The Edge

We are usually quite shy at Social Edge about our accomplishments. We rarely mention our traffic numbers (booming!) or our ego-pleasing nominations, like the Webbies Honoree mention for Global X.

But we couldn't help but blush when Social Edge was named one the Best Innovation Blogs (along with IDEO!) by Five for Friday, an informal roundup of some of the best things on the Web. These are the reason they chose us:

Thinking about starting your own NGO or jetting off to personally end
hunger? Read Social Edge first. [...]

Social Edge furthers innovation among social entrepreneurs through its
collection of blogs, discussions, and resources dedicated to the “pioneers
of innovations that benefit humanity.” No matter what your plan to solve
the world’s problems, you’ll probably find a blog from someone who’s been
there before. [...]

Though lots of members, like Kiva founder Matt Flannery, are well-known and successful, the site is intended to help social entrepreneurs share common experiences, positive or disastrous.

Thank you to our community that has been helping Social Edge become the practical, global network for social entrepreneurs.

In "Twitter-concise" language, here are 10 reasons to apply for the Global Social Benefit Incubator. For more information on the GSBI, you can read the full press release or find the copy in Spanish, Portuguese, and French in our press area.  

• Reason # 10 to apply to #GSBI Scale your impact & change the world faster! http://bit.ly/gsbi10 What is your reason to apply? Let us know. 
• Reason #9 to apply to #GSBI Special opp for orgs helping communities off the grid or suffering frequent disruptions in their energy supply 
• Reason #8 to apply to #GSBI Be the next #Kiva. @mattflannery attended along w/other successful #SocEnt frm around world http://bit.ly/5LyokM 
• Reason #7 to apply to #GSBI Make trusted connections "I now work w/a GSBI participant I met there & have partnered w/another" Matt Flannery 
• Reason #6 to apply to #GSBI @robertkatz http://bit.ly/7QDEd1 & @fjnoguera @nextbillion think it's a good idea http://bit.ly/5FjJOF 
• Reason #5 to apply to #GSBI Mentoring by Silicon Valley veterans "help open doors for funding opps..& cont to be avail as a sounding board” 
• Reason #4 to apply to #GSBI "Typically results in major "ah-ha" moments" "you don't often get chance to step back, look strategically @ org" 
  
• Reason #3 to apply to #GSBI It forces you "to step back & assess current market & competitive landscape.." Hardika Shah http://bit/ly/gsbi10 
• Reason #2 to apply to #GSBI Application has "tremendous value" RT @socentex Global Opps for Active Social Entrepreneurs http://bit.ly/8GUu8N 
  
• Reason #1 to apply to #GSBI Incubators are great! Business Week: "triple-bottom-line biz encounter unique challenges" http://bit.ly/5HpYHo

There are many more reasons to apply, but starting right now, you can get free feedback on your Value Proposition. The mentoring will help you explain "Why you" and distill your "mission essence" into a concise statement that will help people understand what you do and how your solution will change the world.

Don't delay. The first deadline is January 15. Then you can get help with defining your target market and business model... and that's just for entering. Can you imagine the value of being one of the 20 selected for a full scholarship to the incubator?!

Life is complicated, says our Idealist friend Ami Dar. He wonders whether we could start looking at the world from a different point of view to "quickly build a network of people and organizations that will allow us to make the most of what each of us has to offer, online and in person."

He just published a vision for this network, a path and a timeline to get there, and an invitation to be part of this movement from the very start.

Will you join them?

Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg is contributing thought-provoking blog posts to the Intrepid Philanthropist blog, a new initiative at the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. You can read those here.

Debra Dunn just wrote a fascinating review of Roger Martin’s new book, The Design of Business (Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage), in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

As they grow, many organizations tend to become driven by an analytical approach to management that is incompatible with exploration of new and innovative ideas. "This is the crux of the conflict between innovation and scale," writes Debra Dunn.

She adds a personal comment: "As someone who wears the scars of many battles fought for innovation during 22 years at Hewlett-Packard, a company that succumbed to the natural bias toward scale, I’d give most companies poor odds of achieving the balance Martin espouses, but they will be better for trying."

Note that Roger Martin didn't directly address the social entrepreneurship sector in his book, but the ideas are equally applicable.

Barrons' Magazine this week has a cover story on effective philanthropists. The 25 Best Givers doesn't look at just levels of giving by philanthropists, but instead focuses on factors like "innovation, quality of alliances with other groups, the ripple effects of their giving and the extent to which their successful projects can be replicated."

Jeff Skoll is second on the list of 25 (just behind fellow eBay Pierre Omidyar). The article also mentions Jeff's founding of the Skoll Centre at Oxford and his work with Participant Media in making movies that both entertain and inspire people to action on social and environmental issues. Jeff Skoll also launched Social Edge in 2004.

This year’s winners of The Purpose Prize, a $100,000 award for social innovators in their encore careers, are ordinary people using a new stage of life to do extraordinary things. They include:

* A former telecom executive who helped wire an Appalachian county and brought laid-off factory workers back to profitable farming;

* A professor who invented a way to transform toxic fly ash into green bricks;

* A psychiatrist who helps saves soldiers’ lives by offering free mental health treatment;

* A former NASA exec who works to treat alcoholism in Native American communities by reviving old customs and traditions; and

* A couple who honor their son, killed on 9/11, by helping to bring mental health services to countries ravaged by terrorism, violence and war.

These people – and five other $50,000 winners – are social entrepreneurs over 60 who are using their experience and passion to take on society’s biggest challenges. Now in its fourth year, the six-year, $17 million program is the nation’s only large-scale investment in social innovators in the second half of life.

The Purpose Prize is a program of the Encore Careers campaign run by Civic Ventures, a national think tank on boomers, work and social purpose.

Here are 20 topics that caught my eye...

• 2009 Iran Election: Women's Revolution? Twitter Revolution? (Mona Kasra, UT at Dallas)
• The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions (Stephen Anderson, PoetPainter)
• Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won't Work (Dan Roam, Author)
• Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change (Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog)
• Digital's Emerging Role In Unconsumption (Nita Rollins, Resource Interactive)
• Exploiting Chaos -- How to Spark Innovation During Times of Change (Jeremy Gutsche, TrendHunter.com)
• Future of Context (Matt Thompson, Newsless.org)
• How to Teach Entrepreneurialism Globally (Doug Richard, School for Startups)
• In Code We Trust: Open Government Awesomeness (Noel Hidalgo, New York State Senate)
• Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web (Joe Alterio, Robots and Monsters)
• Interactive Documentaries: a Multidimensional Narrative (Victoria Ha, Stitch Media Inc)
• Process Journalism: Getting it First, While Getting it Right (Will Sullivan, The Poynter Institute)
• Real-Time Everything: the Era of Communication Ubiquity (Rob Gonda, Sapient)
• Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery (Peter Morville, Semantic Studios)
• Student Startups: Entrepreneurship in the University (Hung Truong, Troubadour Mobile)
• Uprising Tide - Inciting Online Communities into Offline Movements (Chris Schultz, LaunchPad, New Orleans)
• We F*cked Up. Now What? Exploring Failure, Together (Kevin Hoffman, Happy Cog)
• When Swine Flew: Embracing Innovation in H1N1 Response (Andrew Wilson, U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services)
• Why Challenge Prizes Are the Future of Innovation (Brandon Kessler, ChallengePost)
• Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit? Donations 2.0 (Skylar Woodward, Kiva)

First Batch of Panel Announced for SXSWi - see all that made the cut http://bit.ly/myGgD

Clay Shirky will be there too.  Which sessions caught your eye?

Fifteen international economic development organizations have received grants in support of their work to expand small and growing businesses in developing countries.

The grants, which total US $447,000, were the first awarded as part of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Capacity Development Fund, a US $1million effort to increase the productivity and effectiveness of organizations that provide investment, training and other resources to small and growing businesses in developing countries.

Funding for the grants was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lemelson Foundation and Shell Foundation.

Our friend Bunker Roy at Barefoot College just found out that out of 1,000 entries in the BBC World Challenge 2009, the Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa were selected as one of the 12 finalists.

Help them win by voting today!
 

As we look forward to the SoCap10, let's hope in the coming year we can make progress on greater collaboration and sharing of data.  As we seek to hold social enterprises to higher standards, we will need to work together to hold all companies to higher standards, to increase knowledge and awareness among donors and investors alike, and to achieve much greater transparency of data in order to enhance efficiency of the social entrepreneurship sector.  Here are the gaps aka opportunities for the coming year:

For-profit SROI metrics
Much has been said about the heavy metrics focus of SoCap.  Kevin Jones, SoCap09 Convener, said the market for social enterprise needs sizing and he asks “How big is the opportunity? A string of anecdotes is not measurable.” But perhaps lost in the metrics discussion, is now that social enterprise are being held to the same standards as for-profits (indeed they are expected to out-perform not only in financial returns but to have the social returns to boot) – Then the for-profits must be held to the same standards and report their social impact as well as their financial returns. It’s only fair. Then you can really compare and contrast to your heart’s content. After all, the "rules between customer & company are going to be rewritten & this time—caveat venditor” according to the article  Meaning-Driven Business. (Not to mention Virgance who is also driving this home with their CarrotMob concept and other consumer driven power plays to incent businesses to be better and do good.)
 
Education gap
If you are going to bring social ventures up to speed so to speak, then you need education, training, and how-to guides and curriculum materials so that social entrepreneurs can understand these new reporting expectations.  Likewise, whose job is it to educate brokers and clients on the returns and benefits of social investing?  Right now both education efforts are ad hoc and labor intensive. There is an opportunity for an association or group to step up and create the teaching materials, open source them, and assist with rapid dissemination. Check out Sean Stannard-Stockton on transferring knowledge to major donors.  Then read Money and Meaning where an optimistic Nathaniel Whittemore declares "people have capacity to shift their values and recognize gaps between values and action"
      
Uber-solutions and databases
Charles “hipbone” Cameron asks who will step up to make whole social entrepreneurship  sector more efficient rather than solving only part of the problem for only their own organization?  Which brings me back to the Social Entrepreneur API and the Make the Maps, Mind the Gaps, Build the Apps session.  The model that we drafted includes 5 components:  Raw materials (participating organizations that will solve their own problems through the collaborative app), tools (the process for managing the development of the solution), glue (funding – and this is both small amounts of seed funds and/or sweat equity), workers (the expertise to build the database/apps), and riders (the adoption and use of the data by the community). This concept works well, but keep in mind a caveat by Peter Deitz, "participating organizations are not like bricks – designed to fit together” so it takes an effort to bring people together even for their mutual benefit. 

Let me leave you with the three quotes I used to wrap up our session:
Here's "Why It's Smart To Be Optimistic" as a recent BusinessWeek article explained, you need to "Prepare yourself for all possible outcomes, including highly positive ones."  In other words, don't be afraid to start or overthink what could go wrong - instead, think about what could go right.

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, they introduced the concept Catalytic Philanthropy and the 4 key tennants are: "Take responsibility for results; Create "conditions for collaboration and innovation"; " Use all available tools"; "Create Actionable Knowledge"  Sharing data and building collaborative App solutions, like the Social Entrepreneur API, create knowledge that will benefit many players in the field of social entrepreneurship, and they provide value, often in ways that you did not even anticipate.

And finally Skoll Social Entrepreneur Martin Von Hildebrand in speaking with Global X reminds us “Don’t go in with the answers. Answers need to be built.”  Instead, get your collaborators together and ask right questions.

We look forward to continuing the discussions that were begun at SoCap and hope that many of you will step up and collaborate on Maps and Apps to bridge the Gaps that are slowing down social entrepreneurs.
 
 

At SoCap09 we did see that gains had been made since last year.  That's not to say we are done and in the home stretch, but rather that new doors are opening.  Here are some of the gains I saw this year:

Government
As Vanessa Kirsch of New Profit said, “Government was not part of our equation.”  In past years, social entrepreneurs deliberately worked around government. Now government is seen as a potential funding source and even partner. Kirsch went on to say that “We (social entrepreneurs) have to change our own behavior. We have to ask ourselves - Do we have a policy team?”

Kirsch is not the only person adjusting to the new government role. Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation Sonal Shah talked about their new innovation strategy  and pointed out that their initiatives "might seem like common sense, but for the government it's a new way of doing business."

And Andrew Wolk of Root Cause reflected on the evolution of the responsibilities for government – what was a role of program developer, became outsourcer, and is now becoming an enabler.  Still to be answered, though, is how government can encourage innovation, reward success, create a conducive environment for social ventures, and foster metrics.

Need for New Tools           
This may be seen as a gap, but in reality, it is a gain – people have gained the realization that it is not enough to work with, bend, and renovate existing rules and tools.  There is a real need to develop new tools and rules.  With this is mind one can understand why some at SoCap could say with a straight face “I would rather give you a grant – it is too risky to give you a loan.”  With the current set of tools, this dichotomy makes perfect sense – if you expect your loan to be repaid with interest in a short term, then the risk is very high that you won’t be repaid.  But if, for example, you can guarantee a low or no interest loan (to make it less risky for the lenders and back it up with a potential grant) then you can do more with less money and foster sustainability.

This requires redefining risk and offering more ways to provide patient capital.  Kim Smith of New Schools Venture Fund pointed out “No-one has the teachers guide" and it’s not going to be easy but we need to innovate completely new tools rather than just continuing to find new ways to adapt the existing ones.  

And Dan Crisafulli of Skoll Foundation emphasized this in his blog post where he said, “Change the rules of the game. … some social entrepreneurs are creatively engaging with business and government to …one day change the equilibrium of how business is done and, in effect, put themselves out of business.” 
 

Measurement and Iteration:
Metrics "were indeed sexy topics throughout the first days of #SoCap09. Believe it," says Jake Samuelson  who added they were "sexy, but contentious."  There is still a way to go in building consensus but advances have been made and there are lots of fascinating tools emerging including Pulse, IRIS and GIIRs to name a few.

Aaron Sklar of IDEO pointed out that “You get what you measure, so measure what you care about.” IDEO also came out with the human-centered design toolkit that promotes prototyping as “a methodology for making solutions tangible in a rapid and low-investment way.  It’s a proven technique for quickly learning how to design an offering right and for accelerating the process of rolling out solutions to the world.” 

And in a joint project of IDEO and Acumen called the Ripple Effect, Sangeeta Chowdhry explained two additional keys to success: 1. A short deadline (2 months) prompted participants to start and complete projects in what would have taken over a year and 2. Rapid iteration led to both faster & better solutions.  Learn more about seeding Innovation and the Ripple Effect. 

Check out my next post for GAPS remaining despite measurable gains.       

Gaps are on my mind having just led the session “Make the Maps, Mind the Gaps, Build the Apps” at SoCap09.  Our session, which included insights from Curtis LeFrandt – a BYU graduate student who is writing his thesis on mapping the field of social entrepreneurship, and Peter Deitz of Social Actions and Social Entepreneur API fame, was a buzz-worthy favorite that also sparked and contributed to a number of follow-on conversations on the final day of the Social Capital conference.

How do social entrepreneurs journey from idea to break-through ventures?  What routes work? What routes should be avoided? What is slowing social entrepreneurs down?  We discussed the barriers to growth, and then talked about the collaborative apps that could be built to reduce friction. As an example of apps to bridge gaps, we introduced the Social Entrepreneur API http://socialentrepreneurapi.org , the first open source database of vetted entrepreneurs. This tool helps social entrepreneurs find each other, helps funders and the media find social entrepreneurs, and helps more people discover the innovative solutions of successful social entrepreneurs. The press release launching the public beta was released at SoCap.

Check it out http://search.socialentrepreneurapi.org – play around with it – search for “water and Africa” or “youth in Cambodia” and you will quickly see the social entrepreneurs working in those areas and the innovative model they are using.  This is early days but you can already see how hugely valuable and time saving it is to have one search engine for vetted social entrepreneurs from several different funders. We’re working on widgets so you will be able to “drop” lists of relevant social entrepreneurs onto your site. Please let us know how you might use the social entrepreneur data so we can build the tools to make it possible.

And then check out our map of the field, possible filters, and model for building collective apps like the Social Entrepreneur API.

Gaps were seen at more than just our session, though.  Check out my next two posts on on take-aways from SoCap – featuring three gains made and three gaps remaining.

Last week was the SOCAP09 conference attracting social entrepreneurs from all over the world.  This week was the MOMENTUM conference attracting the leading activists from all over the world.  Interestingly there were only a small handfull of overlap in the attendees.   Is there a divide between these two camps?  The civil society is already fragmented enough. If there is a growing divide between the social entrepreneurship and activist camps then surely the greater good would call for us to bridge the gap.
  
Sure enough during a Tuesday evening cocktail networking at the Tides Momentum Conference, I oversaw Ellen Friedman (ED of Tides and the host of this conference) at a table with Kevin Jones and Rosa Lee Harden (the co-founders of the SOCAP conference last week among other important endeavors).  It was as if both gang leaders team were huddling up in a dark alley to decide the fate of civil society, or so i thought melodramatically. I was intrigued and so I interviewed them the next day.   

Friedman mentioned that they did discuss this divide and are keen on beginning a dialogue to start bridging the gap.  In fact, Freeman suggested that one important outcome from the conference might be this very dialogue.  She intends to 'keep the conversations going'.  I met with Kevin and Rose Lee separately and they confirmed their interest in strengthening the dialogue and start to build bridges.  So keep an eye out and start pressuring from your end.   All those with the passion to drive social progress need to find a way to stay united. 

I also asked their opinion on the difference between activism and social entrepreneurship.  There was consensus that entrepreneurship is about creating something new while activism is about taking action of any kind so you can indeed be both an activist and a social entrepreneur.  Ellen gave Kevin Bales and Willie Smits as examples.  Both changemakers spoke eloquently in the Momentum conference about their work.  Kevin's mission is to end slavery over the next 25 years while Willie's is to curb global warming, save local fauna & flora while simultaneously developing local jobs in Borneo, Indonesia.  Both individuals are creating something new and innovative but are required to influence government and others in positions of power as part of their important work.  As Ellen eloquently put it, 'often you need to build a movement and a market'. 

Most social entrepreneurs, like me, don't identify with activism, but, like corporate managers have understood long ago, we mustn't overlook the fact that influencing those critical non-market actors in positions of power is often a critical part of our work as well.  One can influence non-market actors in two ways: with votes or with dollars.  Most social entrepreneurs don't have the deep pockets of the corporate world, so they will have to follow the path blazed by the activists: build political leverage with votes.  On the other hand, activists should also start to recognize that their work will only be enhanced by learning from a new wave of changemakers who want to go beyond the traditional activism born out of the 60s to incorporate principles of the market and best practices of management and private industry to achieve the same goals.  The millenials, particularly in the US, don't identify as activists but will usually need to incorporate incorporate their best practices for the purposes of movement formation and advocacy.

Do you think the activist community and the social entrepreneur community are divided?  Should that divide enough of a concern to be seriously addressed now?

by Lloyd Nimetz

At the Tides Momentum conference, I spotted a social entrepreneur among the activists.  David Cohn is betting on his crowd-funded initiative Spot.us to be the future model for professional journalism.  He calls it 'community funded reporting'.  If you want an article written, you can submit a story idea and see if the crowd funds the story.  Spot.us has a team of freelance reporters on stand-by ready to work on stories that receive sufficient funding to cover the corresponding costs of investigative reporting.  It's like Donorschoose but instead of funding school teachers, you are funding articles.  It's a fascinating model and experiment that makes a lot of sense although will inevitably have many nay-sayers who don't believe the general public or those with more disposable income should be able to influence reporting - a legitimate charge but not much different from the corporate marketing budgets influencing newspapers and magazines today.

Spot.us has great potential, but I think the class of professional journalism overall is dying a slow death.  Don't fret; we will still get the news.  What's dying is not journalism but professional journalism, supported by traditional newspaper business models; you, me and advertisers aren't willing to pay anymore like they used to.  Some people will continue to pay for some professional journalism but a new form of amateur journalism is slowly taking over.  I compare this to what happened hundreds of years ago with the end of a different professional class called 'the scribe'.  We don't mourn their demise now because we know that with better education and new technology -- the advent of the pencil, pen and later the computer -- we can all be amateur scribes!  (aside: Now with computers my handwriting is such crap that I might need a scribe again!)   The same is happening in the field of journalism.  Just like some scribes still exist even today, some professional journalists will continue to be demanded, but more and more news will be produced by you and me and more complex filtering mechanisms built on top of websites like Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot/Wordpress and Google will do the work of sorting through the mess to deliver to your smartphone, computer or e-pad the news you want, packaged as you want it.

What do you think is the future of journalism?

by Lloyd Nimetz

Paula Goldman, Live from the Momentum Conference

-----

An amazing plenary this morning on the notion of rights.  Here's an interesting tidbit from Kevin Bales, head of Free the Slaves, and a tremendously convincing speaker.

Fact: There are roughly 20 million slaves in the world today.

Fact: The estimated cost of finally wiping slavery off the face of the earth: 10.8 billion dollars, the equivalent of Intel's 4th quarter profits.

We are swimming in the fog of historic change in the social-change arena.  At the core of this transition -- or at least a symptom of it -- is the shift in language.  Obama's ability to recognize and unify a latent progressive movement in America depended on his effective use of language.  There are lots of new words floating around.  For example, I just co-authored a paper with the UNDP on what we called "Open-replication investing".  People like me are inventing terminology right and left partly because we can't find the right terms that fit and partly because we like making things up. 

The most important words that I want to focus on are those that change-agents identify with: those words that define who you are.  If somebody asks you at a cocktail party "what do you do?", what title do you answer with?  Am I an activist or a social entrepreneur?  Identity is one of the principal motivators behind people in general and especially in civil society, philanthropy and volunteerism so this is not just a matter of semantics. Understanding the decline of the title 'activist' and the rise of the 'social entrepreneur' unearths what is happening around us today and gives us a glimpse of what the social-change arena will look like tomorrow.

I've been asking all the self-selected 'progressive activists' here at the Tides Momentum conference whether they are social entrepreneurs or activists.  As a follow up I've asked how they differentiate the two.  The results have been varying but I'll try to sum them up here:
one bucket of responses were of people who immediately associated social entrepreneurship to self-generated revenues stream for sustainable financing.   Others thought it's related to a cultural and generational difference with activism as a dying breed of people coming out of the 60s as revolutionaries.  It comes out of an era that has ended and the results of those activists were not very successful.  That generation has been in positions of power in civil society until now but their lack of success and their gradual replacement in civil society and government by younger generations is driving the emergence of a new lexicon that fits with the current change agents in society that need a title to identify with.   

Digesting the thoughts has made me reflect on this topic as well: 
True.  I'm 30 and of a younger generation that doesn't identify with activism.  I'm turned off by all the protest and anti-establishment sentiment.  The focus on dissent instead of direct responsibility for value creation doesn't sit right.  I see entrepreneurship as a great engine of good in the world so of course I want to associate myself with it.  I don't feel much sense of entitlement but instead a sense of empowerment to create change by generating initiatives, social innovations and organizations (for-profit or non-profit).  Those in power do need to be influenced so if that's activism, then call me an activist but in the end of the day my work doesn't end there.  It focuses more on implementation, innovation and venture creation. 

by Lloyd Nimetz

Paula Goldman, live from the Momentum Conference.

---------

In the past several decades, we have seen a tide-shift in the way we think about social change.  The growing popularity of social entrepreneurship (both as a concept and a movement) is one major part of this, but it is just part.  It is a shift towards a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of issues, a paradigm in which words like 'effectiveness' and 'results' have trumped words like 'resistance, and 'domination.' It is a shift away from seeing any one individual, group, or organization as 'the enemy,' and towards seeing every single individual, group, and organization as part of the solution-- a critical part of the solution at that. 

If there is any one person whose journey is representative of these kinds of shifts, it may well be Adam Werbach, who I had a chance to chat with today before he gave a talk in the Carbon Plenary here at the Momentum Conference.

Some of you may know his story.  At 23, he was the youngest President of the Sierra Club. As an activist, his efforts helped achieved many successes, including major legislation in California to protect the state's deserts from destruction. 

But slowly, he grew dissatisfied.  He started to realize, he told me, that his efforts weren't achieving their stated goals. Despite decades of efforts by thousands of organizations, every environmental indicator was heading the wrong way.

He took it as a reflection on his own work.  In fact, he was ready to throw in the towel.  If he couldn't be successful, he told me, perhaps he should walk away and let other people take the lead who could do a better job.  He gave a speech in 2004 on the Death of Environmentalism, a speech which sparked controversy throughout the environmental community.

Today, Werbach doesn't regularly call himself an environmentalist anymore.  He has urged us, publicly, to drop our 'isms,' reminding us that the world's problems are so urgent, complex, and interdependent, requiring us to stop creating fiefdoms over which issues are 'our' issues.  This kind of thinking is indeed part of the overall shift I described earlier--  and is referred to in some areas of the activist world by the term 'intersectionality.' 

But far more controversially, Werbach has chosen to work on the inside, with big corporations rather than against them.  He was first approached by Walmart several years ago when several of its executives asked him to collaborate with them on their plans to green their footprint. It was a moment of deep reflection for Werbach.  His decision to collaborate with Walmart earned him derision and even threats from colleagues in the environmental movement.  Such incidents were widely noted in the media.  

Today, nearly five years later, Werbach runs a division of Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world's largest marketing and PR firms, focused on helping large multinationals create more sustainable operations. His recently released book, Strategy for Sustainability, urges corporations to look at sustainability as crucial to long-term profits.

Sitting in a board room with corporate elites is a far cry from organizing protests against the destruction of the world's ecosystems.  Or is it?  "Look, it's always been about effectiveness for me," he told me. And he proceeded to give me an abbreviated list of the ways in which the strategy has yielded tremendous dividends.  The vast strides forward made by Walmart are only one of these results.  He points to the ways in which companies like Hewlett Packard and Starbucks and even McDonald's have significantly greened their operations, in the process creating the kinds of results that sometimes seemed elusive to Werbach during his Sierra Club days.

Werbach's professional arc is noteworthy not just because he has leveraged the power and logic of business for social good.  Such openness to work with and through business is in itself a popular trend, especially amongst today's youth.  But the more important take away here comes at a higher level of abstraction.  It's about finding allies wherever they can be found, leaving behind the logic of opposition to focus more on the logic of solution-making.  

Werbach repeatedly emphasized this point in his talk today.  "Can we pull away from our own dogma to meet people where they are?" he asked, challenging an audience of donors, activists and social entrepreneurs. 

It is this kind of sentiment, perhaps more than any other, that embodies the way our thinking about social change has shifted in past decades.  The great complexity of our modern world does not permit simple models of good and evil, the oppressors and the oppressed.  We are increasingly compelled to find common ground wherever it can be found, to leverage resources wherever they can be used to genuinely good effect. 

This does not mean that everyone need work on the inside.  It does not mean that traditional activism, as we know it, is dead. (Indeed, Werbach was born in the world of activism, and freely acknowledges, for example, that without Greenpeace activist creating high-profile stunts outside major corporations, he would have far less leverage to do his own work.)   But it does mean that activism is no longer the single dominant model for how change occurs. It is one of many important tools at our disposal.  

The urgency of the world's problems demands we use all the tools available to us, as well as possible.

A couple important points that came up in the plenary, don't get mentioned often in the healthcare debate, and seem particularly important to underscore.

(1) It's not about Healthcare reform; it's about the government's role in our lives.   If you ask people who are against healthcare reform, their doubts are founded on the notion that more government is bad and it shouldn't force citizens to do anything, i.e. get healthcare coverage.  They also think that government running healthcare is not a good idea -- a waste of tax dollars.  Understanding this objection from the reform opposition is the key to compromise and real progress towards what we all want: quality healthcare for all who need it.

(2) The President's role is limited in that he doesn't touch the legislation until after the fight is over -- it passes the house and senate.  His role is crucial however in that the "reform is orphaned without him".  Every congressperson and advocacy group is working for their own constituents' interests.  Nobody's job is to think of the policy as a whole but shape it to their own interests.  The President can take a nation-wide benefit maximizing perspective.  Without it the policy will inevitably get fragmented into little bits.  This historical reform need to keep structural coherence as much as possible.

(3) Urgency of Now vs. Long-run.   Passing healthcare reform is critical but where is the finish line?  It's important to remember that passing a bill is only the beginning.  Implementation is going to be a huge administrative and politcal endeavor that will make or break our country's well-being, literally

(4) Political win.  This administration and the democratic congress know that they need something passed.  Without any win, the political consequences are very large well beyond healthcare.  The surviving politicians remember all too well the mid-90s when they lost congress due to the failed attempt to get healthcare reform. 

by Lloyd Nimetz