today in Manhattan with a call for renewed urgency amid the global financial slowdown to create ever-more innovative, cross-sector solutions to climate change, poverty, and other global social ills. Clinton urged the record 1,200 attendees from the worlds of business, government, social advocacy, celebrity, and academia to forge more cost-effective and collaborative problem-solving initiatives, and to view emerging economies around the world as critical proving grounds for new ideas that can scale globally.

This is the fourth consecutive CGI I've attended; Bill Clinton, bowing to last year's collapse of the financial markets, has put special emphasis this year on society's overlooked populations—namely, the so-called "bottom billion"—and has scheduled panels to explore how business CEOs might do a better job working alongside social sector leaders to help local communities. To that end, ABC's Diane Sawyer will moderate a panel Wednesday that looks at how various countries treat women, followed by several sessions on human trafficking. Organizers also are promising some conversations about how the emerging mobile Internet—cellphones—can be a force for grassroots change, economic empowerment and collaboration from Kigali to Queens.

This year also will be different in another way: a record number of bloggers will be included in the press room, and there will be quite a few "citizen journalists" among the conferees; the ubiquitous Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, philanthrocapitalist Jaqueline Novogratz, actors Matt Damon and Ben Stiller, and philanthropist Steve Case (@SteveCase) are among those already tweeting their takes on the proceedings. CGI, meanwhile, is livestreaming much of the event, and is providing an easy interface for members of the public to ask questions of Clinton and other participants.

Watch this space for highlights from the week; much of the program will be unfolding during simultaneous break-out sessions and town hall-style seminars taking place on Wednesday and Thursday. Some of the sessions will be live-streamed over the Web. Cause Global will be tweeting from the floor and during some of the breakout sessions. You can follow our CGI tweets @CauseGlobal through mid-day Friday.

For the opening plenary, which includes President Obama's speech to conferees, click HERE. In that speech, Obama referenced the social advocacy work of his late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro:

[My mother] was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to understanding and improving the lives of the rural poor, from Indonesia to Pakistan. Whether working with USAID or the Asian Development Bank, the Ford Foundation, Bank Rakyat in Jakarta or Women’s World Banking here in New York, she championed the cause of women’s welfare and helped pioneer the micro loans that have helped lift millions from poverty. My mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of Java or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we all share common principles: justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. And we all share common aspirations, for ourselves and our children: to get an education, to work with dignity, and to live in peace and security.

(Photo: Mills/New York Times)

SkollPoll

It's often been said that social entrepreneurs, more than others, tend to see the world as something they can shape against all odds: a poll of 200 of the 785 delegates attending the three-day Skoll World Forum at Oxford University seems to prove that perception. According to the poll results, academics and advisers are the "gloomiest" of the social enterprise lot attending the forum, with nearly two-thirds of those responding saying that they are either "moderately pessimistic" [59%] or "highly pessimistic" [6.5%] about the "economic situation."

In contrast, less than half of social entrepreneurs responding to the survey said they felt pessimistic; a full 84% of social entrepreneurs predicted their programs would increase in size or at least stay the same over the next year.

Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, which organized the forum, said only 16% of organizations would be cutting back this year, a contrast to the 40% of nonprofits in the United States that said they would be scaling back or cutting programs this year in a recent U.S.-only poll. And what about the entrepreneurs? Today's poll data also show that almost 87 % of funders attending the Skoll conference [and responding to the poll] say their grants have remained the same or have increased in the past six months; over the coming year, 63 % say they think funding will remain the same or increase.

For more on the optimism of the social entrepreneur and what drives it, see our interview in December [Squalls] with Paul Light, the author of the recent book, The Search for Social Entrepreneurship, about the traits that distinguish these social innovators. Light told CauseGlobal:

I have come to agree that there is something different about the social entrepreneur...What they are is extremely optimistic about their chances of success. They all have very high confidence that they will succeed and they often ignore evidence to the contrary because they believe so strongly that they'll succeed...Additionally, they're not more likely to take risks than others but they do tend through their optimism to stick with it, and when they are told they are going to fail, they actually invest even more energy. They rebel against messages that suggest they're somehow on the wrong track."

For more on social entrepreneurs and how they're faring during the downturn, see this article, Global Heroes, in the May 12 issue of The Economist.

(Illustration: Debbie Hanford for istock.com)

SkollFest

Today through Saturday, we're in Oxford, where the Skoll World Forum for social innovation convenes for its sixth year. Called the "Davos for social entrepreneurs," the event is all about celebrating up-and-coming and established entrepreneurs who don't simply want to get rich but also want to forge innovative solutions to the world's social problems—as well as create new business models for sustainable social problem-solving worldwide. The forum—being held in what Skoll's Oxford Centre Chairman Stephan Chambers today called "the most chilling economic environment we've ever experienced"—is being hosted by Oxford University and Jeff Skoll's social enterprise foundation. [Skoll, who was the first employee and first president of eBay, also is the founder of the independent movie company, Participant Productions.]

Despite the dour global economy, this year's forum has broken all previous attendance records, with some 785 social entrepreneurs from 65 countries in town for the event, including Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor; Mary Robinson, founder and president of Peace Worlds Group, and Soraya Salti, senior vice president of INJAZ al-Arab, a youth education and empowerment project in Jordan. A wide range of panels Thursday and Friday will include talks entitled The Uses and Abuses of Power in Social Innovation, Capital Markets in Crisis, Powerful Women: Shifting the Status Quo, Technology and Shifting Power in a Hyper-Connected World, and Tomorrow's News: Models for an Everyone-is-Media World.

Cause Global will be covering parts of the conference. Among highlights so far:

* Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, urged conferees to be "the kinds of leaders who reject the traditional choices between two or more unsatisfactory alternatives and instead create new courses of action in the world." Martin, during an opening ceremony at the historic Sheldonian Theatre, referred to President Obama's inaugural speech, in which Obama asserted: "For our common defense, we reject as false a choice between our safety and our ideals." Rotman said that time and again, highly successful leaders reject unsatisfactory options and create new alternatives. "They understand the power of the paradox," Martin said. "The critical take-away for social entrepreneurs, specifically, is that you must reject the notion that existing business models equal reality. The status-quo business model versus civil society is not a choice but rather the root of a new model, a new set of solutions for our times."

* Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and now president of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, underscored the importance of government to help bring order to the current "chaotic" climate of change that is being felt around the world. She said:

One of the shifts taking place in this severe economic crisis is a recognition that government matters and that it's very important to the 21st century. We had been in a neo-liberal phase when there was a reduction of government and the private sector was supposed to be so efficient and we didn't need regulation. I am hoping we are now seeing a new era of more appropriate government, governments that are more responsive and also more welcoming to younger people with their tools of the information society. We need for people to become more participative in their communities and societies and their movements. We need more people holding those in power to account. How are social entrepreneurs holding existing institutions to account? We need more of that. It's important to do that and that's what social entrepreneurs and young people with their tools can do very well.

* Ken Brecher, the executive director of the Sundance Institute and an anthropologist by training, delivered an eloquent speech that underscored the importance of passion and persistence in the pursuit of the common good. He received a hearty round of applause when he compared the traits of social entrepreneurs to those traits which characterized and qualified the fearless crews recruited by the early 20th century explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. [Brecher quoted an advertisement that Shackleton placed in The London Times in 1907: "Wanted: Men for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in the event of success."] Brecher also spoke about the perserverance and resilience that characterized the life of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1965, when she was 76 years old, during a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre [the spot where Skoll conferees were assembled Wednesday night]. Brecher urged social entrepreneurs to heed Akhmatova's example of creativity and passion against brutal odds to bring new levels of sanity to the world. "You can use your skills to bring order from chaos and in doing so fulfill the highest human function, not as visionary but with a strong sense of reality. (Akhmatova's life was) a reproach to those who feel that a single individual can never stand up to the march of history."

The conference, at the Said Business School, continues through Friday. For more on social entrepreneurs and the state of social innovation, see this recent article in The Economist.

— Marcia Stepanek

(Photo-illustration by Lise Gagne for istock.com)

Party's Over

The air in Davos this past week was so thick with gloom over the convulsing economy and Wall Street greed [$20 billion in bonuses paid out despite hefty bank bailouts and historic layoffs], that many CEOs leaving the World Economic Forum for home today "bore the harrowed looks of survivors of the Donner Party," according to Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross.

Quick, boys. It's time to dust off those old corporate social responsibility [CSR] initiatives and retool them into Web-driven programs that deliver—or your company may find its precious brands, recruitment efforts, and corporate culture worth zilch to Generation G (for Good). That's the name trendwatching.com gives—in a just-released report—to a growing segment of cause-wired, global consumers aged 40 or younger who consider "generosity" an important social and business mindset. "As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy...has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity?" the February 2009 report asks in its introduction. "...Sharing is the new giving...In this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?"

Compiled for business leaders in more than 120 countries from a global network of 8,000 trendspotters, the report lists various ways firms might use social media and other initiatives to create social responsibility programs that matter:

*Co-donate. Collaborate with customers about how often to donate—and to which causes. Use online and mobile technologies "to make the most of impulse-driven and networked fundraising."
*Be eco-generous. Don't just offset your company's impact on the environment; find ways to improve it .
*Engage in "free love"—in this case, give away some goods, like free coffees or free travel guides to consumers.
*Use brand butlers to help customers make the most of the company's products. IKEA, for example, loans out branded bikes with trailers to its customers in Denmark to help them transport their purchases home.
*Engage in "perkonomics." Offer perks like reserved parking to, say, owners of a specific automotive brand, or let preferred customers jump queues at busy events.
*Offer "tryvertising." Let customers try products before they purchase them to make their purchasing decisions based on their product experiences rather than corporate brand messages.

There's no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington [and Davos] still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction for their Web-powered ideas as they head into the start of their own summit season—first at the vaunted TED2009 conference in Long Beach on Wednesday and then at the Skoll Foundation's World Forum in Oxford in March.

In the months ahead, expect aggressive efforts by leaders of the social enterprise movement to track and compile the ROI of social media in for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. Says new media expert Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: "Design an environment where people can feel good at what they're doing...and they'll flock to your venture."

For more on designing initiatives for generosity that also work for the bottom line, see Shirky's talk at the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine, below:

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)