A select group will be invited to board a ship charted by Semester at Sea, which will sail around the world for 100 days, spending a few days on land in countries like Brazil, India, and China.  The Unreasonable Institute will choose ten companies, represented by teams of two or three. The reason for inviting small teams, said Daniel Epstein, the founder of the Unreasonable Institute, is that “CEOs need to have their engineers with them so they can work, and iterate the projects as they go along.” There will be a handful of mentors on the ship to work with the entrepreneur teams.

In order to maximize the short amount of time spent in each country, the Unreasonable Institute is organizing a national event in each country that brings together the national social enterprise community and political leaders, to discuss how entrepreneurship is taking shape in that country.

“We want to create the conditions where meaningful relationships can happen. There will be intimate dinners. It’s not just a conference,” explained Epstein. Entrepreneurs will also have their own time to explore on-shore--and they will be encouraged to use their technologies to see how people respond to them. “They’ll see which aspects work and which don’t, and then come back on the ship, and they can iterate their projects as we go along,” said Epstein.

George Kembel, the co-founder of Stanford’s d.school, will be co-leading a class on design-thinking and international entrepreneurship on the ship, alongside Epstein. This partnership originated with Kembel led a workshop last summer for the Institute about design-thinking.

The inspiration for Unreasonable Institute at Sea dates back to Epstein’s college days, when he went on Semester at Sea. “We were mostly visiting countries in the Global South and it became obvious to me that these issues we face—healthcare, poverty—that they were ubiquitous around the world,” Epstein told Dowser. “So, in trying to think about solutions it seemed that they would have to be international in nature.”

During that trip, Epstein found that “everybody was an entrepreneur—by necessity” in the various countries they visited. “Whether they’re shoemakers or they’re selling water by the roadside, everybody was making their way into markets.”

The question for entrepreneurs who want to achieve impact, explained Epstein, is how to scale up “from 5000 to a million customers, and quickly.” Through the alumni who come out of the Unreasonable Fellows program at the Institute, Esptein said, “we’ve realized that there’s a chasm they need to cross once they’ve hit a large amount of customers—how do they go internationally, scale across borders?”

The Unreasonable Institute at Sea has zeroed in on ventures that focus on technology as a means of achieving impact. Epstein says that this is for two reasons: one is that it is “an experiment in focusing on one method,” and the other is that software or hardware-based projects are more amenable to iteration on board a moving ship. (The vessel will have wi-fi.)

Alongside the Unreasonable tea, 600 undergraduate students will be on the ship as part of the Semester at Sea program. There won’t be much structured interaction between the entrepreneurs and the students, Epstein said, but he hopes that the students will be positively influenced by the presence of the Unreasonable Institute.

Applications for the Unreasonable Institute at Sea are open until May 20^th and the voyage will leave January 7, 2013 from San Diego.

If you've started to feel like plastic has taken over the world, it has -- from the Tupperware in our kitchens to children's toys to the remote patches of ocean it has polluted. And the increase in reusable water bottles may seem like it's helping, but it hasn't managed to stem the problem that those bottles exist, at least in part, to fight: the disposable plastic water bottle.

The bain of any environmentalist's -- or surfer's or citizen activist's or bird lover's -- existence, bottled water is a tremendous source of the plastic pollution that has penetrated some of the most remote ecosystems you can find, killing marine life and swirling around in great big garbage patches in the middle of the world's oceans.

Yet Americans continue to buy an estimated 51 billion bottles of water a year, and recycle just a fraction of those.

Recognizing that what we need is not necessarily more education about the problems with plastic, but a new approach to fighting it that's a little more social and interactive, design company Artefact has come up with the 999Bottle. It's a stainless steel bottle with a rubberized base that provides grip and stability, and more importantly, has numbered dials that allow you to keep track of how much you use it. Turning the numbers like you would a combination lock, you advance the dial one notch every time you refill the bottle -- allowing you to keep tabs on how many plastic bottles you're not using.

For people who have already kicked -- or never had -- the plastic bottled water habit, the designers' intent is for the bottle to help you, and others, visualize the amount of waste that you're not producing. (The 999Bottle team says that by using the bottle, you'll have a positive impact on the environment; it seems more accurate to say you'll avoid having a negative impact. Big, but often ignored, difference.)

The point is also to spark some useful conversation, potentially influencing the behavior of others. There's an accompanying iPhone app that puts the numbers on your dial into context: 226 bottles equals 10 gallons of oil, for example. Or: "You've saved 1,063 bottles! That's equivalent to the height of the Eiffel Tower. Oui, oui!"

With 999Bottle, they explain on their Kickstarter page, where they're trying to raise $99,999 to launch the project: "you can share and amplify the impact of your behavior to influence others in helping reduce consumption of disposable water bottles."

Because, the 999Bottle team says, the problem is about changing behavior more than anything else. "Most people understand and agree that disposable water bottles are expensive, a very inefficient use of resources, and harmful to the environment. But that understanding doesn't necessarily translate into action."

From May 3-10, hundreds of New Yorkers will participate in the first Shop Your Values Week, a project of the New York City-based startup Ethikus. The aim of Ethikus is to generate more business for small enterprises whose practices embody certain principles of sustainability in the realms of product-sourcing, employee relations, community engagement, and environmental impact or mitigation efforts. By looking at those four criteria, Ethikus identifies businesses they want to invite into their network, which functions as a sort of ethics-focused Groupon by providing consumers with vouchers to use in those businesses.

“We look to see that they are engaging in decent business practices. It doesn’t need to be all four of the criteria. And it’s a somewhat subjective judgment,” an intern at Ethikus, recent college grad Justin Jahng, told Dowser. “We’re focused on inclusion, not exclusion, as a means toward creating change.”

But Ethikus is more than just a “green Groupon.” The organization also helps companies improve their sustainability practices if they don’t meet enough of the aforementioned criteria. The energy auditing company, Sage, one of Ethikus’ partner organizations, works with willing enterprises that don’t quite make the cut for Ethikus’ network by offering free energy audits and recommendations that will make businesses more energy efficient.

Additionally, Ethikus exists to help consumers find small businesses that match their interests in environmental and social sustainability. “We want to build more ethical consumption in New York City by linking businesses that do good with consumers. We do this by giving consumers the information they need to choose where they spend their money,” explained Jahng.

Jeff Hittner founded Ethikus in mid-2011 after six years of leading IBM’s corporate social responsibility department. He was looking for a more intimate work environment, and a more direct way to effect change. “I was tired of the bureaucracy, of working through many layers in a big corporation,” he told Dowser. “With Ethikus, the amazing thing is that you can create change just by walking into a small business. It’s incredible how receptive they have all been.”

Since last fall, Ethikus has been able to sign up around 200 businesses throughout New York City. At the time of writing, nearly 1,000 people were signed up for the Shop Your Values Week pledge, where people state that they will only shop “locally, ethically, and sustainably.” During that week, Ethikus is hosting a series of events in conjunction with their partner organizations, including an outdoor dance party with food trucks on May 4^th, and a bicycle tour of restaurants in Ethikus’ network on May 5^th. Additionally, Ethikus has paired up with Bard College’s MBA in Sustainability program to offer a scholarship competition.

Partnerships are an important element of Ethikus’ mission and approach to social change. They work with numerous community organizations, like the aforementioned Sage, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the environmental crowdfunding site ioby, and more.

“This is about succeeding through collaboration,” Hittner said. “We need to get nonprofits sharing in this vision.” And even within Ethikus, collaboration is the work ethos. Hittner admitted that, despite founding the organization, “around 85 percent” of the ideas it runs on had come from his co-workers, during meetings at their makeshift office in his apartment in the East Village.

So far, Ethikus has yet to generate a profit, and it has plans to expand its revenue sources in the near future beyond its voucher offerings. The main vision for that expansion is to create what Hittner calls “experiential events with ethical themes” that will make it fun and easy for New Yorkers to enjoy themselves while spending their dollars in small, ethical enterprises.

“Shop Your Values Week is an easy way for people to say, ‘yeah, that makes sense, I’m signing up,’” said Hittner. “With Ethikus, I can feel change at this level that I couldn’t feel at IBM.”

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks takes note of the increasing popularity of social entrepreneurship – but unfortunately frames it as a kind of naïve idealism, a path by which young people will avoid political participation and fail to confront the “corruption, veniality, and disorder head-on.”  I could not disagree more.

I have worked with and studied social entrepreneurs for three decades. They are far from naïve idealists who avoid harsh political realities. They are driven by ideals, yes, but at heart they are hard-nosed pragmatists. Far from ignoring “corruption, veniality, and disorder,” where these are issues, they tackle them directly. Karen Tse at International Bridges to Justice works to reform corrupt criminal justice systems across China. Witness, an organization built up mainly by the social entrepreneur Gillian Caldwell, provides video cameras, trainings and technology platforms so people can document human rights abuses and effectively pressure governments to reform. Transparency International, founded by Peter Eigen, monitors, ranks and publicizes corruption in business, politics and international development – and has created the most widely referenced indices of global corruption. And these are just a few examples of how social entrepreneurs are taking on difficult governance issues.  The list could go on. These are functions that obviously could not be left to government alone -- things that would take long periods of time to achieve through the ballot box, if they could be achieved that way at all.

In the US, many social entrepreneurs are actively engaged in civic life, too. The Corporation for National Service exists today largely because of the example, actions, and engagement of social entrepreneurs. One of the leaders of that movement, Alan Khazie, co-founder of City Year, and a figure of inspiration to many young world-changers, not only took a run at the US senate seat from Massachusetts, but recently published a book called Big Citizenship, in which he argues for greater engagement of citizens in political and institution-building processes. The ServiceNation event and campaign that Khazie spearheaded engaged many politicians in the effort to expand national service – including Barack Obama and John McCain. Khazie is just one example of many politically engaged social entrepreneurs.

Social entrepreneurs do not discourage political participation – they invent new mechanisms for achieving the public good. Quite often solutions to problems require not just mobilizing political support but actually demonstrating how to solve problems that have confounded others. It doesn’t matter how much pressure you put on the government to fix a problem if the existing agencies don’t actually know how to fix it. In this regard, social entrepreneurship is an essential complement to the political process – not just where there is disorder, but even in well-governed societies. Everyone knows we need innovation in this time of strained government budgets. How else do we achieve better results with fewer resources? Social entrepreneurs serve as society’s “learning laboratory,” developing, testing, and refining new approaches to problems in ways that government agencies, with all their budgetary, bureaucratic, legislative, jurisdictional, and political constraints cannot do. These innovators represent the kind of decentralized problem solving that Nobel Lauriat Douglass North identifies as essential for any society to achieve what he calls “adaptive efficiency,” the ability to adjust and thrive in the face of new challenges and shifting problems.  Now, more than ever, we need innovative, adaptive societies.

Think of the kinds of social problems we face today: how to get health care to the poor (and everyone else more efficiently), how to get clean water or energy to those with limited access, how to get quality education to at risk youth, how to protect children from abuse and bullying, how to get companies to reduce their environmental footprints. To solve them, we need to revitalize institutions across society – governments, businesses and nonprofits. This requires entrepreneurship. Today’s social entrepreneurs learn quickly how difficult it is to do this work well. As a result, they learn humility. They learn to think pragmatically and systemically. They balance the need to work outside governments to enjoy greater flexibility – and to work with government to achieve structural changes. They come to understand the competitive advantages and natural limitations of people working in different sectors.

We should celebrate that so many young people are drawn to social entrepreneurship, not bemoan this trend. They will be smarter about their political choices as a result. It may not swell the ranks of the campus Democrat and Republican clubs in the short term, but it will lead to greater and more thoughtful political engagement in the longer term.

Finally, one thing that social entrepreneurs tend not to be is staunchly ideological. People who are obsessed with solving problems at a significant scale learn quickly that success means making trade offs and compromises – advancing good-enough solutions that can spread and take root politically rather than idealized ones that appeal to the pure of heart. That’s why they tend not to be attracted to the kind of partisan bickering that fills the airwaves and the halls of Washington, D.C. Growing interest in social entrepreneurship is not causing the political malaise in this country; rather it is a reaction to it. In fact, if there is a cure to this malaise, it may come from a generation of people who are more interested in solving problems than winning arguments, who want to build politically inclusive structures, rather than out maneuver or deride their opponents. Today’s youth may seem to approach their social improvement work in a more upbeat, collegial, and optimistic way than the noir heroes (like Sam Spade) that Brooks celebrates in his critique, but that does not mean they lack seriousness, critical eyes or hard-boiled realism. Don’t underestimate them.

J. Gregory Dees, a professor in The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, created the first course in social entrepreneurship in the United States.

Image credit: David Bornstein

Social entrepreneurs often strive toward achieving a 'triple bottom line.' But are they side-stepping questions of politics?

Are social entrepreneurs too idealistic? David Brooks thinks so. In his recent Times column, he wrote that “young idealists” are, while “refreshingly uncynical,” also too naïve, and unaware about national and regional politics.

Social entrepreneurs, he writes, “have little faith in the political process”—instead, they are trying to do things their own way, using grassroots strategies.

At Dowser, we’ve certainly seen that social entrepreneurs often embody a grassroots ethos, preferring to use crowdfunding instead of applying for competitive grants, and working outside the boundaries of institutions.

But is Brooks correct to say that social entrepreneurs are avoiding, or ignorant of, matters of governance and politics?

Brooks’ argument has been made before, in the pages of the same newspaper. In July 2011, In an article called “Real Change Requires Politics,” former McKinsey consultant-turned-author Anand Giridharadas critiques social entrepreneurs for not recognizing that structures and systems need to be changed in order for their work to be more effective.

“Many social entrepreneurs treat power as something to work around. They can be clearer in articulating what they are for than in stating what they oppose, and why,” he writes. Giridharas portrays social entrepreneurs, much like Brooks does in his recent column, as side-stepping government—“picking fights is rarely the social entrepreneur’s way,” writes Giridharas.

After interviewing probably hundreds of social entrepreneurs for Dowser, I can think of several cases where individuals and organizations are specifically dealing with questions of policy and government. For example, Seeing Green’s year-long research project, funded by Kickstarter donations, aims to provide a scientific case for urban agriculture’s usefulness in dealing with water management problems in New York City, with the ultimate goal of prompting the city government to change the tax structure so that urban agriculture is more feasible.

And social entrepreneurs certainly understand that the problems they address are systemic. Many designers refer to social issues as “wicked problems”—when interlocking dependencies within a system make it impossible to enact substantial reform. Examples of wicked problems include the healthcare system and the education system. If you think about government as one of the factors that makes these issues into wicked problems, then it is easier to understand why social entrepreneurs are more concerned with tackling a problem directly and efficiently, than trying to change government or fix an entire system.

One of the letters-to-the-editor written in response to Brooks was penned by Ben Powell, who founded Agora Partnerships, a social enterprise investment fund and incubator, in 2005, as he was graduating from business school at Columbia University.

Powell told Dowser that he sees Brooks’ arguments as symptomatic of a generational divide. “An older generation grew up in a world with many more trade-offs, in the sense that if you were ambitious, it meant you wanted to go into politics or make money,” said Powell.

Today, however, being ambitious bears a much wider scope, beyond making money. Powell thinks that it has to do with “the extraordinary amount of investment that has gone into the Millennials’ education,” he said.

“Young people today with all these communication tools are able to project their ideas faster than any generation in history. They want to lead lives of significance in a world that has so many problems and challenges that they’re aware of, because they’re highly-educated,” said Powell.

On the matter of social entrepreneurs not focusing on politics, Powell suggested that Brooks is wrong in identifying it as a question of avoidance. “The best leaders in the country are not going and running for Congress. And that’s a problem—but it’s not a problem that can be solved by a bunch of 22-year-olds with liberal arts degrees.” Instead, those 22-year-olds locate areas where they can make a difference. “They’re not waiting around. They’re working outside of the system. And they’re being very successful,” said Powell.

Entrepreneurship is also a skill set that prepares young people for leadership, and it provides lessons that universities might not, said Powell. “Maybe social entrepreneurs will go into politics when they have more power, later—and they will actually have the tools to make effective decisions, whereas so many of our politicians are profoundly ignorant about the way the world works.”

Although medical marijuana is legal in California, as well as fifteen other states and the District of Columbia, it is still illegal under federal law, and raids like the one in Oakland are a common occurrence.

Kris Hermes, the media contact at Americans for Safe Access, an organization that advocates for legal and accessible medical marijuana, told Dowser that the person who runs the training facility in Oakland, Richard Lee, “will continue to do what he's doing and not be intimidated by these actions.” Lee has been a prominent activist in the battle to legalize medical pot. In 2010, he spent more than $1.5 million trying to pass Proposition 19, which would have legalized the drug in California. The bill received only 46 percent of the vote, and failed to pass.

Since October, hundreds of dispensaries in California have closed as a result of pressure from federal government. 

“Local officials are tired of federal attacks disrupting their ability to implement state law,” said Hermes. This sentiment was on display on April 4^th, when six San Francisco city officials read statements of support for their local medical marijuana program, on the steps of the City Hall, to a rally attended by hundreds.

And the Obama administration is not taking a friendly stance toward medical marijuana, explained Hermes. He told Dowser that President Obama has been “aggressive in going after people who implement state [marijuana] laws, in an unprecedented way.” Far more than George W. Bush did, Obama has ordered “swat-style raids” of distribution centers in nine out of sixteen medical marijuana states, Hermes explained.

Numerous medical and scientific organizations have, over the years, publicly declared their support for marijuana as a form of medical treatment and released studies supporting that claim. The list includes Washington DC’s prestigious Whitman-Walker Clinic, major health care provider Kaiser Permanente, leading integrative physician Dr. Andrew Weil, the American Nurses Association, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Notably, the most prominent medical organization in the U.S., the American Medical Association, is not on the list.

“Traditionally AMA has been opposed to medical marijuana for a number of reasons,” said Allen St-Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws.

“[AMA members] are much older doctors who have no experience with medical marijuana, and they treat it like an anathema,” he explained. “But the American Medical Student Association, the student branch that represents the future doctors of this country and has about 18,500 members, does support medical marijuana.” The generational division stems from changing attitudes over time toward marijuana, said St-Pierre.

“The older doctors grew up under 'reefer madness,’ while the younger ones are learning about medical marijuana in their colleges,” said St-Pierre. "Reefer madness" refers to a 1930s propaganda campaign that portrayed marijuana as a highly-addictive drug of the underclasses.

In Washington DC, where medical marijuana was first legalized in 1998 but only voted into law in 2009, around ten marijuana cultivation centers are set to open as soon as next month. Being a Federal District, the city is bound to find itself in some tricky situations once the growing begins. As the grow houses--one of which will be under the auspices of talk show host and health advocate Montell Williams--begin operation, mostly in the Northeast neighborhood of DC, it will be fascinating to observe the challenges they encounter and the means they go through to move past them.

A workshop emphasizing diversity alongside resilience, in Pittsburgh

A while back, Dowser wrote about Bellingham, Washington, a town that is consciously developing its local economy in order to withstand the global recession. Across the world, communities are forming around principles of sustainable, locally-based living, with awareness that natural resources—like oil—are finite, and an understanding that sustainability is more than a choice in a grocery store; it’s a way of life.

One example of such communities is the Transition Towns Network. This global network is focused on transitioning out of a reliance on increasingly-less-cheap petroleum. Resilience, according to Transition Town philosophy, is one step further than sustainability—it asks us not only to change what we consume or reduce our impact on the planet, but to actually prepare ourselves for a radically different system of production and consumption. The key is self-sufficiency.

There are now 320 Transition Town initiatives in 14 countries, according to a video made by Rob Hopkins, an ecological designer who founded the Network in 2005. In most cases, the towns in the Network engaged in specific initiatives and workshops, as well as potluck events and meetings where people can connect around issues related to resilience—such as neighborhood leadership, permaculture, or alternative currency.

Arguably, much of what goes on in the Transition Network is happening already, in cities everywhere: urban agriculture, crowdfunding, and other kinds of social enterprises are aligned with principles of resilience. But the Transition Network offers a support base, as well as a handbook to the Transition Town design model, a 12-step guide to organizing a community toward non-reliance on oil.

Building community gardens in L.A. to pave the way for a less oil-dependent future

Los Angeles resident Joanne Poyourow was already focused on the oil question and the problem of climate change when she first learned about Rob Hopkins and Transition Towns in 2004. In December of 2008, trainers from the U.K.’s Transition Town movement came to Los Angeles, and, Poyourow told Dowser, she and others in L.A. “embraced the Transition Town branding onto what we were already doing." By linking up with the network, they created more name recognition for their work.

“People read about Transition Towns in the news and they say, oh wow, I wonder if that's going on around here, and the name helps them find it where they are,” explained Poyourow. “[Transition Towns] have developed resources that help with communication within and across groups. Within the Network, ideas spread about events and initiatives.”

The L.A. Transition Town branch is now focused on food-growing initiatives—community gardening above all, and lawn renewal. They are also launching a monthly discussion series focused on creating social enterprises that help with transitioning away from oil. Additionally, there is discussion about the health care industry: “Our health care system is very dependent on oil--extractions of medicine, high-powered surgery--so we are looking at what kinds of medicines are more sustainable and how we can connect people with those. The mainstream says 'alternative practitioners,' but we've identified them as low-impact,” said Poyourow.

L.A.’s branch operates with very little funding. While elsewhere, Transition Town initiatives are formalized into 501 C-3s, the L.A. group sees advantages to avoiding that.

“Nonprofits are not always a sustainable model—relying on grants in these times can be difficult. We've been saying, how much can we do with next-to-nothing? The answer is a lot: so we do things in partnership with local organizations, creating coalitions, and receiving in-kind donations, too," explained Poyourow.

The partnership-based, low-budget approach that L.A. Transition Town is undertaking echoes the work of sociologist Juliet Schor, author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (2009). Schor argues that the U.S. financial collapse in 2008 signals the end of growth-based capitalism. She sees this as the beginning of a new economy (“plenitude,” she dubs it), where people invest time and energy in local production and social networks.

On the East Coast, Tina Clarke became involved in Transition Towns after many decades working as an activist focused on environmental racism and poverty. Her efforts now are directed toward bringing low-income communities of color in inner-city Pittsburgh and New Haven into the Network. She is doing this by leading workshops, alongside her co-trainer Fred Brown in Pittsburgh. When Clarke and Brown led their first workshop in Pittsburgh, they expected no more than fifteen people to attend. But they were in for a surprise.

“These people don't have jobs, they're losing their homes, there's gang violence--but 52 people came to our workshop,” Clarke told Dowser. “And they really understand what transition is all about. They know what it's like to be on the dirty side of the industrial economy because the trash gets dumped in their neighborhoods.”

The workshop focused on relationship-building and practical actions, and Brown and Clarke were blown away at how enthusiastic the participants were.

“You have to take everyone's needs into account if you're going to have a transition. And there's no top-down enforcement of this idea, but people believe in inclusion. And in this country, you can't do that without going to the most low-income communities and thinking about what rising oil prices mean to them,” said Clarke.

Coming up, the Transition Town Network is offering a “Spring of Sustainability,” a three-month, free online event packed with webinars on creating a more sustainable world.

Another example of an innovative, community-based approach to sustainability is Project Nuevo Mundo. This project is a collection of eco-villages based in Central America, with hopes to expand globally, where participants can learn skills such as permaculture that they bring back to their home communities and share with others.

Beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST today (5:30 p.m. Central European Time), TedxChange will be Webcast live from Berlin, Germany.

TEDxChange is a partnership between TED.com and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The theme of the two hour event is "The Big Picture" -- and the participants will be looking to "challenge traditional thinking around topics ranging from family planning and contraception to the environment to human-centered design."

Speakers include:

• Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference
• Jeff Chapin, designer and engineer for IDEO
• Melinda Gates, co-chair of the world’s largest private philanthropy
• Sven Giegold, German EP Member and environmental advocate
• Baaba Maal, Song writer and artist
• Theo Sowa, Head of African Women’s Development Fund

Will Occupy make a comeback this spring?

To readers of mainstream media, it would seem that Occupy Wall Street had been hibernating for the winter. But, in fact, Occupiers spent the winter working hard on movement-building, strategizing, planning, and dealing with internal problems.

Here’s an update on how the New York branch of the Occupy movement has been preparing for the Occupy Spring, which is likely to put OWS back in the public spotlight with direct actions, marches, a national strike on May Day, and other tactics meant to show government and Wall Street that citizens won’t stand for such an inequitable financial system.

Back in winter…things were tough:

After the eviction—which was emotionally-draining for those involved and, in terms of movement-building, logistically challenging--Occupiers rallied on N17 (November 17^th, in “Action Culture,” is nick-named N17), with a massive march in New York City and parallel actions across the country. But in December, it became more difficult to access Zuccotti Park (renamed Liberty Square by the movement), as Brookfield Properties’ security forces became stricter and enforced a curfew at night. However, meetings continued, at the public atrium at 60 Wall Street and over the InterOccupy communication system—and plans took shape for an Occupy Spring, slated to be the public resurgence of the movement.

As winter deepened, Occupy faced some internal difficulties. Many people were lodged in churches throughout Manhattan, but others were sleeping in fast-food restaurants because the churches had curfews and restrictions; the lack of a physical occupation was demoralizing to many. On D17, there was an attempt to occupy a park owned by Trinity Church, who has generally been an ally of OWS; it ended in arrests amidst much debate about whether Occupy was pushing it too far this time.

Coming in from the cold:

In January, there were some exciting initiatives coming out of OWS, particularly the Occupy the SEC campaign, which drafted a studied public comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the much-chattered-about Volcker Rule, a piece of legislation meant to limit banks’ abilities to engage in risky investment schemes. But meanwhile, within OWS there was tension surrounding one prominent participant who was being asked to leave the movement by another participant who found her behavior—often disrupting General Assemblies with “blocks,” meant to stop a proposal; purportedly lying about aspects of her identity to other Occupiers; once physically attacking another Occupier at a meeting—detrimental to the movement, which sparked a debate about one of the founding principles of Occupy, its unconditional inclusiveness. Anyone can participate in Occupy, even a police officer or a homeless person or a billionaire, and no one can be kicked out, it was determined.

“There are challenges within the movement,” Trish Bou told me in early February in regard to the attempted expulsion of that Occupier, “that have to do with accountability, inclusiveness, fairness, and solidarity.” Bou, a middle-aged woman from New York City, had become involved with a working group called the General Assembly Council, which was mandated with making sure the GA’s integrity was upheld, and that it remained accountable to its founding documents.

“We have the 1% within the movement, trying to create hierarchy and exclusion,” Bou continued. “This is a pivotal time because we are confronting that 1%, mostly white men, who are promoting racism, sexism, and classism.”

To combat those problems, OWS held a Racial Justice Workshop in December, focused on combating racism within activism, organized mostly by the People of Color working group.

There were also some debates about money. For awhile, there was a spending freeze while the movement debated the limits of the Finance group, (and a brief controversy ensued recently when ice cream team Ben and Jerry’s tried to fund OWS--as expected, their offer was not warmly received). Meanwhile, though, actions were continuing. The December 6^th Occupy Our Homes action received much attention and signaled that Occupy was focusing its energies on issues at the neighborhood level as well as nationally. Anti-stop-and-frisk protests against racial profiling in Harlem were another sign of that.

For Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Occupy held a well-attended commemoration event at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Occupiers and prominent African-American Occupy supporters like Russell Simmons spoke about the connections between racial injustice and economic inequality.

Occupy the DOE takes on NYC's decision to close 23 public schools

In mid-February, there was a massive protest led by Occupy the DOE (Department of Education) at a meeting of the PEP, a controversial assembly appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to vote on educational issues, where twenty-three public schools were closed. Protesters occupied the meeting, chanting “Education is a right,” holding signs about the rate of blacks and Latinos who graduate high school prepared for college (13%), and drowning out the meeting’s goings-on with the human microphone.

Throughout late winter, public Occupy Town Square events had been creating “mini-occupations” throughout New York City in highly-trafficked sites such as Washington Square Park. At that park, in late January, passersby caught a smorgasbord of Occupy offerings: the Think Tank, which moderates debates on political topics; the Student Debt Campaign, who performed a play about the education debt crisis in the U.S.; a group of doctors and medical students had a teach-in about the need for universal health care; even the drum circle many remember from Zuccotti Park was present.

Spring awakening:

Shockingly warm weather in NYC in March led Occupy back into the streets in large numbers, resulting in a renewed conflict with their old friends, the New York Police Department. Small direct actions had been going on consistently since the eviction—such as one aimed at Bank of America—but higher temperatures promised bigger crowds. At the end of February, a “Shut Down the Corporations” day of protest gave Occupiers a sense that the police were being overbearing; a few weeks later, the veracity of that suspicion seemed apparent, when Occupiers who were in Zuccotti Park on Saturday, March 17^th, the six-month anniversary of the movement, watched 73 of their companions arrested and numerous incidents where police pushed, beat, or otherwise mistreated protesters. One woman reportedly had seizures while in handcuffs, her head hitting the pavement as she convulsed, and the police refused to tell anyone whether medical attention would be provided to her.

It was a traumatic event for those present as well as all Occupiers who have seen or experienced how the NYPD typically treat protesters. A few days later, there was a “heal-in,” where people shared their feelings about the M17 incident. Occupiers listed the emotions they felt at the start of the meeting: sad, love, realization, uncertain, worried, “I’m just despondent,” “Love and rage,” furious, scared, energized, more rage, and more love. Then they shared their stories from Saturday night, with much weeping and hugging.

Meanwhile, the Occupation had moved uptown, to Union Square, a much more visible site than Zuccotti Park. All the usual suspects were there and the focus turned completely to Spring Training. Weekly marches began taking place on Friday afternoons around Zuccotti Park, so Occupiers could get ready for dealing with the NYPD on May 1^st, when a nation-wide strike is scheduled.

When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in Florida, Occupy Wall Street was joined in Union Square not only by nearly 2000 people wearing hoodies in solidarity for a rally and march against racialized violence, but also by the grieving parents of the slain 17-year-old boy. One after another, people of color spoke out through the human microphone about the injustice they had experienced. But at midnight, that night and on others, the police tried to enforce a curfew on Union Square—something that is not normally done—as if trying to show that Union Square will not become another Zuccotti Park.

Occupy’s public face is beginning to show itself more and more as spring carries on. The lack of a physical occupation site made it difficult for the movement to wage a public relations campaign, but it was never hibernating. Occupiers were hard at work, canvassing in low-income outer-borough neighborhoods, organizing Town Squares, preparing for their spring offensive, dealing with internal trauma and organizational difficulties, and waging policy reform initiatives like Occupy the SEC. These signs point to growing, not waning movement, and suggest that the American Autumn may become an entire year of consistent critique and political action.

Want to get involved or learn more? Check out these links:

• OccupyWallSt.org--a constantly-updated blog with updates about the movement in New York City
• NYCGA.net--the site where Occupy Working Groups connect
• Interoccupy.org--communications, news, and conference calls between Occupy movements everywhere
• LiberationSummer.org--check out plans taking shape for an Occupied summer 2012
• BailOutNY.org--donate to the OWS bail fund as the big day of action, May 1st, approaches
• PorqueOccupy.com--an Occupy blog in Spanish
• OccupyTogether.org--a hub for all the different Occupy movements
• OccupiedMedia.us--the online home of the Occupied Wall Street Journal
• StrikeEverywhere.org--preparing for May 1st general strike

all photos by Rachel Signer, copyright 2012

Former Goldman Sachs employee, Greg Smith wrote an OpEd this week in the New York Times that highlights the malignant work culture at a company that he calls “morally bankrupt.”  This outright acknowledgement from a mid-level employee has opened up a debate about the “new ethic” in the workforce, one driven by a desire to succeed.  Of course, greed has always been part of society.  In fact, a NYTimes piece made note of this, stating: "To be sure, longtime bankers say, it is not as if short-term greed was absent in the past. It has been around since traders gathered under a buttonwood tree and founded the New York Stock Exchange in 1792. But the astounding size of Wall Street’s biggest firms — and the fortunes to be made — have altered the calculus."

So, where is the cancer in modern day greed?  And how is it affecting society?

Atul Gawande commented on this new paradigm on Twitter, indicating that this problem isn’t exclusive to banking:

Atul Gawande ‏ @Atul_Gawande
The debate over Goldman's culture is parallel (http://nyti.ms/ynd1sV) to that over medicine's (http://nyr.kr/A2d9O8): are people just ATMs?

Shortly after the OpEd appeared, news agencies began reporting that Smith’s public accusations against GS cost them $2.15 billion.  The Atlantic wire broke it down further to include the per-word damage: the company lost $2.15 billion of its market value, making Smith's 1,283-word op-ed worth a whopping $1.675 million per word.

But, put aside the numbers.  What has been the effect of Wall Street on society?  Just months ago, we witnessed the global demonstrations of Occupy Wall Street.  But did they make a dent?  Or is one OpEd likely to make more impact?

Smith writes in his OpEd about young analysts absorbing the dialogue and tactics of senior employees at GS - a problem in the making, he would say.  For years now, Wall Street has been able to allure the brightest students from American universities to work for them after college.  The criticism has always been that students who may have gone on to explore other professions, depending on their interests, were distracted by the prestige and pay of the banks.  But, with recent occurrences, could that change?  The NYTimes reports that Wall Street may have a hard time snatching the best students going forward.  That’s because the prestige has fallen, fewer positions are available, and the chase to a seven-figure salary has become harder in a cash-strapped America.

The attitude is changing on college campuses themselves, the article notes:

Adding to the chorus of dissent, students now face criticism on their own campuses. Groups of protestors at Yale and Harvard stood outside bank recruiting sessions last fall, shouting slogans and holding signs with messages like “Take a chance, don’t go into finance.” At Princeton, a group affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement interrupted sessions by JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, urging their fellow students to rebel against what it said was “the campus culture that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street as a prestigious career path.”

The piece goes on to include an anecdote from this week’s megaconference in Austin, noting that Wall Street hasn’t just been a bad ethical option, but has actually dampened American innovation in recent years:

At this year’s SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Tex., a panel called “Keeping Kids off the Street: Wall St. vs. Start-ups” was convened to address questions including whether the finance industry was to blame for what organizers called a “failure to nurture a culture of innovation” in New York. Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied math at Columbia University who sat on the panel, said he was seeing students shy away from Wall Street and veer toward industries where they could work and profit without bringing their morality under the microscope.

Needless to say, the coverage of Smith's OpEd has been intense.  Forbes has run over a dozen articles in just the last few days that connect with the GS "bomb."  You can read them here.  The comments on the NYTimes articles have been endless.  This particular piece received nearly 600 comments; others have hit similar figures.

The question again is, will all this discussion and attention change the nature of the industry?

Weekend Reads:

• Why business needs to get more creative.  Huff Post contributor Jim Prior explains.
• Kristof responds to some of the criticisms surrounding the viral KONY video that’s captivated American this week.
• Forbes contributor writes on the nuances of innovation.  Are all innovations worthwhile?