Document Actions
Connected Activism
Hosted by Allison Fine (November 2006 - Closed)
In May 2005, the women of Kuwait successful won the right to vote by secretly using their BlackBerry digital assistants beneath their burkas to email Kuwait’s all-male legislature. This fall, Rock the Vote and Facebook teamed up to enable young people in the U.S. to register to vote through Facebook, the leading online social networking site. In myriad ways, through stealth or sunlight, people around the world are creatively using new digital media to connect with one another and affect their communities. The interactions that people are having with one another through Web sites, mobile phones, chat rooms, personal digital assistants, iPods, and other gadgets and gizmos has transformed society from the information age to the connected age. These digital tools, called social media, are important not for their wizardry, but because they are inexpensive and easy to use and allow individuals and small groups to bring about big changes. Connectedness does not come from technology but is facilitated and strengthened by it.
Social media combine the intimacy of the telephone with the reach of broadcast media. They provide an opportunity for nonprofit groups to create and support social change in more open and sustainable ways – if they so choose. The greatest challenge for nonprofit organizations and their leaders in the connected age is recognizing that using social media tools is easy compared to adopting a new mindset for social change.
In the connected age, nonprofit groups are part of a larger network or ecosystem of people, organizations, resources and information. Relying on old-fashioned, top-down management approaches for setting activist agendas and designing fund-raising and volunteering strategies will lead invariably and inevitably to disappointing results.
Power is shifting from institutions to individuals in all sectors. We have seen what happens when people can barter and sell goods without a middleman on eBay, and when we can watch what we want, when we want to on YouTube. The same sorts of shifts are happening quietly in the nonprofit sector. Anyone can create and post a video of what they think their Congressional representatives do all day as part of the Congess in :30 campaign organized by the Sunlight Foundation in the U.S. Volunteers can document the connections between campaign contributions and legislation as part of the Genocide Intervention Network. Donors can pick a school and a specific project to give to as part of the DonorsChoose website.
The opportunities for successful social change in the Connected Age is clear – but as with all new ages there are stumbling blocks as well. The key questions that we will be wrestling with in the next several years are:
1. The role of institutions in a flatter, more networked world is changing – what does this mean for nonprofit organizations?
2. Are more people participating now, or did the same people who volunteered, organized, protested doing so now, only online? If it is the same people, how do we broaden the pool of participants?
3. Can people be taught to become better connectors or are certain people simply born with an open source ethos?
Jump in the conversation.
Pamela McLean - Nov 11, 2006 3:48 am (# Total: 21) Thanks for starting this discussion - it is one very close to my heart. I am connected with various community developments projects - mostly in rural Nigeria. My concerns relate to inclusion and the appropriate use of digital technologies to enable people to "rub minds" - to learn from each other and to create new knowledge to address practical problems.
I believe strongly that the problems of poverty alleviation in rural areas will only be solved when people who are in a position to allocate resources and make policy decisions are able to discuss the realities with local people. (It is widely accepted that top down solutions don't work.)
Back in 2000, when I first got involved, communication "across the digital divide" between the UK (and other "bandwidth-rich" locations) the rural areas that I knew in Nigeria was an enormous challenge. Now, with the increase in cyber cafes in urban areas, the dramatic proliferation of mobile phones, the reduction in cost of digital cameras (for photos and video) and various developments in Internet use it is fast becoming an achievable reality.
Certainly, within Cawdnet, we now have the social networks and experience of ICT use to enable discussions and other information exchange across cultures. To date we have only done it in a fragmented way "on a shoe string" - but given the money to bring together all those fragments we could enable philanthropists, policy makers, researchers, who-ever to "rub minds" with people in rural Africa - to begin to really understand the realities and the issues - without the need to travel there.
I look forward to lively discussion here on how we can make the most of the opportunities now available to us.
vicki - Nov 11, 2006 7:34 am (# Total: 21) www.impactanation.com
Allison, I like your message and post about participating in a connected age. Question: did more young people participate in voting with the massive outreach that went their way?
Allison Fine - Nov 14, 2006 8:27 am (# Total: 21) Thanks for your thoughtful post, Pamela. Your description reminded me of way back when I was starting an organization, Innovation Network, to provide nontraditional evaluation methods to US based nonprofits. All the tools and techniques we started with came from the international community wherein folks had found that they had to listen better and as you would say "rub minds" to truly understand social change in a nonwestern setting.
We have extraordinary opportunities to bridge an array of differences and divides using social media today. People in rremote countries and communities can build relatioships with others across the street, the country and world like never before. However, there is a great big caution I want to add here (and something I knowyou know well, Pamela) -- we still need to be very careful about imposing Western values on other cultures. Just because it is easier to connect and communicate with someone doesn't mean that we "know" them well. The values and philosophy driving social change have to drive the use of technology not the other way around.
I look forward to a lively conversation, too!
Allison Fine - Nov 14, 2006 8:31 am (# Total: 21) Vicki, it is very hard to know at this point what motivated young people to vote in larger numbers than the last mideterm election. We do know that there were interesting uses of social media aimed at young people that seemed to resonate with them. For instance, Rock the Vote integrated their voter registration tools with Facebook, and YouTube was used extensively to expose a candidates gaffes (think George Allen and maccaca) and make a statement (various videos on voting featuring young people.
Something very exciting is happening with young people, social networks and social media. I am planning to analyze this more over the next several months.
Laura Chambers - Nov 15, 2006 12:46 pm (# Total: 21) Hi Allison!
I'm enjoying reading your book. I especially appreciate the storytelling you have woven thru out the book; it grounds your message on "connectivity" in reality. Question - do you see on-line organizing replacing traditional organizing in the not too distant future?
Best Wishes,
laura
tutormentor - Nov 15, 2006 7:42 pm (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
Thanks for starting this discussion. I too believe that power is shifting to individuals as well as to different institutions. Anyone can identify a cause and begin to invite people to work together on that cause.
With the types of tools that are emerging, the opportunities for small non profits to work together to create larger visibility and more consisten resources is unlimited.
I have been applying this thinking in the work I do with the Tutor/Mentor Connection (http://www.tutormentorconnection.org ). Our mission is to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs grow in poverty areas of Chicago. Because of the internet, we're now sharing ideas with people in other cities around the world, and finding partners to help us do this from many places beyond Chicago.
What I've learned from this is that it's essential to create a knowledge base from which people in the network can learn, and innovate, individually or as a group. The Internet and linked web sites and on-line events like this, make it possible for more knowledge to be aggregated, and more people to be taking intermediary roles in helping even larger numbers of people find and use this knowledge.
Thus, if I'm trying to find new ideas for helping teens learn, or enage with volunteers, I can look at more than 100 web sites where others show how they can do this. I can also go into two or three forums where leaders of other tutor/mentor programs share ideas. Thus, if I can find the resources, I can constantly improve my own program in my community, just as others can draw from the same pool of ideas to improve programs in their community.
The key is finding the resources. That's where I feel this idea of "connectivity" has its greatest potential. Each small non profit is pretty weak in its ability to get its message to the public and attract customers (volunteers, donors, etc.) to itself. However, if hundreds of volunteers, leaders and youth in various programs around the country will blog their "stories" during December, the weight of these blogs could serve as advertising to draw holiday donors to the various organizations that are blogging.
If the same thing happens as school is starting in the fall, the connected blogs, or YouTube videos, could attract volunteers at the time of the year when every school cycle program is looking for volunteers.
This can give us the weight and results of big corporate advertisers, without spending a fraction of the money they spend to draw customers to their stores.
I don't think a lot of non profits understand this concept yet, but as we demonstrate success, it will breed duplication and that can dramatically change the distribution of resources, and the ability of social service organizations to fullfill missions.
Allison Fine - Nov 16, 2006 8:18 am (# Total: 21) In response to Laura's question, becoming online activists does not replace doing work on land. Ideally, online and on land augment each other to create deeper, more meaningful relationships whereever people meet to talk about and implement soccial change efforts.
Connected activism is not a zero sum game where on land efforts lose because activities are happening online. As groups like Moveon.org have learned that it is incredibly important to their efforts of building a nationwide constituency that their consittuents build local, place-based relationships that can strengthen their personal bonds wiht each other and work on local issues together.
Sophia Buranakul - Nov 24, 2006 9:42 pm (# Total: 21) Fah Diow Foundation
In the organisation I work with (the One Sky Foundation or Fah Diow Foundation) we have just facilitated a project for children and youth to develop video documentaries about coastal resource use in their communities. There were 12 schools involved in Southern Thailand. You can see more about this at www.fahdiow.net
Bearing in mind that most of the children and teachers involved had not handled a video camera before and many of the children had not handled a computer before, one of the biggest issues for on-line connectivity is still the digital divide. That said, we found this effort to be incredibly empowering for the children and youth involved. After initial hesitation on the part of the teachers who were letting the children handle the video cameras, we were really excited to see that at the prize giving ceremony (there were awards given for the best documentaries), all participating schools were now giving the cameras to the children to record the event. The sense of pride in those children was really fantastic to see.
Having seen the power of video in this context, not necessarily for activism it has to be said, we would love to connect more young people across the world through video documentary media. Of course this requires internet or other types of facilitation, and perhaps that is where non-profits such as ours can make the biggest difference - helping to provide the context in which children and youth can find their own voices and engage in dialogue with others like them. Of course we also have to manage language differences but I think that is another critical thing to work on - we've been busy subtitling these videos in English. They also had to be subtitled in Thai because most Thais cannot understand the Southern Thai dialect.
We are very interested in creating connections with these media, but there are numerous challenges to be overcome in terms of literacy, language and availability of appropriate media and software and hardware.
Having said all that... if anyone is working with coastal communities anywhere in the world and is interested in exchanging youth-created video documentaries with us we're looking at how we can create a global network of coastal communities using video media and would really love to hear from you (fahdiow@yahoo.co.uk).
tutormentor - Nov 25, 2006 3:21 pm (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
Sophia,
The work you are doing is really interesting. I congratulate you on this and the way you've been able to demonstrate it via your web site. I encourage you to add your link to the Arts/Mentoring section of http://www.tutormentorconnection.org and to get acquainted with some of the other youth serving organizations listed at that site.
I also encourage you to introduce the project in a discussion at Omidyar.net. The link is http://www.omidyar.net/user/u715126713/news/1/?searchterm=arts%20mentoring
Both of these are aggregator spaces, where people working with youth can connect and share ideas. My hope is that the connection itself draws attention to each of the groups, and helps them find ideas, and funding, that helps each continue their work.
Sophia Buranakul - Nov 26, 2006 4:24 am (# Total: 21) Fah Diow Foundation
Tutormentor
Thanks for that link. That is really interesting. We're exploring different types of mentoring at the moment and have had a lot of success with peer mentoring through our Child at Heart project. We think this approach is going to be more and more important in Thailand as Thai society copes with changes in its culture and increasing generation gaps, particularly for urban youth and their parents/guardians.
We'll give more attention to your website and will certainly link to it. My husband grew up in Danville, Illinois. I expect he will like the geographical connection (of sorts) too!
We've been looking at how to create Internet based links among our teen mentors in several different parts of Southern Thailand... Hopefully we'll get some good ideas from this website on that too!
tutormentor - Nov 27, 2006 11:22 am (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
One of the strategies that I incorporate that I don't feel gets enough attention is an effort to educate the volunteers so they understand the issues better and grow to become leaders.
This is critically important because most high poverty communities, of the US, or abroad, don't have the ability to advertise daily in ways that would draw more consistent resource, for more years, into the various programs connecting with kids. Thus, unless we recruit volunteers and turn some to leaders who go to their own communities (business, church, college, etc.) and come back with reinforcements, we'll not be able to sustain our connection with kids long enough, or in enough places.
As to the geographical connection, I encourage you to look at the Program Locator at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org today. Over the weekend our volunteers added a Google interface. Now you can see where a program is on a map, and you can search the Google database to locate businesses, churches, hospitals, etc in the same zip code who might be sources of funding, volunteers, partnership, etc.
I look forward to connecting with you and others who are working with kids in a growing network of purpose where we work together to increase needed resources that are distributed via maps to all of us.
Sophia Buranakul - Nov 28, 2006 6:09 am (# Total: 21) Fah Diow Foundation
Thanks for the comments. We agree about the training for adults as mentors, although actually at the moment it's the youth that are acting as mentors to younger children and learning a great deal about themselves in the process.
By the way, we have put some of the documentaries up on the website so they can be seen by a wider audience. If anyone has any comments on the documentaries please send them to me at fahdiow@yahoo.co.uk so I can pass them on to the children who made these films.
Thanks to all who view them!
frogigr - Dec 2, 2006 5:58 am (# Total: 21) Allison and Tutormentor -
Thank you for all the time you are spending here. Allison, I have just looked into your book online and look forward to reading it in the future. Tutor, I visited your website and have quickly found it an extraordinary resource. Currently, I'm looking through the Rhodes-Dubois report "Understanding and Facilitating the Youth Mentoring Movement", which I sense has been dropped from the proverbial sky at just the right time.
tutormentor - Dec 2, 2006 10:15 am (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
The DuBois report is good as far as it goes. If you look at the other research from the conference we held Thursday, I point to a policy brief at UCLA and a paper written by Dr. Robert Halpern, as well as research being done at the University of Chicago.
The UCLA paper basically says the government No Child Left Behind is not going to have the desired impact because it does not provide funding for the extra learning support, in school and in the community, that is needed by kids living in neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty. The Chicago consortium report supports this with research that shows that schools that have consistently not responded to the extra money put into school reform are in neighborhoods with very little social capital and lots of negative influences. In my network of Purpose PDF I illustrate this visually.
The Robert Halpern article titled, "The Big Lie" shows how non-school programs that focus on learning supports, youth development, etc, but not acacemic tutoring, are having to lie in order to get funding.
Thus, when DuBois writes about good mentoring, he's not writing about it in the context of how mentoring expands the social capital of a youth living in high poverty, or how the impact of participation on the mentor leads to a greater understanding, and a greater commitment to do something, of someone who does not live in poverty, and may grow to be a corporate leader at some point in the future.
We need to step back and have a much broader, and long-term strategic perspective, and it needs to engage the business community for their own self interests of workforce development. That's what T/MC is trying to do with the conferences, the web sites, and my participation in forums like this.
frogigr - Dec 5, 2006 6:12 am (# Total: 21) Thanks very much for the context and additional information..Also, I enjoyed just checking out your blog and appreciated the story of your relationship with Leo. It is inspiring to see the origins of your dedication to this work.
Forgive me if I have missed it, but have you linked your "Network of Purpose" pdf here or at the Conference site. I'd really like to check it out. Please advise.
Thanks!
tutormentor - Dec 5, 2006 8:52 am (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
Attached is a version of the Network of Purpose that I presented to a Service Learning conference a few weeks ago. Since manpower is one of the missing resources for facilitating this on-going collaboration, one of my goals is to enlist high school and college students as leaders in this process. Thus, the focus here is to get teachers, parents and others to think of ways young people can learn to facilitate this type of network building.
For every person age 12 to 24 who spends 3 to 10 years learning to build and lead a network of purpose, while in formal education, we create a new leader who may spend thenext 40 years of his/her life applying what he/she has learned, while continuing to lead.
Such youth driven leadership could arise in all parts of the world.
|
Attachments: |
Networking for PurposeSL.pdf (384 KB) |
frogigr - Dec 5, 2006 5:46 pm (# Total: 21) Thanks you very much for sharing the presentation and for your long-term observations. I see a connection between your point and a comment from Sophia in post #12 of this thread....
"....although actually at the moment it's the youth that are acting as mentors to younger children and learning a great deal about themselves in the process."
From my many conversations on the best way to leverage mentoring relationships to make an impact on youth's lives, one of the most insightful observations I have heard is that some of the best mentors to youth are young men who are re-building their lives after time in prison and/or suffering from subtance abuse. The men have "street cred" with the youth and their roles as mentors enables them to receive the positive reinforcement of their own message as they speak into the lives of the youth.
This is not what you are talking about, I know, but in some ways seems related. I look forward to reading your report. Thank you again for the time you are spending here.
Also, regarding your above quote....
"We need to step back and have a much broader, and long-term strategic perspective, and it needs to engage the business community for their own self interests of workforce development."
I had a conversation this afternoon with a workforce development leader who is working to create a partnership between a university, a major employer, social services, and a church as a way of creating a team that would then create a relationship with a school(s). Any thoughts on this or any reports you can direct me to that explore this dynamic?
Thanks.
frogigr - Dec 5, 2006 5:59 pm (# Total: 21) Just scanned your report. Awesome! Printing it very soon and anticipate sharing it with some others. Will probably be a couple weeks before I can spend real quality time with it but will definitely be back here. fyi...Bliss Browne ("Imagine Chicago") is a friend of a friend that I've been e-mailing with some. She raised your name when I mentioned I stumbled on a message board with a fellow from Chicago who focuses on tutoring/mentoring.
tutormentor - Dec 6, 2006 8:46 am (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
Thanks for reading the report. I hope you'll go to the Tutor/Mentor Institute at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org and read the other reports that are posted there. Together the create a much broader understanding of what leaders need to do to help young people reach careers.
I do know Bliss, from many years back. This shows the value of the networking we are doing.
As to getting ex-convicts involved with youth, I feel this is part of the solution, but cannot be looked on in a vaacuum.
First, ex convicts are still on their own path to meaningful jobs and careers and most of the workforce development programs do little to connect them with people in industry who will open doors for these people to get jobs, or provide a wide range of workforce mentoring to help them stay and grow in those jobs.
Second, it takes some type of organized structure to recruit ex convicts, or any other mentor, and connect them with youth in on-going tutoring/mentoring that results in kids making better life choices, building aspirations that lead them do work harder in school, and building networks of people who can open doors to college and careers for these kids, just like parents and community do automatically for kids in more affluent areas.
Without the structure its not likley there will be many meaningful connections of any mentors with kids, let alone those who have life experiences that might motivate youth to make better choices the first time they have the chance, rather than after they have gotten off track and involved in the justice system.
Since we're talking about over 15 million youth in America who live in poverty, we're also talking about thousands of places where this structure needs to be in place, and supported by flexible innovation dollars, and dedicated staff and leadership.
Until we have champions in every industry, in colleges, in churches and in hospitals who understand this and spend time every day trying to make such a support system available, we'll all struggle and most kids, and ex offenders, won't get the help they ned.
frogigr - Dec 18, 2006 11:35 am (# Total: 21) Hi Dan,
Just wanted to drop in to say that I continue to look to your site for my ongoing education re tutoring/mentoring and am looking for opportunities to bring your efforts to the attention of efforts. I look forward to being back here over time and seeing where the continued conversation takes us.
Thanks for all the work you have been doing and for your determination to share it.
tutormentor - Dec 18, 2006 11:46 am (# Total: 21) Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection
Thanks for continuing to use the T/MC site as a resource. However, my hope is that you and others will become ambassadores who reach into your own business, university, religious and social networks to introduce this discussion to others, and to invite them to participate.
I don't know how many people visit Social Edge every day, but only a few share ideas in these discussions. If we each can bring others into this involvement, then we put the spirit of the discussion into actions that connect more people with each other, and with the good work we're each trying to do.
