I missed a couple promised blog postings about charities because we’ve been furious at work spreading the word about our new campaign, but I’m back to talk about another great cause.
History has been made between my last post and today - an African American man has been elected president. This is a major turning point for the black community, whose mothers and fathers can now tell their children with confidence for the first time that they too can rise to the top office in the land if they work hard enough. Obama’s victory came on the heels of a slew of images of shameless wall street investors defending their insanely generous paychecks as they were dragging American workers into the mud. In this context, Obama’s victory seems just as relevant to the middle and lower classes. It’s not only Obama’s race that is significant. The fact that he grew up in a middle income family with an immigrant father and was raised with the help of his grandparents says just as much. It signals that even in an era in which the gap between rich and poor is as great as ever, the belief that America can be a meritocracy still has a leg to stand on. The opportunity divide has long been an invisible issue in this country because of a persistent belief that success in America was solely determined by work ethic, when one glance at the economic backgrounds of our nation’s leaders demonstrates anything but that. If you don’t agree with the last statement, I highly recommend reading the eye-opening book “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Year Up is an unbelievable organization that was created because of this opportunity divide. As their website states, “To help address these challenges, Year Up was founded in October 2000 by Gerald Chertavian as a one-year intensive education and apprenticeship program for urban young adults aged 18-24. Year Up’s program recognizes that both job skills (technical and professional) and higher education are necessary to provide a viable path to economic self-sufficiency. Our mission is to prepare these young adults for successful careers and higher education.”
Recognizing that success depends on more than just technical training, Year Up places an emphasis not just on technical training, internship and apprenticeships, but also emphasizes support and guidance. They understand that a head filled with knowledge is useless without developing confidence, strong work ethic and a desire to achieve. These are the character traits that are the engine of success. One on one learning, inspiring advisors and personal connection are what really set Year Up apart.
What the American dream really means has been hotly debated for years and, while to some it will always only be an ideal, it’s reassuring and touching to know that groups like Year Up are doing all they can to help it become a reality. We are very proud to offer Year Up as a donation option to our customers.
In my last post, I wrote about my company’s new campaign to create a totally new and unique customer experience that seamlessly integrates philanthropic donation into the purchasing process. Every customer is able to choose the charity that speaks to their heart as they click their way through checkout. We give more with each item added into your cart and the donations come straight from our wallet, not the customers’. We’re confident that the power of our customers’ charitable passions will help us become the sort of new breed of business that puts social improvement right next to profit on the bottom line.
To help introduce this new campaign, I thought it would be a great idea to feature one of our charities each week on this blog. We’re passionate about every one and we’ve looked long and hard to find a range of charities that we think includes something for just about everyone. This week I’ll be writing about Conservation International.
This was one of the first charities that we absolutely knew we had to get behind. Most people have images of dreadlocks, granola, and some kind of hemp running through their heads whenever they hear the words conservation or environmentalism. You don’t get that with these guys. In fact, Conservation International is the kind of organization that is so pragmatic, forward-thinking and optimistic that they make you wish they were running all of the world’s governments.
They broke the mold of traditional conservation from “keeping places intact as relics of the past” to a “working model of the future – a future in which people lived in harmony with nature.” In order to accomplish this, they realized that they needed to add effective business practices, partnerships with national governments and major corporations and scientific innovation to their significant passion for the environment. This strategy of combining the best parts of science, technology, business and social outreach has catapulted them past more traditional environmental organizations to become a leader in their field. In fact, they’re now on charitynavigator.org’s “10 Best Charities Everyone’s Heard Of”.
What has set them apart more than anything, though, is their vision of nature as all-encompassing - from the boardroom to the playground to the ocean, every square foot of the earth is a connected part of this ecosystem. So, they understand that it doesn’t make sense to just retreat into the wilderness to face the problems that can start anywhere and affect humans, plants and animals everywhere. To CI it’s just as important to ensure that businesses and citizens are creating a human culture that’s in harmony with the earth as it is to repair the damage we’ve already done. This involves everyone from the largest company to the smallest village.
The scope of their projects and the way in which they tackle today’s biggest problems make them a charity we believe is deserving of all the funding we can provide. We believe this particularly because they don’t cling to any dogma about how things are o should be done, but concern themselves with the problems at hand and how to solve them. That’s the kind of charity we think is worthy.
Ξ September 18th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Op-Ed |
Change is the buzzword of the election, there’s no doubt about that. Obama has branded himself as the candidate of change and John McCain has even altered his campaign message to try and get a piece of that pie himself. In the past, elections have been split into concerns over war, economics, abortion, etc. But, for the first time it seems that whether we agree on policy concerns or social issues, Americans are in agreement that the old ways are not working. Everyone knows in their gut that extreme times call for extreme measures and the most dangerous thing for us right now would be to play it safe, put our heads down and meander forward along the same path. You don’t need to go very far to find evidence of this. The major media is adequately covering the outcry for a new way, a new kind of leader - and both Obama and McCain are posturing themselves as best they can to be that leader.
As Nicholas Kristof wrote back in January of this year, however, a whole different kind of change is taking place that will probably amount to more than either candidate could possibly muster. In his article, “The Age of Ambition”, Mr. Kristof outlines the incredible work being done by the young social entrepreneurs who are tired of waiting for politics to provide the solutions they are sick of watching on the news every day, “With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics. But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).”
My company, Worthy Fashion, is in a small way a part of this movement towards creating the social change we want to see in the world. We’ve created a section of our website entitled “A Worthy Cause” that describes our efforts to help create financial opportunities for entrepreneurs in the developing world yearning to uplift themselves and their communities. To make sure everyone knows we’re walking the walk, we’ve recently decided to create a sliding scale of donation so that one product yields a 1% donation to Kiva, 2 products yields 3% and 3 or more products will produce a 5% donation. Once any of the loans are repaid the money is immediately recycled into a kiva-only account so that each sale (and each repaid loan) increases the total amount of money we are able to loan to these deserving entrepreneurs.
We’re truly proud to be a small part of the movement of our generation of using business to solve the problems we see all around us. Because, as Kristof so eloquently notes, “Only one person can become president of the United States, but there’s no limit to the number of social entrepreneurs who can make this planet a better place.”
Please check it out and tell your friends about it, it’s definitely a “Worthy Cause”.
It’s extremely easy to look around today and find every reason to be pessimistic about the future. And, although I’ve always thought that there is a fine line between being optimistic and being unrealistic, I do think that real change always springs from a place of optimism and inspiration. In other words, if you want things to be good again at some point you’ve got to begin believing that is really possible.
We’ve already pretty much gone through the phase of opening our eyes to the grim state of affairs on the globe today - climate change, economic instability, etc. But, you can only cry over spilled milk for so long. Now that we’ve taken a good, hard look at the problems the next step is taking a deep breath and not just begin to move forward but to move forward with bold optimism.
Popular media is not helping us to do this. Major news outlets have a tendency to report on the disastrous because it makes for more compelling television. Very quietly, however, major changes are indeed taking place. I’m not just talking about change in laboratories and think tanks (though that’s happening too). I’m talking about real populist, grassroots change in areas like environmentalism, human rights, sustainable design, alternative energy and the list goes on. It’s a wave of human compassion pouring outwards and because it’s occurring at so many levels all over the globe, the greater trend at play probably won’t be recognized until we look back at it years from now.
Here are a couple of books that I love that address this trend, directly and indirectly, and will make you a lot more hopeful for the future. Change is possible. And it starts with a bit of optimism.
The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything and I thought that it would only be appropriate to have an Olympic themed posting. Everyone always thinks the best commercials are made for the superbowl, but I tend to think that the most inspiring ones always seem to show up during the Olympics. Here are some of the best in breed.
Nike - I Can
Everything You Need is Already Inside
Kerry Strug
Derek Redmond
Another great article over at Creative Capitalism, with some good comments following it up.
Global recognition replaces local shame
After realizing that no one actually seems to have a coherent definition of creative capitalism, or at least no one can agree on one, I thought this made sense.
The crowd within
And the apocalypse…
The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb
While I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the incredible changes that could occur as a result of things like creative capitalism and microfinance, I think that there’s an equally enormous change brewing as a new generation enters the workplace and brings with them a totally new view on how work should serve them.
Just as we’re beginning to realize that companies can do good and do well, it’s also becoming clear that employees are demanding they be fulfilled both emotionally and financially by their work. A recent article in The Guardian argues that this has incredible implications for the future of business. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I think that it will be such a sea change the ripples will be felt throughout society.
Just consider for a moment how much differently you act when you’re content with life. How much less irritated are you and how much more empathetic are you when life is going smoothly? The answer is obvious and think about how much better happy people are for the community because they spread those good vibes around without even realizing it. We live in a world increasingly obsessed with work and increasingly stressed out by work. To think that this does not adversely affect the general human interaction beyond the office is shortsighted. Unhappy workers aren’t just bad for business, they’re bad for all of us.
I don’t think that as the next generation replaces the boomers that we’ll all magically be transported to Xanadu, but I do think that it could make life less stressful. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Born in 1983, I fall somewhere between “digital immigrant” and “digital native”. These are the monikers aptly used to describe the two kinds of humans who went through their important developmental years either before or after that point on the digital timeline when the internet became a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Digital immigrants have to adapt to technology, whereas anyone who’s seen a teenager these days can see that the digital natives have to do very little adapting to the machines they grew up believing had always existed. I grew up with Nintendo, didn’t have a cell phone until late high school and didn’t use the internet on a daily basis until college, so in some sense I grew up alongside these disruptive technologies and not before or after. I like to think this gives me a unique perspective on how these modern conveniences affect the way we think and how we look at the world. Although I’m more in tune with computers than most people at my parents age ever will be, I still find myself shocked whenever I see ten year olds with cell phones or hear about elementary school students doing anything on the internet besides playing Oregon Trail.
So the world is changing and it seems our childrens’ brains are changing as well just to keep up. Ages ago, humans evolved to use tools to adapt to the natural world, but now we find ourselves forced to adapt to our own tools. How did we end up on the wrong side of the stick? It seems like we’ve created a feedback loop of biology and technology, but sometimes I’m not entirely sure that our biological adaptations serve us as much as they serve to facilitate the runaway growth in complexity of technology. In some sense, I think we’re so enamored by our digital creations that we assume whatever progress we make is inevitably good progress and therefore the onus is upon the human brain to keep up. We’ve prostrated ourselves before the altar of the microchip.
The reason I mention all this is because I recently learned of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program. I was totally blown away by the scope and vision of the program - to provide the world’s poorest children with “a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.” The mind reels considering what sort of possibilities this can open up for these children and for the entire world. Like my last Op-Ed piece pointed out, who knows how many Einsteins and Edisons are waiting for an education in the developing world? For the purpose of giving these kids connection to the outside world, freedom to pursue their own intellectual passions and the resources to become autodidacts, I wholeheartedly applaud Mr. Negroponte. This program has the potential to transform the world in countless ways and I can’t wait to see the effects.
What gives me pause, however, is the concern that we will stop at the laptop. I’m concerned that sending laptops to Kenya will become the educational equivalent of dropping sacks of rice from the sky - well intentioned, but ineffective in creating long term change without some further human interaction. Even in the richest nation in the world, we’ve begun to find that computers in the classroom do not show any correlation to improved test scores. It’s completely commonplace today for American middle and high school students to have their own computers and yet I’d feel quite confident wagering that far less than half of their time on it is spent for educational purposes. Some circles of education are finding that computers in the classroom are actually having negative effects on the progress of students.
One factor in education, however, has proven to be extremely beneficial and most of the world’s best scientists, artists, politicians and engineers have cited it as having a highly critical impact on their own success. That factor is having a good teacher. Connection to the internet is extremely powerful and so is educational software, but absolutely nothing can replace the sort of passionate curiosity that can only be instilled by parents, teachers and mentors. In a recent New Yorker conference, the erudite Malcolm Gladwell proclaimed, “There’s nothing you can do to improve school more than by improving the teachers [sic].” More than class size, computers or any other resource, good teachers equate to good education. But, he went on to note that being a “good teacher” actually boils down to something quite ineffable, citing a recent study which showed that the best educated, most prepared educational experts performed on par with a random sample of ordinary people. I can’t say this for sure, but I feel very confident that this ineffable quality probably boils down to two things - passion and the ability to connect. I say this because I know that the teachers I learned the most from were always the ones who inspired and motivated me with their passion or through their connection to me on a human level.
So, let’s send laptops to Uganda and Cambodia. But let’s not forget that the people that built those laptops probably had a whole cadre of teachers and parents pushing them forward. If we really want to teach these children we also have to instill in them a passionate curiosity. Otherwise, we’re just giving them a window into another world.
This article from the LA Times disturbed me a bit, but did not entirely surprise me. The more that I learn about traditional philanthropy it seems the more I am convinced that we can find new and better ways to approach the problems of our time. Whether some new form of capitalism is that solution waits to be seen. But, it’s articles like this one that give one pause about the current status quo.
For-profit fundraisers collect loads, but nonprofits see a sliver
And a bit of more upbeat news. Kiva has burst onto the world of social media, getting involved with the juggernaut that is Facebook.
Kiva + facebook = involver
I just read another great article on creative capitalism over at Creative Capitalism: A Conversation. It touches on something that I’ve thought about a lot recently: the perception of capitalism as a solution for poverty. Despite the fact that capitalism is by definition an economic system, I think for many people it is a gut reaction to instinctively judge it as though it were an ideology. Proponents of capitalism point to the incredible wealth created and the growth of the middle class in the countries that have benefited from it, while opponents highlight the sweatshops, the environmental disasters and the endless pursuit of cheap labor that has devastated small town America. When you get right down to it, capitalism is capable of producing both incredibly good and incredibly bad results. You can build a house with a hammer or bludgeon someone to death with it, but this does not make the hammer good or bad. I don’t think capitalism is any different.
In the past century capitalism has done an even mix of good and bad, but individuals tend to focus on only one or the other. If capitalism is truly to be used as a tool for eliminating poverty we must treat it just like the hammer - with respect and with an understanding that it’s our responsibility to ensure it produces positive results. As Kyle Chauvin points out in his essay, we have already seen that the benefits of capitalism have already begun to creep beyond the borders of western nations into places like South Korea, Isreal and Peru. So, we have good reason to believe that it is a sound strategy to continue to promote the growth of this economic system in the developing world, which has borne the brunt of the negative side effects of capitalism in the past century. But, we cannot forget that simply spreading capitalism isn’t enough. We must spread ethically and environmentally responsible capitalism. The choice between global prosperity and poverty lies in the way we approach this issue.
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