Bikes may be trendy, but they are also just a way to get around. How can people who use bikes in different ways be united for the good of the community? City of Lights started in 2009 in Los Angeles to make visible ...
PROBLEM: While some applaud the power of social media to create social change, others doubt that information and discussion moves users to action. This fall, Malcolm Gladwell took a strong stand against the role of social media in changemaking, stating that connections formed ...
PROBLEM: People generally want to volunteer in some capacity; social change organizations generally need volunteers. Soup kitchens and Habitat for Humanity seldom have a shortage of volunteers, because most anyone can do it. But, for a professional who wants to use their specialized ...
PROBLEM: VolunteerMatch, an online service that matches volunteers and organizations, had operated for about a year when it faced a wrenching choice: either become a for-profit business, which would allow the organization to grow quickly by accepting investment from venture investors, or remain ...
Five-year-olds from low-income communities have one-quarter the vocabulary of their more affluent peers, and half of them enter first grade as much as two years behind in preschool skills. That’s a severe handicap, which will persist for life unless something powerful intervenes. That's ...
It's becoming increasingly popular to take a gap year either before college or between college years. Many youths are choosing to use that time to make a positive impact in the world. Here, Doni Bloomfield (right), an incoming freshman at the University of ...
In our Big Ideas series, we check in regularly with top thinkers in the field of social innovation. We want to know what they're working on, what questions they're wrestling with, and what opportunities and challenges they see up ahead for the sector. Alan ...
Oso Martin, founder of the Portland, OR-based recycling collective Free Geek, combines three problems and comes up with a solution. “Some people have too many computers; others don’t have enough,” he told us. “And there is a glut of computers going to landfills. ...
Search for the hashtag #socent and you'll find wide-ranging interest in social entrepreneurship on Twitter. Here's a roundup of a few thought-provoking tweets from the last week: Remember Vélib, the pilot bike-sharing experiment in Paris that’s been replicated in cities around the world? ...
Summertime, and the tweeting is easy...It's only been three days since we launched our social change Twitter contest, #SummerImpact, and we've already racked up quite an array of amazing responses to the question, “What purpose-driven projects have you been carrying out over these ...