Susan Sarandon (above, right) was recently on CNN honoring Rose Mapendo (above, left) a genocide survivor who became a hero working with Mapendo International to rescue thousands in Africa. Rose is the inspiration for the organization Mapendo International, founded by Sasha Chanoff in the United States and his partner Dr. Wagacha Burton in Kenya.

To date, Mapendo International has helped more than 2,000 refugees into the U.S. Resettlement Program and provided medical care to an additional 3,000 through the organization's health clinic in Kenya.

The following comes from The Tactics of Hope. For more personal stories like Sasha’s, visit us at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources:

As the grandson of Jewish refugees, Sasha’s identity is intertwined with his life’s work, Mapendo International, a world-leading innovator in strategies for refugee and refugee protection.  A lifeline for people displaced by conflict, Mapendo identifies and protects people fleeing war and violence whose lives are in imminent danger and who fall outside existing aid efforts.  Of the eight million refugees worldwide, Mapendo is devising strategies at scale to reach as many of the “forgotten ones” as it can possibly reach.

Excerpt of Sasha’s story from The Tactics of Hope:

“I remember walking into the tent for the first time, and seeing the hollow faces of refugees needing to be rescued.  There were so many people, many more than the 113 I was supposed to bring back.  My eyes were drawn to a woman, Rose Mapendo, holding two little bundles in her arms, twins that she had given birth to eight months earlier in a prison with no running water or doctors.  She had been imprisoned for sixteen months, and her twins weighed four pounds each at birth.  Huddled around Rose in this tent were seven other kids, gaunt-like stick figures orphaned during the war.  In the tent were thirty-two other women and children whose husbands and fathers had been executed already.   They had come to the protection center only five days before I had gotten there, and none of the thirty-two were on my list.”

Sasha Chanoff founded Mapendo International with Dr. John Wagacha Burton, a Kenyan doctor and sociologist at the University of Nairobi.  Named after the woman, Rose Mapendo, who had been saved during Chanoff’s rescue mission to the Congo after giving birth to twins in prison, Mapendo means “great love” in Swahili. The organization, which devises and implements short and long-term solutions for those like Rose whose struggle to survive would otherwise go attended, is innovative in its efforts to address and solve the chronically unmet needs of thousands of refugees.  As Sasha says of the organization’s approach, “We are out to help the forgotten ones.” 

Sasha at Mapendo offices.

Mapendo’s strongest tactic, in comparison to traditional international aid organizations, is its unique approach to building local capacity.  In countries that are stricken with poverty, endless funds seem to flow inefficiently into the refugee crises that maintain the status quo without reforming it.  Tens of millions of dollars a year are pumped into the refugee camps from the top-down, that is, from western organizations with big grant money that rolls over year by year in board director rooms lacking the domestic ground knowledge in the very countries in which they are giving aid.  With a fraction of the budget of most transnational organizations, Mapendo is nonetheless one of the top emerging refugee initiatives in the world, largely because of its approach to building local capacity.

To this end, more than half the people on the board of directors, as well as the co-founder, are African.  Mapendo links its operations to local and indigenous stewardship not only by hiring nationals in countries of operation, but also by exploring ways to build resources and provide training to fight poverty.   In their short-term operations, Mapendo identifies, saves, and keeps refugees alive through their rescue and health initiatives.  In its growth and strategic plan, it is adopting innovative strategies for long-term systemic transformation of the refugee and prisoner rights issues at large.  The short-term tactics focus on the immediate improvement of healthcare, security, and integration of refugees.  The long-term tactics focus on building a permanent infrastructure for refugee assimilation and integration.

•    In its first two and a half years of operation, with resettlement projects to the United States, Mapendo has rescued over 2,000 refugees and launched a rescue resettlement mission to resettle 600 Congolese refugee massacre survivors who are in imminent danger.
•    Mapendo has provided health assistance to 1,000 urban refugees without access to any care who live in the impoverished areas of Nairobi.
•    In the coming few years Mapendo plans to launch rescue resettlement efforts for tens of thousands of refugees across Africa, as well as provide health assistance to tens of thousands of other at-risk refugees living in urban centers.
 

      Vera Cordeiro began Saude Crianca Renascer, or the Children’s Health Association, in 1991, using a new approach to medical care in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to fight poverty and ill health simultaneously. Renascer seeks to break the cycle of poverty that goes, as Vera says, “from poverty to illness to hospital admission to release to readmission. And then often, too quickly, to death.” Renascer addresses the conditions under which the children got sick in the first place, thus seeking to improve the systemic problems of the child's environment, housing, and family life to return a child to a healthy living place.

      Vera started raising money by raffling things from her home. After getting 117 letters with negative responses asking for financial support and grants from all over the world, the biggest breakthroughs came when Renascer began to develop a fast-growing partnership network with Ashoka, Avina, Skoll, Schwab, and PATH. The organization has found its greatest ability to save children’s lives by creating analytical measurements of impact. On a family-by-family basis, Renascer pairs a mother or family with a trained volunteer caseworker to cover all five areas of their own “Action Plan”: health, income, housing, education, and citizenship.
      Renascer works with administrative volunteers, construction workers, psychologists, vocational teachers, pediatricians, lawyers, and general physicians to offer comprehensive plans with assistance, medication, and support. But with a budget of $1 million a year, Renascer does not go deep into all five areas; rather it builds partnerships with other organizations that have specializations in each, while leveraging Renascer’s  impact through corporate sponsorships and marketing.
       A 2004 poll taken of 200 families indicated a 63% reduction in hospital readmissions. Renascer has offered more than 1,700 courses in its five areas of focus. It will add thirteen new centers by the end of 2008.

    

     In The Tactics of Hope, you can learn more about Vera’s journey, in her own words, and how Saude Crianca Renascer developed from its earliest beginnings in a horse stable to full-scale operations in hospitals.

In the weeks ahead, please stay tuned and fasten your seatbelts: this blog, we hope, will transform into a more quantitative, technical, and practical source of information (rather than purely inspirational). If we continue and go ahead, each week will focus on a different chapter or individual social entrepreneur from The Tactics of Hope, and will provide in abbreviated form, a cliff notes version of where they came from and how they accomplished their goals.

After 2 months of traveling abroad in Southeast Asia, I have returned home to reconvene with Wilford about the more technical and practical next steps we want to pursue marketing The Tactics of Hope. It is a fine line, however, as any writer or author will attest, to find the resources and expertise necessary to break the mold from modest to outstanding sales. Tactics tells the stories of 27 world-changing social entrepreneurs, most Ashoka and Skoll fellows, with adventurous narrative and pragmatic guidance, offering readers from every part of the world a literary bridge to engage in social entrepreneurship in ways they can. In other words, the book engages every individual, encouraging each to take action around passion for improving others' lives while earning an income to support their own.

While the critiques and reviews have been hugely successful, the book is suffering from our own lack of experience and financial resource in publicity and book sales. After having breakfast with Bill Drayton in Washington DC before Wilford and I spoke at the Meridian International Center, we were elated to have received the highest approval from the man himself, and the positive support from within the field has continued consistently. But now, we are struggling to find the time and financial resources necessary to move this book from modest readership to widespread public awareness. As all of you Social Edge readers are the most informed of any in the field, and are the "doers" that Tactics seeks to highlight as examples to those having never even heard the term "social entrepreneur" before, this blog seeks your advice. How might we get this book and its many protagonists (all of you!!!) the attention it deserves?

The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World could be read in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms everywhere - to support and inspire young people with the knowledge that there are so many new and important opportunities in the world to make a difference. But how best can we make this happen?

So China's internet restrictions have been crippling to my ability to access this blog! From internet cafes in Beijing, the current capital, Xi'an, the ancient capital silk road market center, and Pingyao, a walled-in small city with hundreds of beautifully lighted hanging red chinese lanterns, none could offer Social Edge access! 20 hours train ride in standing room later, though, and Hong Kong's historically distinct development finally gives respite to the govt. controlled net censorship I've experienced and allows the conversation to continue.

Along the journey, we have bicycled through a corn field to an ancient Shaolin Temple, bargained with haggling street vendors, climbed 5,000 steps along the Great Wall, and witnessed some of the most stunningingly rapid urban development on earth. The development seems somehow stunted, though, by the lack of it in rural areas. This massive disparity is questionably apparent, though, and so in my frustrations with the internet, I wanted to pose a question to any of you readers who may have had your own experiences traveling, especially in China or Asia, about the future of democratization of technology in the far east. For countries that lack popular literacy, but are increasingly coming into contact with travelers and foreigners, and yet are stymied by their own government's cyber restrictions, how can digitally-minded social entrepreneurs make change happen abroad?

Close friends of mine are putting video cameras in the hands of children in India through their Modern Story project(www.themodernstory.wordpress.com), and the committed efforts of Room to Read by John Wood is teaching children to read in many of these countries, often building technologically advanced language labs. What stories and approaches do you know of that may work to bridge the digital divide? Rodrigo Baggio's CDI programs in Brazil is certainly a great model. How can initiatives like his be replicated?

The hiatus in our blog is a halftime in the series, poised between characterizations of our writing process and after the launch that released Tactics of Hope to an audience worldwide. This pause in correspondence, for which I hope you accept our apologies, has been for good cause: 6 weeks of local and on-the-road speaking engagements for a book tour.

As you can see from TacticsofHope.org, our book talks have taken us from San Francisco to Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Silicon Valley, and Seattle, among others. On a shoestring budget self-funded, I flew home from the East Coast while Wilford continued on to speak at Boston, New Haven, Camden (Maine), and other places in New England.

Together from late May upon release of the book to the public, and late June when we parted ways and Wilford kept on traveling with his incredible wife, Carole (who is a beautiful and accomplished social entrepreneur in her own right), we conducted nearly 8 "book talks". With social entrepreneurs featured in the book including Priya Haji (World of Good) at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, Book Passage Marin, and Mrs. Dalloway's independent bookstore in Berkeley, Van Jones (Ella Baker Center and Green for All) at the Books Inc. in the SF Civic Center, Matt Flannery (Kiva) at Virgin Megastore, Sasha Chanoff (Mapendo) at East West Books in Manhattan, and Nina Smith (Rugmark) at the Meridian International Center in Washington DC, we have had some fantastic opportunities so far.

This has been an incredibly steep learning curve for me, personally, though, as public speaking with Wilford and social entrepreneurs is a deeply humbling experience.

Meanwhile, due to the limited budget and resources I have had to work with, our marketing and PR of the book has entered me into a whole new set of challenges with respect to "getting the word out there". If any of you readers know a bit about marketing a book, we sure could use your help!

I am now traveling in South East Asia, writing this during my transit layover in Tokyo, about to spend 7 weeks actively looking for social entrepreneurs throughout China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

Talk to you all soon, I hope. And since there have been few comments, throw a line out there and let's begin to engage. Until next week!!!

Over the past month, a recurring question arises from curious audiences we’ve come across in San Francisco, Berkeley, Marin, Mountain View, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, New York, Brooklyn, New Haven, Boston, and several other locations. I was just in an interview this morning about the book launch, and again the question was asked: “What were the common qualities among the twenty-seven social entrepreneurs you interviewed?”

 As last week’s blog focused on the eclectic diversity of social entrepreneurs from The Tactics of Hope, this entry identifies the elements that unite them, and there are four main common qualities:

1) A stubborn, healthy persistence. Every social entrepreneur, whether Matt Flannery or Priya Haji, Tim Williamson or Karen Tse, articulated a host of negativity they had to overcome in achieving their organizations’ goals. Many say, “No, you cannot do this, it will not succeed,” to a new or unorthodox idea. To the social entrepreneur, such negativity often becomes not a barrier, but an opportunity to demonstrate success in what others are shortsighted to think is impossible. In fact, often, the negativity of others is exactly what fuels a social entrepreneur to succeed in the face of extreme adversity.

2) An ability to listen deeply to the needs of the community. As Lynne Twist of the Pachamama Alliance told us in her interview, “The charitable relationship adopted by too many organizations and individuals is one of us helping them. This way of thinking is counterproductive.” Paul Farmer adds to this notion in his profile: “We (Partners in Health) are partners not only with other nonprofit organizations who may enhance our reach, but also most importantly with the communities themselves. We ask the people we serve what ails them and then do whatever it takes to make them well, just as we would if they were a member of our own family.” The process of listening deeply to communities becomes a partnership through which the sustainable model of the social entrepreneurs’ initiative is made possible by a succession of ownership that is rooted in and derived from the community itself.

3) The capacity to boundary-ride. As John Catford wrote as early as 1998, and as we have included in the epigraph to the Introduction of our book, “[Social entrepreneurs] make markets work for people, not the other way around, and gain strength from a wide network of alliances. They can ‘boundary-ride’ between the various political rhetorics and social paradigms to enthuse all sectors of society.” The ability to boundary-ride often mean ignoring the distinctions between for-profit, non-profit, government, and academia to maximize players from any sector that can further a social entrepreneur’s vision for progress.

4) A business-like focus on results. As John Wood articulated in his interview for Tactics, “The NGO sector often doesn’t think enough in business terms. Too many organizations don’t track or present their results proudly. We try to bring a business philosophy to Room to Read with a balanced eye on both the social and financial bottom lines…providing the link between the quantitative and qualitative, while allowing our investors to decide how to allocate their funds, whether for books, scholarships, libraries or even entire schools.” Bringing business into the social sector often means becoming managerial and practical, rather than lofty in idealism, while setting benchmarks that every employee and volunteer internalize in their daily efforts to achieve the organization’s ambitious, yet tactical, goals.  

It is often asked whether social entrepreneurs are products of nature or nurture. While it is very difficult to train someone to become a pure social entrepreneur, these 4 cross-issue characteristics are a critical start for any potential change-maker.

To learn more about cross-thematic qualities of social entrepreneurs, please visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org