By Adam S. Poswolsky

If extreme poverty is going to be eradicated in our lifetime, all sectors of society, especially young people, need to be mobilized.

Nourish International, a social venture started in 2003 by a student at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, get this.  That’s why it engages students on college campuses to use social entrepreneurship to empower community partners in the developing world.

Nourish puts students in the driver seat to take action by running social ventures at their chapters, while contributing investment in sustainable development projects around the world. They have a national office that provides resources, programs and trainings for students to start their own entrepreneurial ventures.  The students select the ventures to run, the students select the partner organizations, and the students see the projects through implementation by going to work alongside their partners abroad during the summer.

“Fortunately for the field, many amazing student organizations are now working in grassroots community development,” explains Allie Treske, chief operating officer for Nourish International.  “Nourish is unique in that it takes student leadership seriously.  Two college students serve on our board of directors, and co-lead our student advisory board, a nationwide group of student leaders who have a serious stake in the future of this organization.”

The focus on student leadership is paying off, as Nourish has already raised over $350,000 in partner communities in 25 countries around the world since 2004, and will expand from 28 to 45 campus chapters by the end of the year, with a goal of reaching 100 campuses over the next five years.

The Nourish chapter at the University of Texas-Austin raised over $5,000 through their Hunger Lunch program, in which they partner with a local food truck, Naan Stop, and sell Indian food on campus. Proceeds from the student-led venture went towards an educational initiative that supports technology infrastructure including computers through DJMV, a nonprofit community partner that works to improve living conditions of poor and marginalized people in Odisha, India.

Nourish selects their projects based on partnerships with established organizations on the ground, ensuring they are meeting the needs of the community members, providing the resources that they want and need.  “This enables a group of students who otherwise wouldn’t really know how to go about doing development work, how to actually make an impact in helping the poor,” says John McCreary, a University of Texas-Austin graduate, and former student board member.

Other organizations are also empowering students to create global change.  GlobeMed matches students with grassroots organizations to address health disparities.  FaceAids has raised $2.5 million to fight AIDS by building a movement of young leaders, with 230 student chapters focused on global health equity.

Like Nourish, FeelGood incorporates student social entrepreneurship, by having students run non-profit delis specializing in grilled cheese sandwiches, and investing 100% of the proceeds in partner organizations eradicating global hunger.  FeelGood was started in 2004 by Kristen Walter and Talis Apud, then students at the University of Texas-Austin, and now has chapters at universities across the country.

Nourish projects allow students to learn social entrepreneurship skills,but also receive hands-on field experience working in community development. Students at Ohio State University partnered with the Global Health Network, a nonprofit primary health organization focusing on maternal and child health, to build the capacity of health workers in Oyam, Uganda. After six weeks, the students taught sexual and reproductive health education to local youth, constructed latrines, and visited the homes of new and expecting mothers. The students were also involved counseling and testing over 700 women and their spouses as part of an outreach program for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Some organizations are working to ensure young people get passionate about eradicating poverty before they even go to college.  Global Citizen Year sends high school graduates to work on service learning projects in Senegal, Brazil, and Ecuador for up to eight months for an impactful gap year before college.

“By living with a family in a single community, our Fellows remain in one place long enough to learn the local language and customs, and to develop the trust and relationships which help them understand why people are poor, and what actually works (and doesn’t) in addressing the root causes of poverty,” explains founder Abby Falik.  “In contrast to classroom based study of poverty, this learning comes through first-hand observation and experience.”

Organizations like Global Citizen Year and Nourish have demonstrated that the personal experience of working in grassroots development keeps young people passionate about poverty eradication, long after they graduate college.

(Photo Courtesy of Subject)

Dana Frasz is a food entrepreneur.  She wants to recycle food, taking the food that’s not consumed and putting it into the hands of those who cannot afford it.  She wants companies to stop wasting so much food – at the grocery story and in restaurants.  She wants us all to be aware of how much we’re throwing in the dustbin.  Too idealistic?  Frasz would argue otherwise.  Hear her talk about her passion – FoodShift. 

How much waste is there currently in the US and how accurate are these figures?

40% of all the food produced in the US is wasted.

This figure is from national experts on food waste – author, Jonathan Bloom wrote “American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half its Food” and Dana Gunders has been researching this issue for at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

What are grocery stores doing currently to prevent food waste?  Are there any policies in place to prevent this?

Some grocery stores are donating excess food or marking down the prices of food that is still good but may be past its peak freshness, damaged in some way or cosmetically imperfect.  There is a federal policy in place to encourage food donation.  It’s called the Good Samaritan Food Act and it was passed specifically to encourage the donation of food.  It protects food donors from liability as long as they are donating to a non-profit.  Many food donors can also receive tax deductions for their donations.

What has been the toughest part for you, as an activist and a social entrepreneur, in this effort?

I am really disturbed by the excessive waste and consumption in American culture.

Our materialistic lifestyles in the US have negative social and environmental impacts around the world. Rather than living in harmony with the earth, we are perpetuating a culture that is dependent on exploitation, extraction and acquisition. Food waste is not only a waste of nutrition, it squanders water, depletes soil, wastes fossil fuels and adds greatly to the world’s carbon footprint.

What is your solution? 

Food Shift is working with Oakland schools to ensure surplus food from the cafeteria is redistributed to students and families rather than thrown in the garbage. We are working with a local grocer who has expressed interest in paying Food Shift to recover food from their stores.  This would allow us to employ someone in the process while reducing waste disposal costs for the business.  We are interested in developing food recovery and redistribution models that increase access to more nutrition food, reduce waste and generate revenue in some way so they can sustain and scale – like low-cost markets and value-added products.

How feasible is it?

We have trash and recycling removal in this country, why not have a food recovery service sector that recovers and redistributes surplus food as an extension of our current waste management system?

It may sound crazy, but it is realistic strategy and could create a lot of jobs in the green economy.  Generating revenue from food that would otherwise be wasted is possible, but by no means easy.  It’s a difficult challenge to ensure food safety, to establish new distribution channels and to pilot new models that are outside of the current norm.

Why do stores not simply list fresh foods items as 50% off at night, an hour or so before closing?  That seems to make sense to avoid waste and still make some money. 

It makes so much sense – and people love a good deal.  Berkeley Bowl estimates it sells $1,500 per day of produce off its bargain shelf, which offers bags of damaged or nearly expired produce for  99 cents, Andronicos is running a program with Food Star to sell cosmetically imperfect produce at a low cost and Zero Percent is a technology that is allowing food establishment to post their surplus through an online application at either a discount or for donation.  These are all great innovations that more businesses should adopt to reduce waste, save money and protect the environment.

Are there models for food waste elsewhere in the world (that you’ve read/seen) that you would like to see implemented here in the US?

The United Kingdom is leading the way on this issue. A campaign there called Love Food Hate Waste has reduced food waste by 18% over the course of 5 years.  The UK has also standardized date labels so they are not so confusing for consumers.  Many grocery stores there provide storage instructions for fruits and vegetables and informational tips and ads are displayed in over 12,000 stores.  Instead of buy-one-get-one-free promotions, some UK stores are piloting a buy-one-give-one-free or get one later program. I also really like Rubbies in the  Rubble – a company in the UK making jam and chutney from rescued produce.

What can each person do? 

Become a food waste champion within your family and circle of friends!  There are lots of recipes and other tips online.  Here is a storage guide. And until May 12th you can vote for Food Shift in this contest to win $50,000 of free advertising on San Francisco’s public transit system.   If Food Shift wins this contest, it would mean thousands of people would be exposed to informational ads about the social and environmental costs of wasted food. Our campaign would be the first of its kind in this country and would inspire and invite Bay Area residents to be part of the solution. Help us win by voting now and sharing with your friends!   http://bit.ly/ZfntKG

By Nisha Kumar Kulkarni

Last month’s garment factory collapse in Savar, outside of Dhaka, is being coined as the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh’s history.

Though the police ordered the Rana Plaza building to be evacuated on April 23^rd due to a visible fracture in its infrastructure, five garment factories housed within, employing a total of 3,122 workers, continued “business as usual” on April 24^th.

The consequences of this decision are heartbreaking: though approximately 2,500 people were rescued from the building’s rubble, a fire broke out in the ruins just days after the collapse, and the death toll to date has crossed 900 people.

Unfortunately, this devastating collapse follows on the heels of other disasters that have plagued Bangladesh’s garment industry. In November 2012, a garment factory fire killed 117 people, also near Dhaka. Factory workers were reportedly jumping out of windows to reach safety.

The repeated incidences of factory workers very literally being in the line of fire has reignited discussion and debate in Bangladesh, and the world, on how to better support and safeguard the rights of workers.

Dr. Mustafa Mujeri, director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), explains, “Workers’ rights are not high on the policy agenda. This is true in general, but more so in the garments sector. The basic rights of garment workers are neglected, especially related to workers’ safety, which has led to many tragic incidents.”

That is not really news, given that the garment industry is where cheap labor fuels cheap products. And the garment industry’s importance to Bangladesh’s economy is undeniable: in 2005, at least 75% of the country’s earnings from exports came from the garment industry.

This is obviously a huge feat, but it also increases the pressure to meet international demand for retailers, including H&M, Gap Inc. and Walmart, who rely on the country’s relatively inexpensive garment factories. From the factory perspective, the easiest way to keep costs low is by taking shortcuts when it comes to sound infrastructure and, of course, hiring cheap labor.

For this reason, there is escalating public discourse on the responsibility of companies manufacturing in foreign countries and on “fair-trade” working conditions.

So who are these garment workers?

They are rural migrants, often young women between the ages 16 and 25, who have moved closer to urban centers for stronger economic opportunities. They may move with their families or on their own, charged with sending remittances back to the village. Young women with limited formal education have few options in the big city: they are typically employed as domestic help, the maids and cooks of middle- and upper-class households, or they can find work in factories, where the wage is relatively higher. It has also been reported that Bangladesh’s garment industry is one of the largest employers of child labor.

The national minimum monthly wage in Bangladesh is ~US$38 – that is just a smidgen over US$1.25 per day, and officially, a garment worker may take home about that much with each paycheck. However, the actual earned income of a garment worker is likely variable, and in many cases, unknown.

It is clear, then, why garment workers are not fully empowered citizens: if the majority are women and children, they hold little sway over their employers – factory owners and foreign conglomerates. Working-class men encounter the same challenge.

Their lack of economic and political bargaining powers makes them easy to ignore and exploit.

Mujeri says Rana Plaza collapsed for several reasons. But the most critical one is failure to implement safety standards by factory owners, the government, fashion companies and other actors in the garment industry.

“The government’s lack of seriousness along with owners’ greed [are] responsible. [The] garment owners lobby is very powerful,” he notes.

Sajid Iqbal, a social entrepreneur and founder of CHANGE, an affordable lighting project in slum communities, agrees, “[The] government should be less dependent on [the] BGMEA [Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association], and [the] BGMEA should be more accountable to the government.”

Given these conditions, what can be done?

There are grassroots efforts to educate poor labor communities and provide them with goods and services that may otherwise be out of their reach. But in terms of a more large-scale effort to address workers’ safety, not only in the garment industry but also in Bangladesh’s brick, shipbreaking, housing and waste management industries — amongst others — there is clearly room to make impact.

The not-for-profit sphere has been making its mark on Bangladeshi workers’ rights for nearly 20 years.

• The Awaj Foundation implements education, health and legal initiatives for Bangladeshi garment workers.
• Verité has been working with international corporations to guarantee safe conditions for workers in countries like Bangladesh.
• And INCLUDED is taking a more holistic approach by focusing on inclusive cities and empowering migrant communities around the world, including Bangladesh.

Organizations such as these are doing valuable work, but would a model of for-profit social entrepreneurship further impact Bangladeshi workers’ rights in a meaningful way?

There are successful examples of such models’ efficacy in the garment industry around the world – just look at the Indian chain of retail stores, FabIndia and the socially-consciousness business of rug-making, Jaipur Rugs. Another example in South Asia includes Nepali fair-trade enterprise Mahaguthi, which produces, markets and exports handicrafts by more than 1,000 producers from the Kathmandu Valley.

But first, for such an enterprise to start in Bangladesh, the challenges and needs of workers need to be better understood. Gilbert Houngbo, deputy director general for field operations and partnerships at the International Labor Organization (ILO), states, “If workers are not able to make their voices heard, and organize themselves and speak collectively, then it will be much harder to understand the real problems and make the changes necessary.”

(Photo Courtesy of Creative Commons/ Flickr)

Kim Campbell and Hila Mehr

Last week, gaming company Zynga announced the launch of a $1M accelerator for educational games in partnership with the NewSchools Venture Fund. Similarly, ed-tech incubator Imagine K12 recently announced the formation of a Start Fund that will support promising new ed-tech entrepreneurs with a $100k investment. Education technology is seeing more money, support, and incubation than ever before. As exciting as it is to see these changes, as the sector grows, what we would like to see more of in ed-tech is design research.

One of the resounding lessons from the failure of initiatives like One Laptop Per Child has been that ed-tech initiatives fail to reach their potential when they lack understanding of the school environment and users. This is where design research comes in.

“Design research,” a term popularized by innovation consultancy IDEO, is the discipline of developing a deep understanding of users and incorporating them into every element of a product’s design. Rather than getting feedback on a product your team has already built, design research demands that your users’ needs drive a product’s development from the beginning. For new enterprises, understanding the user is no longer an extra element to give the company an edge; it’s a pre-requisite to success. This is the level of acceptance design research needs to take in the world of education technology.

Where design thinking becomes especially relevant to ed-tech is the fact that we are already seeing technology products being developed for a wide range of education systems throughout the world. Technology in education has captured the imagination of leaders on every continent and the past few years has seen announcement of one-tablet-per-child schemes in India, Ethiopia, Thailand, and New York City. Exchanging ideas across nations is exciting and encouraged, as long as the heavy lifting is done to ensure that the idea meets the needs of the people and can thrive in the new context each school district, city, and country offers.

Our report, Education Technology in India: Designing Ed-Tech for Affordable Private Schools lays the groundwork for understanding users in India’s growing affordable private school (APS) market. Through our own application of several design research methods, we uncovered how each school stakeholder influences technology purchases, and identified over a dozen tangible ways ed-tech could better address school pain-points and succeed in the APS context.

For instance, developing solutions that rely on tech use in spaces outside of school could reinforce the surprising gender gaps that we found in Internet access between girls and boys. It’s important for core educational content to be visually appealing to students while tied explicitly to the school curriculum, otherwise teachers will have to work harder to make it relevant, or just see it as a burden. Parents’ middle class aspirations for their children make them willing to invest in technologies that will improve their children’s grades, and also develop skill that makes the children more employable, with an emphasis on English language and 21^st century skills.

As ed-tech products become more sophisticated, integration of stakeholders needs to be present through all stages of the product’s creation. Investors and ed-tech accelerators can be an important part of facilitating this trend. For instance, Imagine K12 accomplishes this with its teachers in residence program. The constant conversation that the cohort has with teachers throughout their company’s development helps create scalable, workable solutions that can actually take hold in the classroom. Programs like Stanford’s d.school fellowship for Edu innovators could also be the beginning of placing thoughtful design and ed-tech in tandem.

Why is design research so important to education technology? Because each school is really its own little universe, with its own ecosystem, objectives, and colony of unique individuals. The outcome of creating products that actually work can open a world of opportunity and learning success for a child–or for a generation of children. The cost of not building relevant and innovative products is too high. So let’s not miss the opportunity to change the future of education and start taking the time to understand the people behind the solutions we’re building.

Kim Campbell and Hila Mehr are co-authors of the report.  Campbell recently worked with Grey Matters Foundation on ed-tech project in Hyderabad and Mehr is a recent IDEX fellow in Social Enterprise.

by Brittany Koteles

Unreasonable at Sea (UaS), a first-time collaboration between Unreasonable Institute, Semester at Sea, and Stanford’s d. school, was born with the objective to accelerate companies that are using technology to solve the world’s biggest social problems.   This past week it came to a close.

Eleven handpicked companies came aboard UaS with twenty mentors.   The journey included a 25,000-mile itinerary, 600 cohabiting university students, two learning partners, fifteen ports, and four months to let their minds and projects loose on the world.

By the end of the trip, each of the eleven startups saw changes in their business plans.  The Series B financing round for the companies totaled over 30 million dollars. Something is working – but what is it?

The Island Effect

Was Unreasonable at Sea just that good at picking potent startups and all-star mentors? What makes this program more than a sensational twist on your average accelerator?

Founder Daniel Epstein would argue that the magic lies in the “Island Effect.”

“If you take unlikely people, trap them in confined quarters, and foster a wildly creative environment, the pace of innovation is unstoppable,” says Epstein. “We have trapped some of the most potent, interesting, entrepreneurial, and wayward thinking individuals in the world on this ship as we set sail over the course of 100 days.”

Judging from stories like that of Guru-G, it just may be the wind in the sails of the Unreasonable at Sea entrepreneurs.

Guru-G uses a “gamified” platform to make work fun and engaging for teachers around the world. One of the company’s great challenges is that their application is tablet-based – meaning that the world’s poorest teachers don’t have access to the tool. That all changed in 48 hours, thanks to an encounter between the Guru-G team and three key mentors.

It all started when Google X Experience Lead Tom Chi planted a wild challenge: How could you make your product without a tablet? The spark was fueled by prior conversations with Tom Clayton, founder of Bubble Motion (“Twitter with voice”), and FrontlineSMS founder Ken Banks. Three isolated ideas combusted into a breakthrough for Gugu-G: It might be possible to translate their product to the cheapest, simplest cell phones out there. “By combining data-wire SMS and a voice-based platform, we wouldn’t need a tablet,” says founder Anand Joshi.

“It was a crazy idea,” he adds with a laugh – but the team took hold of the absurd notion before reality could ground them.

“By 5pm, we had all the mentors around the same table,” says Joshi. “For three hours, they threw us all the feedback and ideas they had. By 8pm, we decided to do it.

In 48 hours, the team had a complete development plan for the new business line, with a feasible design and complete next steps. Founder Chetan Manikantan says that the breakthrough wouldn’t have happened in the comfort of their Bangalore-based office.

“Even if we were with the same people in the real world, we couldn’t lock ourselves in a room and develop it. On the ship, we had the uncommon agility and swiftness to create.”

But the “Island Effect” isn’t just about good ideas and brilliant minds: Less glamorous and equally important was the trust that was quickly created among the innovators. “The sense of community and family on the ship was incredible,” shares Evan Swinehart, editor and cinematographer for the Unreasonable team. “Ship life played a big role in it.”

They lived in the ship’s old crew rooms – simple, close, and tiny.  Swinehart says it was no mistake. “They didn’t want us in our rooms; they wanted us to be participating in the atmosphere and engaging in the program.”

Your average business accelerator doesn’t include a three-day storm in the middle of the Pacific, with 10-foot swells that make it difficult to stand straight. Parallel to the trajectory of the startups themselves, the Unreasonable crew’s literal weathering of storms may be an overlooked but crucial player in the experiment.

Isolation in Moderation: Finding the Balance

Unreasonable at Sea aims to strike a balance between Epstein’s “Island Effect” and a crucial connection to the real world. For these entrepreneurs, port time didn’t imply encounters in fancy office building. Rather, they were unleashed upon the streets of fifteen different cities.

Adventures unfold in the real-world grit. Swinehart recalls one such instance in Ghana with Protei, a company that’s designing ocean drones for oil spills. The team was in search of some nearby oil fields for testing – but a twist of fate resulted in an improvised work session with the local fishermen.

“The drones are made to clean the oceans, but the guys started discussing other uses for fishermen, like detecting rocks or casting nets,” says Swinehart. “I thought the day was a bust, and it ended up being a huge learning experience.”

Borderless Business

Unreasonable at Sea is a combo of the Island Effect that’s kept in check by healthy interruptions from the world’s real problems. It’s what sets this program apart from others, say the entrepreneurs on board.

Catlin Powers says that it’s a learning experience that changed the trajectory of One World Designs. “This trip has reminded us that the world we’d like to see depends on much more than my business. It’s a global dialog, and it’s one that we need to engage in.”

“For what we want to do, borders are invisible,” says Gugu-G’s Chetan. “Before, we saw ‘travel to work’ as the two-mile trip between home and office. Now, we’re realizing that we might have to make a few more 10,000 mile pit stops.”

Unreasonable at Sea has discovered something powerful – an Island Effect that’s kept in check by healthy interruptions from the world’s real problems. It’s what sets this program apart from others, and it’s what will continue to drive the impact in the participating companies. Other actors have caught onto the trend, like 500 Startups with Geeks on a Plane.

Surely, they’re onto something big. But is it too big? Unreasonable at Sea may be the opportunity of a lifetime for eleven, but behind them are over 1,000 applicants that didn’t make it aboard. For the ones that did, the opportunity also implied a four-month hiatus from day-to-day business, complete with questionable internet connection (whose very mention to one of the entrepreneurs ensures a roll of the eyes and a short laugh).

“It would have been impossible to run One Earth Designs from the ship,” says Powers. “We were only able to do it because we have an incredible team on the ground.”

Unreasonable at Sea is knocking impact entrepreneurship’s global storytelling out of the park, but small, local models need the Island Effect, too.  As ships and trains set the bar, impact entrepreneurship will continue to benefit when local innovators adapt their core practices to any reality – whether it be land or sea.

(Photo Courtesy of Subject)

THOUGHTS POST SKOLL WORLD FORUM:

When it comes to sustainability, one of the things that has always nagged me about companies that “go green” is that it typically just means recycling things around the office, some minor carpooling and installing or purchasing renewable energy.  There is nothing wrong with these efforts, but it’s a bit like the Human Torch staving off Mr. Freeze with a Bic Lighter.  Sure it’s the right direction and maybe even setting a good example others will follow, but it’s a serious, nearly negligent under-utilization of power.

The vast bulk of most companies’ environmental and social impact comes well before they decide how to power the lights in their offices.  The majority of a product’s impact is often in the sourcing and manufacture of its material components.  In others, like automobiles, the impact is in how the product is used (ie burning fuels for 10 years).  Rarely, therefore, is the majority of a company’s impact in the scope of a typical greening agenda.

Sustainable sourcing is a major step forward and was the subject of the session Sustainable Sourcing: The Business Imperative.  Moderator Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto led an interesting discussion on the topic and seeded the most interesting and actionable insight in the process.   Together with the panelists, William Rosenzweig, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Physic Ventures, Mary Jo Cook, Chief Impact Officer of FairTrade USA and Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Markets of World Wildlife Fund US, the Dean Martin explored audience selected topics.  The process started with a macro conditions exploration including these gems paraphrased from Jason Clay –

The foreboding:   In the next forty years we have to produce as much food and fiber as in the last 8000

The more hopeful (room to improve):  the bottom 25% of producers create 50% of the impact and only 10% of the products

The most interesting portion of the discussion was that on the barriers to adoption of truly sustainable sourcing, playing off some highly relevant audience members.  It became clear that there are indeed political barriers in convincing CEO’s and investors that sustainable sourcing can be good or at worst neutral to the bottom line and communication challenges in bringing that message down through organizations to the purchasers who ultimately select products.  But, an undercurrent that had been popping up throughout the discussion became acutely apparent.  There is a very real practical challenge in enacting a sustainable sourcing policy.  Supply chains are so complex and often opaque that it is incredibly challenging to actually determine how much carbon or water may be required to produce a product or whether all components meet humanitarian or labor standards.

The need, as Dean Martin highlighted, is for a comprehensive toolset to allow all actors in the value chain to enact sustainability goals.  He advocated an assemblage of foundations and non-profits working in related areas to come together around this issue as one that can transform so many others.  I believe he is right that all too often those seeking change will look to closely at their particular issue’s direct on the ground impact, and miss the root causes or potential solutions that could exist.  He further advocated that this assemblage work to create a tool map of sorts which can be disseminated and then broken off by anyone who can fill the puzzle.

This got me excited and thinking:  This could be a real step towards real change.  But, what would such a toolset include?  My own first pass would be:

-        Open supply chain mapping data & software

-        Common ranking and metrics for impacts – positive and negative

-        “Additive Impact Analysis” – my name for the ability to take the impact of a component product and add it to the whole, all the way through the value chain

-        Choice software that allows a purchaser to quickly see the impacts and balance them against cost and more common factors quickly and clearly

-        Better business methodologies for measuring supply chain risk as it relates to environmental and other “soft” factors

-        A mechanism for supply chain insurance that does not require creation of a duplicate supply chain but instead makes existing ones more distributed, sustainable and secure

-        Public indexes for key environmental data from suppliers around the world.  This can help bring aid and attention to the worst and plaudits for the best

-        A more comprehensive consumer facing labeling system – there are too many to the point where impact is being lost

-        Metrification of environmental and social impacts

It’s imperative that those who have super-hero leverage over the levers of the global sourcing system activate them.  The top 1000 companies control 33% of the global economy; if they act, the world changes.  What tools do you think are missing to convince even a less forward leaning company that they can source sustainably?

This is a guest post by Michael Thornton, a current Skoll Scholar and MBA student at Said Business School, University of Oxford, who attend the Skoll World Forum this April.

(Photo: Antonio Viva, Creative Commons)

by Brittany Koteles

As a follow-up to yesterday’s piece on the explosion of crowdfunding in 2012, here’s a list of new platforms that connect crowdfunding to people, communities, and causes.  Have a specific project? There may be a crowdfunding site for it.

*******

Contests: Crowdfunder’s CROWDFUNDx remains the leader in bringing crowdfunding to the real world in live events. The company is launching both place-based campaigns and social enterprise-only pitch competitions, like CROWDIMPACT.

Research: Funders on Microryza receive lab updates from projects they fund, where they can directly interact with the researchers. When the study concludes, you’ll receive access to a journal with your name in the credits. Spotlight: A team that received $15,000 in funding has already launched its project to cure hookworms.

Local communities: Municipalities vet projects and submit them directly to Citizinvestor, where – you guessed it – citizens(!) can choose to fund the projects they care about most. Lucky Ant and CommunityFunded are two other examples, but their beta versions have a lot of geographical territory left to cover.

Young people with good ideas: Upstart is only open to approved investors, but its idea is distinct: Invest in a person, not a business. In this case, the person is a recent college grad with a big idea. The concept is starting to catch on in college alumni associations: crowdfunding could be the next big engagement tool that bridges successful alumni with bright-eyed students and recent grads from their alma mater. Alumni Funder is an important actor in the up-and-coming trend.

Inventions: Christie Street raises funds for inventors using pre-purchases as the main incentive. Like many niche platforms, Christie Street is has an expert team dedicated to vetting projects before putting them online. Inventors must submit designs, unit-cost calculations, trademarks, and they must agree to third-party audits. James Siminoff, chief inventor, hopes that creating an ecosystem and community around the cause will attract the best inventors to them.

Healthcare: MedStartr’s expert team offers a rigorous selection process and targeted mentoring. “One project like the Little Blue Suit succeeding can save thousands of lives and that is our true metric for success,” says founder Alex Fair.

Music: PledgeMusic, run by “music people,” boasts a 90% success rate and lets fans get involved in a band or label’s creative process. They don’t require the all-or-nothing funding label, a perk for aspiring artists.

Energy: Mentioned above, Mosaic is knocking it out of the park, and Kiva is leveraging its huge global network.

Literature: Book fans pool their resources in unglue.it to pay authors up-front to publish a Creative Commons ebook.

Equity crowdfunding: Platforms like CircleUp and Seedrs paving the way to equity-based crowdfunding – meaning that investors receive a return investment if the company succeeds. Since the US legal situation still hasn’t opened equity funding to the masses, US-based CircleUp if for accredited investors only; whereas UK-based Seedrs is available to the masses.

Bonus: OpenIDEO
This isn’t actually crowdfunding. OpenIDEO makes it easy for people to contribute to creating game changing social innovations. The platform presents social issue “challenges” – each one paired with a partnering nonprofit – and facilitates a massive creative process to shake out new solutions and ideas.

Brittany Koteles is a Spain-based writer on social impact and serves as the community director at HUB Barcelona.

(Photo Courtesy of Creative Commons)

By Brittany Koteles

In 2012, crowdfunding platforms grew 81 percent, while venture capital investments fell for the first time in three years. While I’m not here to forecast the death of VC, I do believe that the growth of crowdfunding implies some radical changes for the future.

Compared to the rigid nature of traditional funding mechanisms – where most social entrepreneurs won’t raise anything but eyebrows – crowdfunding is the biggest democratization of capital access in history. That’s big. According to a recent study by Massolution in 2012, it’s 2.7 billion dollars big.

Over ten percent of that hefty sum comes from Kickstarter alone, one of the leading platforms in the field. Kickstarter, along with peers like Indiegogo and RocketHub, has pioneered the crowdfunding market and refined the user experience of online giving.

Another wave of change will come with the pending implementation of the JOBS Act, allowing a person to sell his company’s equity on crowdfunding sites. Besides a handful of countries in the world, law usually reserves this power for accredited investors – really rich people that make up about 1 percent of the population.

But while we still expect change from the giants, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. With hundreds of other platforms coming onto the radar, crowdfunding still has much of its story to write.

Crowdfunding may have been born on the internet, but the best innovators in the market are finding ways to build meaningful bridges between projects and their funders. “The true power of the crowd isn’t about random people showing up on the web,” says Chance Barnett, founder of Crowdfunder, one of the companies leading these changes. “Crowdfunding has a higher evolution…one that is all about connecting real people in real communities. It’s an idea whose time has come.”

Identity, not serendipity, is what gets funding to ideas that deserve it. There are a few ways crowdfunding is beginning to evolve beyond massive platforms, but all of them have this basic tenant in common.

Face-to-face.

On April 23, Crowdfunder will launch its first edition of CROWDIMPACT, an online-offline live pitch event for social enterprise. Over 100 social enterprises have vied for twelve spots to pitch to over $100 million in capital, and one of them will walk away with a $20,000 prize. Finalist Tippy Tippens says that like-minded partners are a timely necessity Matter, Inc, which she founded in the wake of the BP oil spills. “We just became the first B-Corp in Louisiana and we have a whole stock of new social goods…making new connections at CROWDIMPACT could significantly help us extend our reach. And it wouldn’t hurt to win one of the prizes!”

Crowdfund thy neighbor.

Another emergent breed is hyper-local platforms, where backers invest in the people and projects in their own community. With platforms like New York-based Lucky Ant, a backer’s zip code – not an algorithm – determines the projects she browses. This spring, Lucky Ant went a step further by launching a special campaign to help Coney Island SMEs get back on their feet before the summer season.

“Small businesses aren’t going to be getting assistance from the Red Cross,” said cofounder Jonathan Moyal. “Sometimes, the little guys get left by the wayside.” If each community had its own crowdfunding platform, citizens could quickly respond to both immediate needs and inspiring ideas.

Divide and conquer.

What will happen when there are thousands of platforms out there? Will the glass ceiling shatter?

According to Alex Feldman, probably not. Feldman founded CrowdsUnite to help individuals make sense out of the huge amount of platforms in the market (they count more than 700). According to him, “As long as niche sites differentiate themselves from the larger players, they will not go out of business.” In fact, they just might end up driving the social innovation industry.

Many smaller, specialized platforms have converted into critical rabble-rousers for a specific cause. MedStartr, for example, clearly states that its mission is to “crowdfund the healthcare revolution.”

The startup – whose seed money was also raised with crowdfunding capital – filters projects with a rigorous clinical review process and offers free mentoring for participating projects. “The consultative services is our secret sauce,” says Alex Fair, MedStartr’s founder. “These people didn’t go to business school, they went to medical school. [Supplemental mentoring] is one of the reasons why our clients have raised millions online and offline.”

Mosaic is turning the energy industry upside-down by bringing solar power to the mainstream. Through Mosaic, individuals invest money in solar projects like the People’s Grocery in Oakland, CA. When the project is up and running, investors receive interest that’s higher than they would get at the bank.

Although debt equity is technically different from crowdfunding (a close legal “cousin” of sorts), Mosaic is one of the most innovative examples of how investment from the masses can spark a movement.

Similarly, Kiva’s Green Loans have provided over 2,600 small-scale loans for renewable energy projects in developing countries.

“The reality is that clean renewable energy is out of reach for the vast majority of those who need it most,” says Premal Shah, president and co-founder of Kiva. “Now, with crowdfunding, we have the opportunity to come together to support a cause that affects all of us, one microloan at a time.”

March on Washington, Version 2.0

There is no shortage of examples of how crowdfunding is becoming a vehicle for broad social causes – from (legally) freeing copyrighted books to the world, to solving domestic hunger – and their numbers are growing every day. Community-centered, issue-specific crowdfunding platforms could become the next big revolution-igniters in 2013 and beyond. No longer about funding isolated projects, these networks are investing in relationships, communities, and downright movements.

May the crowd go wild.

Brittany Koteles is a Spain-based writer on social impact and serves as the community director at HUB Barcelona.

(Photo Courtesy of Creative Commons Images)

by Mark Clayton Hand

The Skoll World Forum, the world’s glitziest talking shop on social entrepreneurship and impact investing, is full of conversations. Here are four topics receiving major attention this year (and one that should be).

1. How to engage governments

At the CASE-hosted conference on impact-investing at Skoll on Wednesday, Katherine Fulton reminded her audience that when the term impact investing was coined five(ish) years ago, policy was nowhere on the agenda. Today, however, most impact investors and social entrepreneurs are ready to acknowledge the centrality of policymakers to having more than local-level change. For impact investors in developing markets, access to policymakers serves as a critical component of its investment model. Big Society Capital’s increasingly central role in the UK social entrepreneurship market would not have been possible without support by politicians, and social impact bonds often depend on a governmental partner. The Strive Network in Cincinnati work on collective impact relies upon the participation of government partners. And so on.

2. The importance of telling stories

Wandering around the Skoll World Forum this year is an interesting bunch: the Sundance Institute, Participant Media (the folks that brought us Lincoln), NPR, PBS Newshour — storytellers. At the same time that the social entrepreneurship world is wrestling with how to tell its story, storytelling itself is changing to reach the Millennials who, according to Sundance’s Cara Mertes, multitask so much that we pack 36 hours of activity into every 24 hour day. On August 1, Participant will launch its latest, most ambitious effort yet: Pivot, a television station to carry forward its efforts to tell stories with meaning and purpose.

3. Impact investors’ (lack of?) risk tolerance

During a session with Skoll Scholars, IGNIA’s Álvaro Rodríguez read out a quote from a much-discussed report on social entrepreneurship:

The overwhelming majority of impact investing funds and  we spoke to expressed a strong preference for investing in the later stage, certainly after commercial viability had been established and preferably once market conditions were well prepared for sustainable scaling.

This, Rodríguez pointed out, is not risk-tolerant capital. If impact investors want their investments to be truly disruptive (the theme of this year’s Forum), they will have to follow the lead of their most risk-tolerant peers; risk, Rodríguez argues, is a necessary by-product of innovation.

4. How foundations (mis?)manage their assets

In the U.S., foundations are required to give away 5% of their total assets each year. The rest is handled by finance professionals trained to invest in a wide range of assets, maximizing return in order to ensure the perpetual existence of that foundation. What does this mean? That many foundations — including those focused on changing how markets hold investments in the very same companies and structures that they are fighting against.

Total Impact Advisors’ Arthur Wood says that shifting 20% of foundations’ assets to mission-related investments could unlock over a trillion dollars of investment at a cost of roughly five billion dollars. Debra Schwartz of the MacArthur Foundation pointed out another cost of shifting dollars into riskier investments, namely the money that would no longer be available to put into causes and research that no investor with profit motives will touch.

5. The unspoken centrality of faith and religion

Ten years on, social entrepreneurship remains primarily charity-funded, be that through philanthropic families like those of the Bing Bang network or, foundations like Skoll and Echoing Green, or indirectly by foundations like DOEN Foundation that act as limited partners (LPs) in impact investing funds. The link between charity and religion is a similarly tight one: in 2011, religious groups took in a third of U.S. charity, and religious people are more likely to donate to charity than secularists. If social entrepreneurship is charity-funded, and much charity stems from religious conviction, religion ought to be a (big, open) part of the conversation.

This was originally posted on PolicyMic.

Photo Courtesy of Skoll World Forum.