Dowser: How did your background lead you to developing programs for children?
Buchbinder: I worked in various camps growing up and always had a passion for children. I studied International Relations and realized that I was not interested in an exclusively government position. In 2007 I was one of eleven delegates to a program organized by the government of Japan called ‘Ship for World Youth,’ which aims to establish networks and activities for youth leaders across the world. There I met a Canadian woman named Dara Parker who was working on a program called ‘Sport in a Box,’ which introduces global themes through physical activities. I had always been a hyperactive girl involved in many sports and I was really excited by the opportunity to link themes this way.

How did you translate this idea to the Mexican context?
When I got back to Mexico I asked a fellow delegate if he would start a project like ‘Sport in a Box’ with me and try it out for a year. We worked together to adapt and ‘tropicalize’ the idea to Mexico and changed the games to be more identified with Mexico. We piloted one semester and we were amazed with the results.

How did and do you translate the UN’s broad goals into local ones?
The broad goal of the program is to invite children to be local change-makers, and to this end we emphasize five main values in all of our games – teamwork, fair play, respect, tolerance and gender equality. We have a huge obesity problem in Mexico, so we hope to also teach physical activity through these games. We train teachers to implement our activities in school and in indigenous shelters for underdeveloped municipalities so that a large diversity of students can get access to the program. We started in 2007 and ever since 80% of the students we work with are indigenous.

How do you help students to internalize these change-making goals?
The whole program is through games so that the kids are having fun while, say, realizing why it is important for them to treat others with respect. After each game – and at various points throughout the curriculum - students reflect on how they felt and how the games relate back to their own realities and personal values.

Where and how did you start the program? Was it adopted quickly by schools?
Our first year we ran semester-long programs and piloted them with zero pesos in our pockets. We started in a shelter in Chihuahua, and just started calling shelters and asking if we could come. We also piloted in two private schools in Mexico City, including Colegio Ciudad the Mexico, the one I’d attended. As we expand it’s been very important to us to maintain a diversity of public and private schools as well as indigenous shelters. It’s very difficult to add things to teachers’ jobs because they already have so much to get through, but with this program they seem to fall in love with it on their own. Teachers have said that just our three-day training has changed their whole perspective on teaching – made it more human, more motivating. To date we have had more than 30,000 participants.

How did you get connected and funded to work in schools?

To see more stories from Latin America, click here.

We work with the Mexican Ministry of Social Development and the agencies that run indigenous shelters. When I graduated from university the minister of social development was making the ceremony, and I went directly to him and told him about the project idea. I’d been very active in organizing things in university, and it was good timing to connect with the ministry with that behind me.

What are the biggest challenges for the program?
There’s always the problem of human resources – we need talented and committed people but we can’t pay much just yet. I work really hard to maintain a lasting and skilled team. So many schools in the country want this program, and we don’t have enough resources to deliver it to all of them. Funding can be a challenge, too. We are funded by various Mexican ministries, a little private support and a few other partners. Lastly, the NGO community in Mexico can be touch-and-go. Everyone has good intentions but we need people with skills. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to feel part of a larger community of people doing similar work in the States an internationally, most recently through Ashoka’s Iniciativa Mexico.

How do you evaluate the results of the program?

We measure qualitative results in terms of how much students’ self-perception changes and to what extent they begin to see themselves as change-makers with social capital. We measure quantitative results in three areas – students’ understanding of the Millennium Goals, how much they’ve adopted healthy lifestyles, and how much local community development is being enhanced through the program.

Why do you think communities are so interested in adopting your program?
From the very beginning participating teachers told us in evaluations that they saw a huge change in children’s’ attitudes and parents reported that students were more cooperative and helpful at home. We always receive amazingly positive evaluations and have more applications for the program than we can handle. We’re looking to expand within the next five years to more area of Latin America, and ideally to migrant communities in the US. Alliances through Ashoka, the UN Network and the International Youth Foundation make this seem eventually possible!

Photo: Deport-es para Compartir staff

The event is part of their Pop Up Summer Series, an array of seminars taking place in New York City from July 19th to August 17th. Topics range from social media to female empowerment to public speaking, but the goal is the same: educate, inspire and motivate high school students to become community leaders.  PoP calls it their "49%"--the half of their mission that focuses on empowering a global generation of youth--and it is, in our opinion, the core of their ripple effect.

In case you're not in New York, Dowser's own global Millenial, Oscar Pocasangre, will be live-blogging the event. He wants to be your eyes and ears, so send him comments. Ask him questions. Here's how to get in touch:

• Email dowser@scribblelive.com
• Interact with the liveblog below or on our Facebook page.
• Send tweets with the hashtag #askdowser.

Oscar and the back-end Dowser team will receive any questions or comments sent through the above channels.

So watch, engage and share, and we'll see you on Wednesday.

Dowser: How did you start writing? How did you start writing nonfiction?
Kidder: I discovered I wanted to be a writer in college. I fell under the spell of a wonderful teacher, Robert Fitzgerald, who took us very seriously and was demanding. I didn’t know what else I was going to do exactly after college. I went to Vietnam as a soldier, came back and wrote this novel about all the experiences I didn’t have.

Then I went to Iowa, where almost no one at the time was writing nonfiction – it was fiction or poetry there. The company I was in there was pretty humbling. At the time my resources for writing fiction felt like they were drying up – the only fiction I really got off there was one short story. But I wrote this one nonfiction story about Vietnam that made it into the Atlantic Monthly. Meanwhile it seems to me there was a guy named Seymour Kramer has been working on the 'new journalism.' A writer named Dan Wakefield showed up, who was very helpful to me, and helped me to get some nonfiction into the Atlantic. At the time it was great because it was something no one else was doing. I didn’t have to compete with anyone.

What role do you – as the person mitigating the story – play in generating interest in change work, as in, say, the work of Paul Farmer?
I think there was a time when I was quite young when I thought that the written word could actually change something. I’m not sure it ever actually has. I’m told Grapes of Wrath did, or that other books influenced the minds of influential people, but I think that approaching writing from the point of view of thinking you’ll make change has severe limitations. I’ve written a few polemics for the New York Times Op Ed page, but that’s pretty much what I confine it to. I try to mostly keep away from writing expecting to change something when writing narrative nonfiction.

Someone once said to me something about how I’d been really lucky about a book I’d written, and that kind of bothered me, because I don’t think it was about that. But it’s about writing itself. All stories are created. There’s a lot to do. You need to get to the point where your hands don’t show. Someone once said to me that if you get good as a writer you develop your own style, and if you get very good you learn how to hide it – which is as good a definition of art as any.

Do you see yourself as actively working for social change and human rights as a writer? I know you have direct links on your website for people to support Partners in Health and Village Health Works…
The notion that good writing can try to make changes in the world was never mine. If I had tried to write about Paul Farmer with a burning desire to change issues of poverty and disease, to make people care about those issues – I think it would have been a terrible flop. What I thought was that I had an interesting story, and I wanted to tell it as well as I could. I came to feel that art was possible with nonfiction stories.

Of course, what’s at the center of the stories I write are human beings. So on that level, of course I was interested in Farmer and Farmer’s cause and I was interested in the things that preoccupied him, but only to the point that made it a good story. And of course I was incredibly moved by things that I saw through him.

How did you first get drawn to Paul Farmer’s work?
It’s really the way I wrote it at the beginning of Mountains Beyond Mountains. I was in Haiti to report on American soldiers there, and I met him completely by chance. I didn’t really like him at first because he seemed to be giving this American captain a hard time, which he was. But then when I met him again by chance on a plane, he was so warm and generous. I got to know him just enough to know I’d stumbled on a really interesting story. I think my first constituency is the vast – or maybe tiny – group we call the 'reader.' Those are the people I look to when I’m writing for some sort of context. I wanted to tell Farmer’s story to them. That required that I start to understand what he was really up to. He was pretty famous within his field at the time, but not the way he is now.

When did you go from seeing yourself as telling Farmer’s story to seeing yourself as involved in Partners in Health?
The way I acted and felt about him and the book when it was published is a different thing altogether. There was a time when I reflectively thought about expressing my support for Partners in Health – but I was thinking about people in journalism who wouldn’t approve. I remember once the book was done having a conversation with [Partners in Health Executive Director] Ophelia Dahl about how I needed to be careful not to seem too partial. And then after the book was done, I thought, really, why was that? It was 2003, in the middle of the Bush administration right then, and there were journalists all around me really sucking up to power in the most disgusting ways. And I thought, 'I don’t care if I express my opinion about this cause outside of the book.' In the end, I care deeply about this subject, but I’m not going to write a book trying to convince someone of that.

Why do you think the book resonates with so many, especially young people?
I can’t speak for them, but I’ve given many lectures and talks to students and communities. Oftentimes they’ll all line up to get their books signed, and they’ll say things like,'Your book is, like, awesome!' or 'Your book changed my life.' I think, well, if you’re eighteen and you don’t have a life-changing experience every week there’s probably something wrong with you! But really, I think there are a lot of Americans who feel how meretricious this culture is, and how filled our culture is with frank consumerism that leads into a kind of selfishness. I think a lot of young people are thinking, 'there has to be something more.' Something that can change communities. I think they see that in Farmer’s story. The great error that young people sometimes make is then trying to imitate Paul Farmer.

When you speak to college or other large audiences, do you see yourself as a representative of Partners in Health, or as speaking to what it’s like to be a nonfiction writer? How do you see your role there?
Usually I’ll retell the story of the book in a slightly different way and only later address the larger questions. One of the first talks I ever gave was at Brandeis, and afterward a very nice woman said to me, 'yes, but the students want to know what they should do.' Then I got that I was in that role. I see it within my role as a lecturer to answer those questions. I don’t see that as a real contradiction. You can section off parts of your life. I wouldn’t convince people of what they should do in my writing, but as a lecturer it’s different. As a lecturer I don’t feel accountable in the same way.

What are some of the other challenges of describing a passionate cause-driven character like Farmer?
Well, the first challenge is the research. Another is delving into things that are difficult for the subject, which I encountered particularly with Deo while writing Strength in What Remains. We often got into memories that were very difficult for him to relive. I offered to stop at those points, but he didn’t take me up on it. I don’t like to think about myself as traumatizing people, but just as stealing their shadows. It’s a lopsided personal relationship - you’re both getting to know one another, but they’re not writing down what you tell them! Writing a book about someone is not a ripe basis for friendship. I think it was very difficult for Farmer to be scrutinized this way.

You said once that the role of a nonfiction writer is 'to make what is true believable' – can you elaborate on how that relates to the way you write?
First, there were a number of reasons for writing Mountains Beyond Mountains in the first person. The decision to do that wasn’t so that I could preach to the reader -- it was to make the story palatable. Farmer presents a pretty daunting figure. Part of that choice to use the first person was to make him seem totally human. When I first gave this book to my editor, he said, 'you have a problem here, and it’s the problem of goodness.' How do you write about virtue? It’s a real challenge, and one I always wanted to undertake. It’s an old idea, but readers need an everyman, someone who they can relate to and understand through.

Did you see that 'problem of goodness' from the beginning, or was it pointed out to you later on?
I didn’t see it from the beginning. I wrote this profile on Farmer for The New Yorker, and I think it missed it on tone. The tone is essentially the attitude of the author toward the events and people in the story. Once my editor pointed out that problem of goodness to me, we set to work looking for the right places to acknowledge that this guy’s goodness might make you feel uneasy. I settled on having some conversation about my own relationship with Farmer’s virtue. I think there’s a reaction that often comes up of people of my generation, children of the 1960s who imagined that they’d be doing something like what farmer does, but gradually they became lawyers, investment bankers – all of which are perfectly fine, but I think there is some of that resentment in seeing that in him.

Are there particular ways in which you want people to empathize with characters in your books?
Sometimes, but I'd only address them after the book is done. Once when I was speaking at a college there was a young woman who really started in on me about Farmer’s wife being alone in Paris. For some reason I started telling her about this horrible disease that affects many poor pregnant woman in Haiti. I said to her, 'your imagination might be better used to imagine yourself as one of those poor pregnant women in Haiti than to imagine yourself as Paul Farmer’s wife alone in Paris.' In the end, Farmer is a guy I’m really glad is on the face of this earth. It’s not that I don’t have a view on him – I just didn’t start out writing the book trying to promote a view. If you set out to try to understand someone, you’ll never find a character who is wholly unlikable, and setting out to understand people is what I do when I write.

When do you consider a piece you’ve written a success?
I try not to read reviews too much anymore. A wise man once said to me, 'every writer needs another set of eyes,' so I have that. I rely on the pleasure of making something, and the pleasure, or at least the illusion, of making something really well. There’s a moment somewhere near the end of the process where I say, 'this is actually pretty good.' I read and edit with friends, and we help each other.

Did you approach Strength in What Remains any differently knowing the impact Mountains Beyond Mountains had on Partners in Health?
I don’t think so. Every book is different. Usually there’s one big problem in every book, and with Strength in What Remains it was really structural. I needed to figure out a way to organize the time in Burundi with the time in New York, and how to organize those around a character who was vastly different from many of my readers. I look at Deo’s story, and I think, would you go back to Burundi after all of that? I doubt it. Yet he did, and started this clinic. I don’t think most people would do that. Readers might not find that much to relate to in him. What I really want to do is to try to get a reader to care about the story.

How did you set up Strength in What Remains to encourage readers to connect with Deo’s story?
In the end, we decided on a very old technique, in media res, and decided to start the book in New York, in a place that was more relatable to readers. So the book starts there, and then goes back, and the sections in Burundi start short and get longer as the sections in New York get shorter.

I used to say that the whole idea of storytelling was to get life on the page. At some point after I’d been saying this for a number of years, my editor said to me, 'that’s not quite right – what’s really magical is getting life off the page and into the reader’s imagination.' You’ve got to get the reader to that brink of understanding without forcing them to accept it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Christian Pena was attending Brigham Young University when he noticed a gap between the Latino population and the students. To bridge the two communities he started Conexiones which pairs Latino families with BYU students to help teach English, read to children, play games, and build relationships.

Dowser: What is something concrete you have learned in the last three months?
Pena: Leadership is about inspiring and empowering others to be their best selves, and then getting yourself out of their way. When faced with the experience of handing over the leadership of Conexiones, a program I founded and subsequently directed for two years, I was reluctant to choose a successor who didn't see eye to eye with me on every point. So, I didn't. I chose one early on and indoctrinated him with my vision, and then relished when he used the same words I'd repeated to him time and again to describe what the program was about and where it was going next.

Circumstantially, two other fans of the program unofficially nominated themselves as co-directors and we, the leadership, two of one mind, were obliged to acquiesce. After handing over the reigns to the three and moving out of state, I received a phone call from my clone. He was frustrated about the direction the two 'imposers' wanted to take Conexiones. While listening to this news, instead of frustration, an unexpected sense of relief swelled over me. I shared this with my chosen one, and he and I both agreed that it was best not to stifle their excitement with our rigidity and pride. He decided to 'Let 'em have it. Let 'em run with it. I'll even cheer 'em on.'

Not long thereafter, my clone called me back to relate that things had truly taken off beyond what he'd expected. The stats and figures he mentioned astounded me. I must admit that I'm glad I wasn't there to see it first hand. I might have gotten in the way.

What is a mistake or mishap you have learned from?
Working in healthcare administration, one has to be conscious not to forget that patients are people, not sources of revenue. One day, while talking to an old and seasoned nurse, I referred to a patient solely by their payer-source: 'Mr. Medicare...'  This nurse, who embodies the perfect balance of sagacity and crassness, turned to me and said, 'If you ever refer to a patient in that way again, I'll punch you in the face.' (Notice the absence of an exclamation point--she said it so calmly). I've never been punched in the face, but I believe I'd prefer it one hundred times before I ever catch myself heading down that slippery slope of disregarding the inherent and universal value of people.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo courtesy of Christian Pena

The Human Impact Institute works with young girls in Los Angeles.

While working as the program director at the Lower East Side Ecology Center in New York City, Tara DePorte saw the same problem again and again -- many groups working on environmental issues were duplicating efforts by launching similar initiatives. “For instance,” DePorte explained, “one university is researching the impact of green roofs on the urban heat island effect, another nonprofit is working to build green roofs, and another group is researching the impact of water retention on green roofs, but none of them are coordinated in their efforts.”

What if there was a connector, providing translation and mediation between groups?

That’s the aim of a newly-formed nonprofit DePorte runs with Director of Outreach and Advocacy, Tristan Jones: the Human Impacts Institute. “We see ourselves as ‘environmental translators’ where we take information from each sector and translate it to the appropriate terms and formats for other sectors to use, apply and disseminate,” said DePorte, noting that the academic language often used in reports creates a barrier for general public use.

By focusing on building collaborative partnerships and adopting an ethos of resource sharing, the Institute hopes to plant the seeds of environmental education, community development and sustainable practice in places like South Africa and New York City. Currently, the Institute is collaborating with the Rural Women’s Movement (RWM), an activist organization focusing on land reform and economic development in South Africa.

In this partnership, the Institute develops environmental leadership training for women and HIV/AIDS orphans. “These two groups are highly underrepresented, particularly in the context of tribal governance in rural areas,” DePorte said. “These are also amongst the most vulnerable populations, particularly when dealing with climate change vulnerability, water scarcity, disease and access to natural resources for survival, let alone income generation.” In workshops, the Institute focuses on developing the linkages between local environmental issues (particularly water, waste and climate) and RWM's existing programs on women’s land rights and economic development.

DePorte represented RWM at a recent water and energy conference. The Institute recognized that RWM doesn't have experience in this sector, so they took the event as an opportunity to discuss the connection between these issues and the work that RWM was already doing. Additionally, the Institute has a training scheduled for January to work with ten women representing rural communities in South Africa to develop interview and story-documenting skills. “This will help the women to monitor the needs and impacts of RWM programs in their community,” DePorte explained.

What makes the Human Impacts Institute unique is their resourceful way of bringing together university students and grassroots activists, and their open-source policy, making their curriculum and research data available free of charge.  These methods speak to a need for sustainable forms of knowledge-transmission to help foster new ideas and practices, from the ground up.

Photo credit: Human Impacts Institute.

Dowser: The Green Dot model centers on six key tenants: 1) small, safe, personalized schools; 2) high expectations for all students; 3) locally managed schools; 4) increased parent participation; 5) maximum funding to the classroom; and 6) keeping schools open later. What influenced you most in formulating this model?
Barr: I went to some traditional public schools and saw things I didn’t want to replicate: they were huge, undemocratic, and looked like prisons. But I was more influenced than anything by the private preparatory schools. I asked the question: what does $25,000 per pupil get you at these fancy schools? They were small, gave personalized attention, and had high expectations for their kids. If these basic things worked for the richest kids, I thought, they should work for the poorest.

Green Dot runs 16 charter schools in L.A., and one in the Bronx. Every other major charter organization in the country has fought off teachers unions, but Green Dot embraces unions—why is that?
I didn’t see the value of going to a 100% unionized industry with non-union labor, especially when I think I could attract better teachers with more money. We are more efficient than other schools in our districts, so we pay consistently 10% to 15% more than they do.

Also, there’s a big disconnect in public education because all curriculum decisions are made by outsiders. I want teachers to have more say in what they teach. That can be put in the union contract, and then you can challenge teachers to be more accountable.

Green Dot is a nonprofit charter management organization. What distinguishes Green Dot from other charter operators?
My expertise in politics has been a boost. A lot of the Green Dot model is old-fashioned organization sense: recruit and breed leaders, nurture their leadership, and look at communities as a shared value system.

It also comes down to a love for retail politics, which means going into neighborhoods where people have been promised for decades that something would happen and nothing has. Knowing that you have to go to an African-American church in South Central maybe five times before people actually start taking you seriously. The reason all schools aren’t excellent is a political problem.

How do the communities respond to your involvement and your follow-through?
A minister gave me the highest compliment I have ever gotten professionally: ‘Do you know how many people have come to this neighborhood and made promises over the decades? Everybody from politicians to presidents. And you know how many people actually follow through? You are probably the first, and you actually said you are going to do this and you did it, and that gives you a lot of credibility.’

How have you used your political savvy to rally parents?
I always tell parents, ‘Coming to our school is the ultimate revolutionary act, because you are saying to the public school system that what stands for education is no longer acceptable.’ I give out my home number and say, ‘If anything ever gets in the way of feeling that your kids are being given the best public education, you call me, and I will be there for you.’ Most of these families are made up of busboys, or cooks at a hotel around LAX, and they have come to this country and have never tasted democracy. Nobody, let alone a public school, has ever treated them with respect.

Have you used lessons from politics to overcome resistance from school districts?
Yes. When the district wouldn’t work with us on one of the lowest-ranking schools in L.A., we mobilized families. We went door to door with this simple message: ‘Do you want a small, safe school that will prepare your kids for college?’ We rallied 10,000 signatures and 1,000 of those people marched to the school district to present the charters. It transformed the neighborhood, and when we opened those five schools, we took half the kids off that failed campus.

How about a success story from one of your schools?
We started with 140 kids at Animo Leadership Charter High School, in one of the poorest areas of L.A.. Seven out of 10 of those kids were not graduating from high school in the local school district. Despite the fact that we started with five teachers who had never taught, a principal who hadn’t been a principal, and an organization headed by a person who had never been in education before, we saw immediate results. We had 100% attendance most days. Test scores were triple those at the high school the kids would normally attend.

It was astonishing that these theories that we believed in actually worked—the young teachers with development got better; the kids with individualized instruction got better; the parents were challenged and included, and they showed up.

What is your long-term vision for Green Dot and for influencing public education in California?
Our basic theory of change is that we concentrate on L.A.. We feel that if you can change the second biggest school district in the country from a grassroots level, it will have ripple effects. Ultimately, our goal is that in five years, all public schools in L.A. will be like Green Dot schools — not charter schools — but schools where the dollars go directly into the school site, the schools are small, and they follow the basic tenants that we believe in.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Photo: Pop!Tech

Dowser: The Pangaea Project gives young Americans a rare inside look at social entrepreneurship in poor countries. Why just include low-income kids?
Delman: Because these kids have very little access to the idea of social entrepreneurship, let alone opportunities to see it in action. They’ve got even fewer chances to travel outside America. Most of our students have never been on a plane before.

Aren’t there social entrepreneurs in Oregon?
Leaving the U.S. is central to what we’re about. We want students to learn about global disparity. What causes it, and what local people are doing about it. The best way to learn this is to experience it. To experience how completely different life can be, just based on where you’re born.

How do you prepare American teens for that kind of experience?
The curriculum has three phases. We start with a three-month course, 150 hours of classroom learning on wealth disparity. They learn about colonialism, neo-colonialism, worker rights, and human rights. They also get basic language and cultural sensitivity training.

Then they spend one month abroad. What happens when they get there?
First they spend two weeks traveling, seeing what happens when powerful outside interests operate without considering the life of indigenous people or the natural environment. It's a real eye-opener.

What do they see?
In Ecuador, students hike and canoe through the Amazon rainforest, past huge contaminated oil pits and miles of clear cut forests. In Thailand they visit vast slums, where small children work the streets. They drive for hours through farmland controlled by transglobal corporations.

This is powerful stuff for teenagers who’ve never been on a plane before. Do they get overwhelmed?
They are meeting with community organizers, so they can see that it’s possible to make change, even in extremely challenging situations. For example, they meet with youth leaders in Sarayaku, a community of indigenous people who have kept the oil companies out. Sarayaku’s leader is 23 years old.

In Bangkok they meet with Four Regions Slum Network, an organization of slum dwellers working to stop eviction from the only place they have ever lived. The students see real social change strategies at work.

Pangaea Project students spend their second two weeks abroad living with host families in Thailand and Ecuador. How do they like that part?
It’s a highlight of the trip for most of them. The host families are incredibly gracious and welcoming. The students get a day-to-day, intimate experience of how another culture lives. Our students are urban youth, and they’re working on the land, milking cows. And they do service work. They have a lot of fun, too, but it’s not a trip to Disneyland. It is very real. We travel very far off the beaten path. We really want them to see the real life of people out there.

OK, they get back to Portland, now what?
Now they have ideas, informed ideas. Each initiates a social action campaign, and the final part of their project is to spend four months campaigning. They speak to hundreds of high school students. They speak on the radio to thousands of listeners. They speak to the mayor and city council. We give them a chance to develop their public speaking skills, to find their voice, and to realize that there are people all over this community who really care about what they have to say.

You were working at a refugee center when you decided to start The Pangaea Project, what made you change course?
It was an amazing organization, people from 46 countries came in and out every day. But it was still an office job. I wanted to do more. I had traveled to dozens of countries and while abroad I had my own evolution from backpacker, to volunteer, to becoming a social activist.

It changed my view of the world. I had this idea that if more people could have that experience, the world might be a more just place.

That’s a pretty big idea. Where did you find your early partners?
I was having coffee with a friend, Stephanie Tolk, Pangaea’s other co-founder. She had been in the Peace Corps in Mali. She told me she wanted to start a program to bring low-income students to other countries to do service work. I said, 'That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking!’

What came next?
I took a course in nonprofit management and Stephanie took a grant-writing course.

We put up a post for volunteers on a local website and 35 people showed up. It was crazy! That was eight years ago.

And now the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds The Pangaea Project. Can you share something you’ve learned about fundraising?
We started by writing to everybody we ever knew. Literally everyone. My dentist from third grade, my fifth grade science teacher, my third cousin. After the first letter went out, I didn’t sleep for a week.

Something you learn quickly is that people want to help; they want to be a part of something. They just need to be asked. Now I am much more comfortable with asking.

What is the best advice that you can give someone who is interested in pursuing a career in social activism?
Balance and take care of yourself throughout the process. Have boundaries with it. For several years, we had very few boundaries and worked seven days a week. When you’re obsessed with an idea, it consumes you. You think about it at 3:00 in the morning and you’re working on it Sunday afternoon. That’s OK if that’s what it takes for a little while, but try to also have fun. Go out with your friends, get a break.

And make yourself replaceable if you are really on to a big idea. This is a hard one. I feel so invested and attached to this whole thing, but at some point, you want it to be bigger than you. You want to be able to pass it on.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Photo: The Pangaea Project

Today, OneWorld Now! is a highly regarded global leadership program. Its two-year structure gives Seattle area high school students the time they need to build leadership skills, learn languages like Chinese and Arabic, and explore cultures in preparation for a semester or year abroad. To date, OneWorld Now! has graduated more than 1,000 mostly minority, low-income youth, all of whom have defied demographics and gone on to college. The organization is currently accepting applications for its next two-year program, and its 2011 summer program which is open to all students able to travel to Seattle.  Here, Hayden talks about the challenges she's faced and her vision for the future.

Dowser: Launching a social venture takes chutzpah. How did you develop your sense of agency?
Hayden: When I was 15, I studied abroad for a year in South Africa during apartheid on a Rotary Exchange scholarship. Because of the experiences that I had there, I went into my teens with the confidence and belief in myself that I could do anything.

Why South Africa?
It was in the news all the time, but nobody knew people from there. I wanted to understand what those experiences might be like. I came back with a commitment to social justice and a passion for study abroad. It absolutely influenced the work that I am doing today.

After you finished school, you lived abroad and worked some pretty interesting jobs, from running a pharmaceutical company in Moscow to playing in a Parisian acid jazz band. When did you decide to start OneWorld Now!?
After traveling and being an ex-pat for seven years, I decided that if I were going to stay in the States, I had to manifest this vision I had for OneWorld Now! and put it into action.

One thing that stuck with me from my past study-abroad trips was that all the students I traveled with were white and affluent, which perpetuated a stereotype for people abroad of what it means to be American. I saw the downside of this, and wanted to counteract it.

Why didn’t you continue to live abroad and be a one-woman stereotype killer?
When I made the decision to come back to the States, my biggest resistance to being here was my frustration with Americans’ disconnection from the rest of the world. I decided to be proactive and do something about the things that used to push me away. It was a very conscious choice to stop complaining and be part of the solution.

How does OneWorld Now! realize your personal vision?
The program model of language, leadership, and study abroad is a culmination of my vision for 21st-century global citizens. We’re still one of the only programs in the country giving under-served high school students the critical language and leadership skills to prepare them not just for their study abroad experiences, but for the rest of their lives.

What else makes OneWorld Now! unique?
We are the only program in the country that actually takes a year to prepare students and then sends them abroad. A year beforehand, we help students for their time abroad – which can be a semester or a year – by giving them critical language and leadership skills. The languages that we’ve strategically chosen, Arabic and Chinese, are not typically taught in public schools.

Our leadership curriculum has five main modules - personal development, intercultural communication, social justice, global citizenship, and social entrepreneurship.

What do they do while abroad?
During their experiences abroad, they live with host families, do service projects, develop their own projects, and continue their language studies. Then, they come back after a year, and they continue the language and leadership component, as well as a mentorship component.

You also focus on preparing students for college. How and where does this fit in to OneWorld Now!’s work?
When I first started the program, I was coming from my middle-class perspective, which was assuming that most of these kids were going to go onto four-year colleges. I was coming from a family that encouraged me; it wasn’t even a question – was I going to go to college? I quickly realized after the first year that it was definitely not the typical mindset of most of our students, and that this was an area where we could have a big impact - and we are!

What does this look like? SAT prep? Mentoring? Nagging students about their grades?
It’s more about really taking the time to be involved in their lives, giving them these projects that engage them and put their minds and passions to use. Then, they understand that part of being a successful leader is getting a good education as well.

What’s your vision for the next few years?
Our vision is to be a model for others to replicate and duplicate. We also want to expand our program globally; we want to create versions of OneWorld Now! in the Middle East and China. The bigger vision is about providing access to transformative international experiences for young people all over the world. For the first time we’ve been exploring ways of hosting international students here to create a true exchange.

What was a crucial decision you made in OneWorld Now!’s startup phase that has contributed to its success?
Developing a well-respected and credible board of directors.

What about your most significant challenge?
We started right after the dot-com bust and no one wanted to fund new ideas. I just remember the atmosphere was horrible for funding. I’d been abroad for seven years, so I was new to the community here. And I was young. All sorts of things were going against me.

That must have made funding difficult.
The funding was so hard. I look back at those times – two years of pain and no money – and I don’t know how I made it through.

What was the tipping point?
What changed everything was this big grant proposal we’d written to the Freeman Foundation, which funds all the Asian studies programs at major U.S. colleges. We’d asked for half a million dollars; they basically laughed at us. They loved our idea, but we clearly had not yet proven ourselves. They wrote us a letter saying, ‘Good luck kids. If you can raise $100,000, we’ll give you another $100,000.’ That letter was like gold for me.

Solid, motivational gold.
Yep. Then we got our first big break and everything was boom, boom, boom, after that. There was a competitive grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation for the nation’s most innovative after-school programs. We got that. The money got us started, but it was the recognition that really made the difference.  Then, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decided to fund us, too.

When everything seemed discouraging, what carried you through?
There were moments of truth where I asked myself, ‘Is this really worth it?’ But at those key moments, a couple of people close to me said, ‘Kristin, it’s OK, you’re not going to be considered a failure if this doesn’t work.’ They were giving me permission to let it go. That actually motivated me; it got the fire under me to make it happen.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Photo: Julie Furbush for Dowser

One thing we know from the field of neuroscience is that, unlike computers, the brain is very slow at individual processing. In one second, a computer circuit can handle millions of instructions, but a neuron can fire only about two hundred times. That's why computers are so much faster than human beings at serial, computational tasks.

But why can a child understand someone speaking with a lisp, or a foreign accent, better than the best voice recognition software? Why can a baby recognize facial expressions better than a supercomputer?

The answer is that the brain is a massive parallel processor, with 100 billion neurons operating simultaneously, making it extraordinarily powerful at pattern recognition. Much of what our brains do is to pre-process information—we store up experience—and then, in real time, determine which patterns to apply to which circumstances.

That's why business and law schools teach via case studies. It's why entrepreneurs are so fond of biographies. It's why religions teach morality through allegories. In each case, we load up our brains with examples that enhance our ability to spot patterns. Those patterns can later be summoned to help us manage unforeseeable situations.

What are the implications? To boost your pattern-recognition abilities, give yourself exposures to a variety of experience bases. Don't limit yourself to one model of reality. Different fields -- the law, physics or religion, for example -- offer complimentary ways of understanding the world. Steve Jobs traced his invention of the Mac to a calligraphy course that gave him an aesthetic appreciation which he later fused with his technical know-how. Today, we see advances coming at the intersection of fields like biology and computer science, economics and psychology, finance and social entrepreneurship. If you want to be an effective problem-solver, gather experiences from different fields, sectors and cultures—and keep thinking about the patterns.

Back to Part 2

Photo: Mrs McArthur's Blog

I've spent the past 20 years interviewing social entrepreneurs in different countries and fields—and if there's one quality they all have in common, it's creativity. Not a specific talent like a flair for painting or writing poetry, but a generalizable kind of creativity that can be applied to many types of problems.

This creativity has less to do with knowledge (although it requires knowledge) than with a willingness to ask unconventional questions, absorb new information, and try ideas out. It's both playful and bold.

A society that does not nurture this kind of creativity is in trouble.

The irony is that it is so easy to encourage. If you look at young children, they are continually experimenting. Most of their experiments are failures—in the sense that their efforts to control their environment usually backfire. A toddler quickly discovers that he can't stand on a ball. Or he pulls a glass of milk off the table and SMASH! Big mess. But the wonderful thing is that there are no penalties for those failures.

There’s a robust and incredibly accelerated learning process in the first five years of life. And it can be a joy to witness. A first grader (who hasn't been suckered to think that he's really supposed to build the Star Wars ship featured on the Lego box) will concoct the most marvelous paracosm out of a bunch of Lego pieces, Pokemon cards, and plastic reptiles.

Then you get to school and you discover that if you put up your hand and give a wrong answer, it doesn’t feel good. Maybe the other kids laugh at you or the teacher frowns. The impulse to experiment gets abruptly curtailed. How many students come to avoid failure more than they embrace learning? It depends on how much we value 'right' answers over self-directed learning. In this regard, testing can be a huge impediment.

Schools can do much better to nurture the kind of creativity that helps children grow into powerful changemakers. In our new book, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, Susan Davis and I devote a chapter to this subject. Here's a brief excerpt:

In their book The Scientist in the Crib, authors Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl observe that babies and toddlers from their earliest years “think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments.” Children know far more about the world than adults imagine, and they seek to understand everything they touch and taste. During their first two years, they make extraordinary intellectual leaps.

For most children, intellectual development slows dramatically within a few years. By the time they are in grade school, children have lost much of the curiosity and resourcefulness that a few years earlier made them incomparable explorers. As the educator Eleanor Duckworth explains in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas, once children enroll in school, their natural enthusiasm and inquisitiveness becomes subordinated to the needs of adults enlisted to teach them. A young child who breaks something to see what it looks like inside, or asks a question that is socially embarrassing, or wants to discover how it feels to wear shoes on the wrong feet, will often be met with a discouraging glance or tone from an adult.

Duckworth argues that educators should encourage and structure moments when children can have their own ideas and feel good for having them. Only if children honestly believe their ideas are valuable will they develop the interest, ability, and self-confidence to be lifelong learners and doers. “Having confidence in one’s ideas does not mean ‘I know my ideas are right,’" notes Duckworth. "[I]t means ‘I am willing to try out my ideas.’”

Photo: ScienceWorldCA