Archive for August, 2013

Funding Changemakers as if Change Matters

Social Entrepreneurs to the Rescue

In our time of transition, moving to the Digital Era connecting us globally, storytelling has reemerged as the way to sell consumer products, to gather investors in startup companies, to change government policy, and to address long unmet environmental and social conditions.

Social entrepreneurs are among the best of these storytellers, speaking often from the first person singular as to how a person in need or a legacy process for daily activity was the catalyst for seeing the challenge as solvable, and the solution as worthwhile for doing well by doing good.

Media forums such as the TED and TEDx Conferences attract vast global audiences to hear this good news, and to delight in the craft of a founder story told with full passion for moving to a previously unachieved outcome.

Yet, it would be naive to think that “social entrepreneurs” singlehandedly solve the insolvable.  Many social entrepreneurs succeed through building enormous networks of likeminded and complementary actors scattered in industry, government, stakeholder communities and the media.

Watch the successful social entrepreneur on a TED stage, well-dressed and well-spoken, connecting with the audience authentically.  It would be easy to believe that foundations or investors fully or even partially funded the work that got them onstage.  In a survey of Ashoka Fellows in North America during the height of the Great Recession’s impact on philanthropy (2010), Urban Logic found that  social entrepreneurs personally sacrifice much to commit to and pursue their missions:

  • credit scores and personal net worth drop while salaries are deferred, and funding ebbs and flows into their organizations,
  • relationships with family and friends ebb and flow producing stress and anxiety, and
  • upon successfully championing their change in the broken paradigm, the market expands to take over and build on the first social entrepreneur’s vision, often without recalling how the vision emerged from sweat equity.

For university undergraduates and those with advanced degrees entering an economy with massive student debt and paltry job prospects, pursuing the passion to change broken paradigms is quite appealing.

Funding Changemakers as if Change Matters

Three decades ago, a McKinsey partner, Bill Drayton, coined the phrase “social entrepreneur.”  Later, empowering “everyone is a changemaker” became the bedrock of Ashoka’s mission.  Bill acted out of concern for the changemaker’s lifestyle, wanting to fund and mentor health in that.  Plenty of foundations fund “programs” and “projects.”  Bill Drayton cherished care-taking the human visionary – similar to Steve Jobs’ iconoclastic call to arms “Here’s to the crazy ones…

Yet today, as brand buffing or examples of corporate social responsibility for market segments of customers, corporate priorities seem to be calling the shots on which social entrepreneurs get funded to promote what changes in the world.  The categories chosen for corporate challenges or foundation grants are often too faddish or rigid to define the multi-layered stories of benefits to be achieved and resources to be tapped more effectively.

Would other types of funding lead to more diversity and continuity in change-making, and thereby improve the lives and careers of changemakers?  We think so…

Bruce Cahan

Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).

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Monoculture Thinking is Unnatural & Unhealthy

Biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has wisely observed that Nature is a design studio, where optimizing sustainability (of planetary lifeforms) and resiliency (navigating climate, species and extraterrestrial impacts) comes through millions of years of adaptability experiments.

Nature Values Diversity

Nature relies on multiple species to sequester carbon and improve nutrients for soils in vastly different climates and geographies.  Nature relies on regular seismic, forest fire, flood and migration patterns to disseminate species diversity, and to capitalize on the extreme events as fortuitous opportunities for establishing new homes for life and species’ advantage.

Our species acts constantly to master Nature, to overcome its unpredictability.  In doing so, we seem increasingly to favor the politics of monocultures – where one “go right” thinker group tries to outshout the “go left” thinker group, setting in motion a battle of monocultural belief as the supreme goal, regardless of its impacts on people, their neighborhoods and the planet.

Natural human rights to a home, healthcare, a job, retirement and other refined benefits of modernity in the “Developed World” are  Nature’s goals for other species in repurposing their ecosystems and behavioral economics.  On the one hand, “survival of the fittest” rules the animal and plant kingdoms providing nutrition, shelter and reuse of organic waste.  On the other hand, each species’ grazing in close proximity and instincts for social response can assure more of a given species survive, especially when threatened from internal and external predators and hazardous conditions.

Monoculture Politics

While Nature cherishes diversity of adaptive response, as humans, our political dialogue seems often to steer by which monologue of belief system is being reinforced by bludgeoning the perceived “other side.”  Instead of “human rights,” champions of one demographic’s rights shrilly and gleefully can ignore other’s rights.  For example, opponents of universal health care seem perfectly happy to ignore the biological and economic pandemic effects of letting the sick remain in suffering, dragging down urban economic vitality and intergenerational family survival.  Likewise, champions of women’s rights go silent when it comes to supporting the equal parenting and economic survival rights of men.  These tugs of war set up and maintain monoculture beliefs.  They create tribes to in-fight ideals.  They consume vast bandwidth on social and mainstream media.  They obscure the basic human dignity that all demographies, geographies and contexts for human quality of life demand, with equal concern, just in their right to speak for consequential Natural good.

Nature, the Design Coach for Leveraging Diversity

It is time to shed monoculture politics as social ideal.  Where Natural Rights could life all boats, the results of letting everyone fend for themselves – for finding a good education, job, home, honorable work, healthcare, nutrition – pulls us downward.

To justify monoculture politics, certain actors in each expert community get funded to build standalone White Ivory Towers, replete with algorithmic math that “assumes away” most other real world constraints and interdependencies with other aspects of quality of life, in order to reach  their funder’s ideal optimization or preferred solution or pre-ordained status quo.

Big Data springs from Big Models.  It is time to begin linking the languages of Big Models so as to build more adaptation from the limited resources each expert group (community of practice) is likely to receive through the political reality of annual budget cycles and recurring recessions.

Bruce Cahan

Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).

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Welcome to Urban Logic’s new website!

It’s taken longer than we imagined, but finally our WordPress website is ready for primetime.

Please let us know what you’d like us to add, fix and collaborate on!

…..

The site is still very much “in beta test mode,” so please excuse the punch list items and let us know anything you’d like us to fix or tweak or fill in more.

Thanks!

Bruce Cahan

Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).

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