The Tactics of Hope

RESOURCES FOR YOU - A NEW VIDEO ON SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

David Hopkins — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:32:53 -0800

Today we are thrilled to share with you a brand new video that highlights KIVA and PLAYPUMPS, as well as many of the case studies from this blog.

Video: "The Tactics of Hope - Join the Social Entrepreneur Movement"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokRURNnSC0

Please join us and send this video to your friends, family, colleagues, and anyone you know who is looking for ways to make a real and lasting difference in the world. If you'd like to learn more about this exciting movement, see this exciting news update here:

San Francisco - November 10, 2008 . . . The recent election of President Barack Obama has given hope to millions and inspired them to address the many local and global challenges at hand. For the past two years, Wilford Welch (a U.S. Diplomat, professor of international business, and acclaimed author) and David Hopkins (a recent college graduate and aspiring social entrepreneur), have been writing a book and creating a website to inspire and support those very people who want to join this movement. Today they released a new video outlining the core concepts of their book The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World. The short video, available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokRURNnSC0 explains what social entrepreneurship is, why it has the power to change the world in profound ways, and how people can join the movement.

Most notably, the video highlights two inspirational and exemplary companies that have been celebrated by Oprah, Jay-Z, former President Bill Clinton, National Geographic, MTV, CNN, PBS, and NBC. The first, Playpumps, provides fresh drinking water to thousands of people in Africa via an incredibly simple, innovative, and scalable system, and the second, Kiva, facilitates peer-to-peer loans via the Internet to allow impoverished people develop their own businesses.

The video also showcases a new and exciting social networking tool on the Tactics of Hope website at http://www.tacticsofhope.org called My Circle. Welch explains that the tool is designed for individuals, at no cost, to determine what social or environmental causes they're passionate about, where in the world they want to make a difference, and how they can do so. "All of the sudden, pops up your wheel, with those thirty organizations and individuals around the world who are the closest to you in their concerns, their passions, and who want to collaborate." The tool is easy to use and provides a great way for people to quickly and easily donate to, volunteer for, or collaborate with non-profit and for profit organizations around the world.

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 7 – MAPENDO, A LIFELINE FOR GENOCIDE SURVIVORS AND REFUGEES

David Hopkins — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:22:18 -0700

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.

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 6 – SAVING LIVES BY PUMPING WATER AND HAVING FUN

David Hopkins — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:27:23 -0700

To read more case studies like this, visit us at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources

The PlayPump® water system is an ingenuous, simple, low-tech solution for developing countries, which lose thousands of lives every day from lack of clean water. Roundabout Outdoor, and its non-profit partner, PlayPumps International (www.Playpumps.org), has adapted a water pump technology that doubles as a merry-go-round. Children play and turn the merry-go-round, pumping water from deep in the ground to a storage container that can be used for billboard advertising to generate revenue. The technology is replicable, as Playpumps International plans to scale its operations with 4,000 new pumps to reach 10 million people by 2010.

•    950 PlayPumps have been installed in four African countries to date; 700 of these have been in South Africa alone.
•    Over 2 million people can access free clean drinking water that could not before.
•    Hundreds of jobs have been created through the PlayPump maintenance program.
•    PlayPumps International plans to help install 4,000 pumps by 2010, in 10 African countries, and at a cost of $60 million.
•    PlayPumps International has raised $20 million to date for this initiative.
•    1 PlayPump costs $14,000 and includes equipment, installation, water quality testing, community liaison and 10 years of maintenance.
•    President Bill Clinton, First Lady Laura Bush, and platinum-selling rapper Jay-Z have all endorsed PlayPumps in African communities.

The PlayPump® Water System – How It Works

While children have fun (1) spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round, clean water (2) is pumped from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground. A simple tap (5) makes it easy for adults and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6). The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities. All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance.

The design of the PlayPump water system makes it highly effective, easy to operate and very economical, keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum. Capable of producing up to 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 meters, it is effective up to a depth of 100 meters. Each identified borehole used for a PlayPump system undergoes a series of geo-hydrological tests as well as water chemical tests to ensure that the water source is suitable for human consumption. A typical hand pump installation cannot compete with the PlayPump system's delivery rate or quality.

The two most important ways that individuals support PlayPumps is to raise awareness of the need and raise money to make their water systems available to more communities in more countries. They document on their website that $6 provides one child with access to clean water for up to ten years, $36 for a family, $60 for 10 people, and $300 for a classroom of children for drinking and hand washing. $14,000 is the cost of an entire PlayPump system, bringing clean water to 2,500 people for ten years.

PlayPumps International is the nonprofit collaborative that partners with the South African companies, Roundabout Outdoor and Outdoor Fabrication and Steelworks, as well as all of its advertising clients that market their products on the PlayPump billboards. Outdoor Fabrication and Steelworks manufactures the pumps and piping, which Roundabout Outdoor then helps to install and maintain in contract with PlayPumps. For its billboard sponsors, PlayPumps and Roundabout Outdoor have partnered to include International telecommunications companies like Vodacom, and consumer goods companies like Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever. In addition to selecting only socially positive content, the organization also takes great care in making sure that both public service announcements and commercial advertising are sensitive to the local community’s culture.

Founders of Playpumps Trevor Field and Paul Ristic

Working hand-in-hand with local governments and community leaders, the PlayPump system is introduced under a principle of indigenous self-ownership from the beginning. Once a community has agreed that it wants a pump, a liaison is appointed. Roundabout Outdoor then trains a local crew to install and maintain the pump, giving jobs to local workers. Over the next three years, PlayPump water systems will be installed throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of reaching 10 million people by 2010. In 2006, additional PlayPump systems were donated to communities in South Africa and pilot programs were initiated in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zambia. Expansion to Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda, will occur in 2007 and 2008.

To read more about Playpumps and hear their story in their own words, visit us at Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World

Photographs courtesy of Playpumps International and Kristina Gubic 2008.

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 5 – HOW ANN COTTON IS CHANGING THE CULTURE OF POVERTY IN AFRICA BY EDUCATING YOUNG WOMEN

David Hopkins — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:09:07 -0700

Wilford and his wife Carole hosted Ann Cotton on their houseboat in Sausalito for a “friend-raiser”for the organization Ann founded 15 years ago, and it was my deep honor to meet this radiant woman I had studied and been researching in awe since I wrote a paper on social entrepreneurship two years ago at Middlebury College. Ann’s daughter Helen and David Ebert, the son of the first chair of CAMFED (the Campaign for Female Education), had just produced an incredible documentary film called Where the Water Meets the Sky in which Helen and David put cameras in the hands of women who then became filmmakers documenting the very real poverty, AIDS pandemic, and lack of access to education in their own lives. The film is narrated by Morgan Freeman and has won numerous awards, including best picture at Jackson Hole film festival.

For more on this case study and others like Ann Cotton, visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org/resources

Ann Cotton’s on-the-ground exposure to extreme poverty in Zimbabwe in 1991 changed her life and, in doing so, the futures of hundreds of thousands of young girls in Africa. During that trip, Ann saw clearly the link between the lack of female education and extreme poverty. Since then, Ann and her team have built an organization that currently provides educational opportunities for over 400,000 children and young people in rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa. CAMFED works in partnership with local communities and ministries of education, using an approach that seeks to systemically break the cycle of poverty.

To educate girls is to reduce poverty. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health—including the prevention of HIV/AIDS.
—Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary General

In her interview with us, Ann says:

“I had never before witnessed the depth of poverty I witnessed in Zimbabwe and I was initially shocked by what I saw. I was also deeply disturbed by the level of insecurity the young girls had to deal with every day. I realized that the high levels of maternal and child mortality were both caused by women’s vulnerability and their lack of access to education. I found that most parents wanted their daughters to go to school but they did not have the funds to pay for them to do so. In most cases the parents used their scarce resources to educate their sons rather than their daughters because boys had the best chance of securing paid work in the future. My realization was contrary to the broadly held notion that cultural resistance was the main reason for low female school attendance.

On one of my walks between villages, I met two teenage sisters, Cecilia and Makarita. They had bussed and walked sixty miles to attend the Mola Secondary School because the costs were much lower at Mola than at schools near their home. Yet these two young girls told me that they did not know whether their parents would have enough money for them to return to school the next term. As I lay awake at night fearful that scorpions were about to fall upon me from the thatched roof above, I realized that the girls were trapped. I also realized that what kept the cycle of poverty in place was not a poverty of culture but the culture of poverty.

CAMFED students at class under the shade of a tree

Back in England in 1992, my first effort to raise money to enable young girls like Cecilia and Makarita to go to school was making and selling cakes and sandwiches with friends at the local market. Before long I had raised enough money to pay for thirty-two girls in Zimbabwe to go to school for a year.

Right from the start, our approach was to set aside preconceived notions of what the challenges and the solutions were and to listen carefully to the needs and suggestions of the local villagers. They suggested, for example, that the scholarship money should go directly to the schools rather than to the families of the recipients. They recommended that CAMFED only hire locals to run the CAMFED offices rather than rely on expatriates. They stressed the importance of transparency so that everyone knew who was making what decisions and how educational funds were being allocated. They joined us at meetings with the Ministry of Education at the national and district levels to support the initiative and assure its effective implementation.

It has now been fifteen years since CAMFED was founded and I still feel energized by our work. What satisfies me most is seeing the change in others, such as when I meet a girl who received an education because of CAMFED and is now doing wonderful things she would not otherwise have had the opportunity to do.

My advice to others who want to get involved in any social effort is first and foremost for them to find their passion, to get to a point where they have no choice, where they have to act, have to get involved. One has to care enough to let go of fear, to care enough to risk failure and look upon not trying as failure. And listen always, and most carefully, to those experiencing the problem you want to try to solve.”

The CAMFED Model—A Bottom-Up Collaborative Approach

CAMFED now is in the midst of seeking to bring about systemic change in the education of young girls in Africa. Ann has turned CAMFED into a charitable organization that is making it possible for hundreds of thousands of youngsters in Zimbabwe, Ghana, Zambia and Tanzania to receive an education. Most are girls, although some orphan boys are also supported. Boards of trustees are active at each branch, supported by an international advisory board.

CAMFED’s model brings transformative benefits not only to the young girls who they help educate but also to the well-being of their families and communities. A virtuous cycle is set in motion, whereby girls are supported through childhood education and post-school years to become leaders who are in a position to break the cycle of poverty during their own lifetime as well as during the lives of future generations.

The following are some of the most important principles guiding CAMFED’s approach:

•    A clear, powerful and inspiring vision
•    A focus on systemic change
•    A bottom-up collaborative approach
•    Staff in each country recruited locally
•    Close working relationships with the ministries of education in each country
•    Transparency
•    Replicability
•    Results-driven
•    A long-term commitment to those CAMFED seeks to educate

Read more about these principles and other stories like Ann's at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 4 – ADVICE FROM JOHN WOOD ON STAYING FOCUSED WHILE SCALING BIG

David Hopkins — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:10:29 -0700

John Wood, former Microsoft executive and founder of Room to Read (www.RoomtoRead.org), made a promise to a school headmaster while he was backpacking in rural Nepal. He returned a year later with 3,000 books to fill the school’s empty library. In his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John explains, “Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?” Founding Room to Read, John Wood wove corporate business practices with his inspiring vision to provide educational access to 10 million children in the developing world. His novel approach to non-profit management includes:

•    Scalable, measured, sustainable results
•    Low-overhead, allowing maximum investment in educational infrastructure
•    Challenge grants fostering community ownership and sustainability
•    Strong local staff and partnerships creating culturally relevant programs

The following is an excerpt of great advice from John Wood in his case study (just 1 of 27 and #4 in this Social Edge series) from The Tactics of Hope:

“I’ve talked to a lot of business people who want to follow their passion but don’t know how. I think there’s two common themes that prevent individuals from following their passion. One is that too many people make the mistake of thinking that whatever they do next they have to do for the rest of their lives, and the other is getting caught up in the trap of thinking that they have to receive permission to follow their dream. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard former Wall Street analysts say, “I want to do this, but my spouse doesn’t think it’s a good idea, I have kids, and my parents think it’s silly.”

Stop asking for permission. It’s your life, and your life only. In deciding what is important to you, you can then get clear about your vision and encourage others to rally behind you. So take that risk. It may ultimately be the most rewarding decision of your life.

    When we started, it was on a severely limited budget in 2003. We began in one country, Nepal, in one language, and with ten titles. I worked for no salary the first four years. This thing was held together with chicken wire and band-aids. Now we’re doing 100 titles a year in eleven languages. And we keep going. The critical key to our success is the relentless tracking, measuring, and publicizing of our results. On every email our team sends in a day, there’s no legal verbiage, just our name, title, and results, which we update quarterly: 3,600 libraries, 287 schools.

Big thinking is a key to our model. In the charity and NGO world, there’s often this scarcity mentality where people are afraid there’s not enough funding out there. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my days at Microsoft, there is certainly enough wealth in this world; you just have to find it. At fundraising events, I’ve heard people say to the audience, “Even if you can only give $5 that’s ok.” No! While that comes across as gracious and humble, it in fact signals to potential investors that the organization is afraid or apologizing to ask for money. Don’t talk your donors down; talk them up.
Among our investor community, I constantly repeat the same facts, as if I’m approaching my company board with a business opportunity that cannot be missed. “There’s 800 million people in the developing world who are illiterate,” I tell them, “Think big with me, that’s 800 million individuals we have the privilege of educating.”

    Many people ask what advice I have to entrepreneurs starting their own organization. There are three steps I can think of:

1.    Hire logistical support early on in the venture,
2.    Think big, focus maniacally on results and celebrate small victories when you achieve them.
3.    Find someone local who is well qualified to run operations. We were fortunate to find Denesh Shrestha, a Nepalese businessman who has been entirely dedicated to our vision in Asia. Indigenous partnerships are essential; local organizations may be much better than you can ever hope to be at meeting needs in their part of the world.

The worst mistake a startup social entrepreneur can make is talking yourself into not growing. Every success we have had since our inception is a step to our ultimate goal, focusing big. For us, this means lifelong education for 10 million children across the developing world. What do you want to accomplish? Think big, and then go do it.

Scaling Room to Read over the last three years since its founding, John has applied the rigor of business to the ethic of education, innovating an expansive growth model that will soon provide 10 million children the lifelong opportunity of reading and learning.

You can read more stories like these at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources
Photos courtesy of Room to Read 2008 (c)

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 3 – BUILDING A COMPANY FROM A CUTTING-EDGE CLASS PROJECT

David Hopkins — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:15:40 -0700

These and 26 other inspiring case studies of social entrepreneurs can be read about in their own words in The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World.

Inspired by a forward-thinking Environmental Economics professor at Middlebury College* (see below) in Vermont, Jake Whitcomb and Andy Rossmeissl turned a class project into a growing business. Together, they created the Brighter Planet Visa™, a rewards-based credit card that provides the opportunity for consumers in the United States to contribute to renewable energy projects and fight global warming with every purchase.

Despite the fact that Jake and Andy didn’t know each other when they started taking the course, they were both drawn to the notion that for the first time in history “the environment” and “economics” were not only being talked about in the same sentence, but in fact taught as complementary subjects. They learned that environmental problems could be solved by implementing an innovative economic lens.

Andy (left) and Jake (right), founders of Bright Planet

Professor Jon Isham, who had just finished co-authoring a book called Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, focused much of Jake and Andy’s course on service-learning, encouraging each student to develop a business plan or project that moved beyond the classroom. So with 2005 census and credit figures, Jake and Andy sat down with a spreadsheet to get a handle on the numbers, and found an incredible coincidence: through their theoretical rewards program the average credit-card carrying American could exactly offset his or her annual carbon footprint of twenty-three tons.

Moving beyond the excitement of the idea, however, is when their challenges grew to become an incredibly steep learning curve. The young entrepreneurs were confronted with the practical difficulties of starting a business, and even admit, "When we began, we didn't even know...how to retain lawyers, secure health insurance, and hire a bookkeeper. Finding the answers to the nuts and bolts questions are critical and tough."

After presenting the business plan at the Cool Air-Cool Planet conference in New York City, and received some serious feedback from leaders in the field including Bill McKibben, Andy and Jake quit their summer jobs to dedicate fully to the business, starting small by raising $25,000 from family and friends. They then hired a CEO who believed in their vision, teamed with Bank of America, and eventually released the Brighter Planet Visa at the end of 2007.

For more on Jake and Andy’s helpful advice as to how they overcame obstacles in starting their business, read the story in their own words at http://www.tacticsofhope.org/resources. Brighter Planet plans to offset several million tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of shutting down a coal plant for an entire year, by 2010.

*Testament to the kind of undergrad educational environment (thanks to Professor Isham) that spawned Jake and Andy’s innovative venture, as well as this blogger’s interest in the field of social entrepreneurship, Middlebury College was recently recognized by Sierra Magazine for its leadership in the climate change movement as the “coolest” college in the country. ( ;

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY 2 – PROVIDING EDUCATION WHILE ENDING CHILD LABOR IN THE RUG INDUSTRY OF SOUTH ASIA

David Hopkins — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:41:20 -0700

In India, Kailash Satyrathi first established RugMark in 1994, and Nina Smith, a Skoll Award winner, launched its program five years later in the United States. The RugMark Foundation, a global fair trade nonprofit, is dedicated to eliminating child labor in South Asia’s handmade rug industry. RugMark has leveraged its fair trade advocacy campaigns to influence consumers and carpet retailers in the world’s biggest market to purchase and sell only those carpets that have been properly certified as child labor-free.

A percentage of the sale price of certified rugs helps RugMark rescue and rehabilitate children they find in the factories, as well as daycare, literacy, formal schooling and vocational training for children who might otherwise be coerced into labor. Nina and Kailash project that with just 15% of the U.S. market share for rugs, RugMark could achieve its goal and stop child labor in the South Asian rug industry by 2020.

Demand for child labor is so high in the countries where RugMark operates that desperate parents often sell their children into bondage, including child trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and domestic work. An estimated 14% of children in India between the ages of fie and fourteen are engaged in child labor activities. Rugs are among South Asia’s top export products and a high employment sector from the poor. Child workers come cheaply and sometimes at no cost, driving down wages for adult laborers.

RugMark rugs are made on looms and in factories that are inspected independently for child labor. The rugs are certified with the RugMark TM label, each with an individual number that can be traced though the supply chain back to the loom.

RugMark’s strategy is replicable as a systemic approach to ending child labor. Kailash and Nina began by raising consumer awareness, and thus demand, for ethically made rugs. Inspectors, teachers, labor rights experts, loom owners, exporters, importers designers, and retailers work together to ensure that no child works on a RugMark rug. Connecting designers to manufacturers is an important step in the cross-continental business. To maintain the upkeep of the manufacturers’ practices, RugMark inspectors make surprise visits to loom and spinning factories, monitoring an average of 64 looms a day, or more than 16,000 a year. If a child is found on a loom or in a factory, he or she is taken to a RugMark rehabilitation center and placed in school. More than 3,000 children attend school with RugMark support. RugMark’s work is having a profound effect. Its certified rugs now represent 2% of the U.S. market. Roughly 30% of imports from Nepal carry the RugMark certification, already demonstrating major transformations within the industry in South Asia.

photos courtesy of Romano, Sam Kittner, and thanks to RugMark

TACTICS OF HOPE CASE STUDY – New Approach to Holistic Health Care in the Favelas of Brazil

David Hopkins — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:28:11 -0700

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.

Striking a balance btwn time and money: The Tactics of Marketing

David Hopkins — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:12:21 -0700

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.

So stay tuned, there's much on the horizon.

That being said, the following is a transition entry inviting advice from those of you who may have some great ideas.

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?

From Hong Kong, the troubles of democratizing internet

David Hopkins — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:41:41 -0700

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 Whirlwind Book Tour

David Hopkins — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:29:41 -0700

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!!!

Common qualities among 27 The Tactics of Hope social entrepreneurs...

David Hopkins — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:49:41 -0700

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

Devising the Tactics matrix: selecting 27 social entrepreneurs...

David Hopkins — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:03:26 -0700

The Tactics of Hope is written for individuals around the world who are concerned about global challenges but not clear what steps they can take to move from concern to action. On every page the book puts forth this vision statement, and in selecting the twenty-seven social entrepreneurs, Wilford and I, as any authors do, internalized two guiding questions in the writing process: “Who is this book about?” and “Who is this book for?”

This book is about you. Regardless of a reader’s background, The Tactics of Hope argues that we all have the capacity to claim our power like never before. It provides a big dose of hope and suggests tools and guidance from social entrepreneurs in corners of the world as diverse as the Himalayan Mountains, New Orleans, the Amazon Rainforest, and the coral reefs of Indonesia.

Wilford and I spent many weeks selecting the 27 social entrepreneurs whose stories we were to write in the first-person, effectively walking in the shoes of these incredible individuals, humbled to tell their story in their own words. To start, we devised the mosaic, or matrix, on a white-erase board with 100 squares with male and female social entrepreneurs plotted across the world on geographic and issue area guidelines.

To identify the individuals, we pulled from trusted personal contact recommendations, newspaper articles, Google searches, and above all from the pre-existing support networks and grand champions of social entrepreneurship internationally: Skoll Foundation, Ashoka, Echoing Green, the Schwab Foundation, and Draper Richards.

Among the 27 social entrepreneurs profiled in The Tactics of Hope, twelve are Skoll fellow winners, among them Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, John Wood of Room to Read, Matt and Jessica Flannery of Kiva, Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health, John and Susan Collin Marks of Search for Common Ground, and the Kuhn family of Roots of Peace. The Skoll Foundation recipients are immediately accepted solely by the foundation’s stamp of credibility. In writing the stories, however, we did not just want social entrepreneurs who already had achieved global successes. So we went back to adjust the board matrix.

Returning to our vision statement, Wilford and I felt it was critical not only to highlight the success stories, but also the stories of struggle, failure, and obstacles overcome. Moreover, we wanted to include profiles of individuals who were still in their early stages and had not yet grown to the “celebrity” status of social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus.

I had felt very strongly that we should write about a social entrepreneur who was introducing new tactics to help rebuild communities in the south after Hurricane Katrina. There I found projects-born Rosalind Jones Larkins who had not been recognized by any major social entrepreneurial organization.

Rosalind is still desperately in need of more funding, and in our interview we connected deeply as she was so clearly a social entrepreneur, even though she was just still in the early stages of her vision and had never even heard that term before. In our moving interview, she said to me: “David, I came from under the gutter, but you know what? I’m changing many more lives than just my own. People ask me how I do this: it comes from a burning realization inside that quitting was never an option…”

To read Rosalind’s story in her own words, or any of the Skoll winners mentioned in this blog, come visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org

How to Move from Concern to Action?

David Hopkins — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:40:36 -0700

“What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continuous.”
-Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1993

Millions of individuals around the world are concerned about international issues but are not clear what steps to take to move from concern to action. In The Tactics of Hope, we seek to give tactics that are grounded in these realities, and which move readers to become changemakers. Here is a sample from Chapter II, entitled: "Becoming A Social Entrepreneur", and we encourage you to share these with any friends and family members who might need some guidance:

First Steps
Whether you are aiming to become a social entrepreneur or simply want to take some meaningful action to address an issue that concerns you, the following are some practical steps that may help guide your journey:

1. Get clear what you are passionate about.
You are undoubtedly concerned about a lot of things, but what are you truly passionate about: Teaching disadvantaged children in your neighborhood? Ending homelessness? Caring for battered women? Creating new hope for refugees in Sudan? Decreasing the impact of global warming? Improving market conditions for indigenous artisans? Helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East? Something else? If you are not passionate about what you choose, you won’t commit to it fully, and you are likely to lose interest when life’s other challenges give you the excuse to let your initiative slide.

2. Determine what skills you have that are relevant to the issue.
Passion is essential, but not enough. What skills or capabilities do you have that will help sustain and fulfill your passion? Do you have money to invest, or are you a great fundraiser? Do you have knowledge of the issue, or knowledge of the people and the culture where the work needs to be done? Do you have a network of friends and professional contacts you can draw upon? Do you have specific professional skills that will be required for the initiative to be successful, such as accounting, marketing, finance or production? Are you a good leader who can recruit and lead a team to help achieve your goals?

3. Consider whether you have the personality to be a social entrepreneur.
Not everyone has the disposition to be a social entrepreneur. Here are several important attributes:
•    Great determination, coupled with a willingness to take risks, experiment, and occasionally fail and have to start again. When Richard Branson was asked by one of the social entrepreneurs profiled in this book for assistance, he asked her how many times she had failed, gotten up and tried to achieve her goals another way. He said he could not help her unless she had failed at least twice, reassessed what it would take to be successful and tried again.
•    The ability to “boundary ride”—to imagine possibilities that are radically different from traditional approaches to the same problem. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, the visionary behind microcredit lending, was a good example of “boundary riding” when he defied the prevailing view that one could not “bank on the poor.” Yunus realized that many of the poor who had no collateral could still be reliable borrowers, and that banking on the poor was well worth the effort because it would address an important social challenge and could also become self-financing and possibly profitable.

4.    Determine which of these three ways of being of service interests you most and would be a good fit, given your capabilities:
•    Giving money to an organization that is addressing the issue.
•    Working for an organization that interests you, as a volunteer or as a paid employee.
•    Starting your own initiative by replicating an existing initiative, or developing your own.
These options are very different in terms of the financial resources, time and talent you may have to invest. One is not better than another and each has great value. For example, it may be wise to take on something relatively small and straightforward first, like going to www.GlobalCool.org and developing a plan to reduce your personal carbon footprint over the next year by one ton. Or, you may decide you want to become a volunteer at another environmental awareness building organization, such as the Pachamama Alliance, profiled in Chapter 9. Or, you may decide you want to replicate the PlayPump water system described in Chapter 3 to bring clean water to poverty-stricken areas of your own country. Social entrepreneurs, unlike those in competitive businesses, are usually willing to share their ideas with others who want to replicate them.

5. Log on to www.TacticsofHope.org
Chapters 3 through 9 provide examples of numerous initiatives that you might give money to, work for or replicate on your own. The personal stories of the social entrepreneurs profiled in these chapters provide valuable insights about potential obstacles you may face, and how to overcome them. We have also created a website to help you determine your next steps, direct you to other sources of information about the growing field of social entrepreneurship, help you identify other initiatives of interest and provide contact information with many of those with whom you may want to collaborate.

6. Take that first step.
Each of the profiles in the upcoming chapters has a section in which the social entrepreneurs share their own journey from concern and passion to action. A few did a great deal of research, consulted the experts and came up with a strategic plan as their first steps. Others just jumped right in and followed their instincts, taking one small step after another. Both approaches can work well, depending on the individual and the initiative. Procrastination does not work well.

Is more better—or sustainable? Redefining Progress in The Tactics of Hope…

David Hopkins — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:22:33 -0700

In The Tactics of Hope, author Wilford Welch reassesses the value of traditional measurement of growth. The conventional measure of a nation’s “progress” is the growth of its gross national product, or GNP. Included in GNP, however, are many revenue-generating activities that pollute the earth and destroy the lives of others. People often measure their own success by their personal financial growth rate and total assets just as nations do. But, a shift in perspective is occurring. In today’s world, more and more people are questioning the notion that “more is better”—or sustainable. They are also questioning how we measure “progress.” For example:

• Since 1994 the California-based organization Redefining Progress has been challenging traditional ways in which economic, social and ecological impacts are conceptualized and measured. Its measure is called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It starts with the same accounting framework as the gross national product, but then makes some significant distinctions. For example, it includes the economic contributions of household and volunteer work, but subtracts factors such as crime, pollution and family breakdown that result in activities that decrease a nation’s gross national product.

• The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has created the Human Development Index (HDI) that emphasizes the social development aspects of each country’s development agendas.

• The WorldPaper created the Wealth of Nations Index in the early 1990s using 63 variables to measure each country’s progress along three dimensions: economic, social and information exchange. The underlying premise is that those countries with great strength and balance in all three dimensions are those that will make the greatest and most sustainable progress.

• Futurist Hazel Henderson has produced a similar index, as has the government of Bhutan. The Bhutanese call theirs the “Gross Happiness Index” which is their attempt to measure quality of life in more holistic and spiritual terms than gross national product.

• The World Social Forum was established in 2001 in reaction to the big business–oriented World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland each year. The World Social Forum’s seventh annual gathering, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya in January of 2007, had 66,000 registered attendees, and 1,400 participating organizations from 110 countries.

• The Earth Charter, created in the 1990s, is a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the twenty-first century. It seeks to inspire a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the living world. Thousands of people and organizations from virtually all of the countries of the world collaborated in the development of these principles.

Please visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org.