Posted: January 28th, 2010 | Author: SarahB | Filed under: social entrepreneurship | Tags: organizational development, politics, social media | 1 Comment »
As new technologies change how we communicate and exchange information, they also re-focus an immediate lens on thought leaders today. Several leaders like Michael Pollan, Stewart Brand, and Danah Boyd have worked at harnessing the power of these tools to create system change. However, the institutions that push forward their ideas are less adept at integrating and responding to the constant conversation unfolding.
Public, private, and for-benefit institutions can learn from the conversation happening on the ground about the ideas, initiatives and products that are in need of change. They need to equip the people on the ground who are excited about their ideas with a strategic, focused message and the tools to communicate that message far and wide.
A case study of an institution recently undergoing a huge shift in how they talk to their supporters, how they intake information from their base, and how they leverage emerging technology to change the playing field and win is the democratic party in the US. Recently, I gave a presentation to Prof. Jonathan Selzter’s Interactive Marketing class at the St. Thomas Business School about the infrastructure the democrats began building and how the Obama for America campaign was posed to win based on this infrastructure. We also chatted about how elected officials have begun integrating emerging technology into how they communicate with their constituents and how that is changing the conversation. Check out my presentation and lets plan the next tsunami of people using technology to change how the system works. Sometimes all it takes is someone screaming for change to begin.
Posted: January 8th, 2010 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: news, social entrepreneurship | Tags: animals, farming, food, social entrepreneur, social innovation, urban farming, youth | No Comments »
The Facts About Food and Farming
image credit: Los Angeles Times
excerpt:
One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced.
full article here via The Los Angeles Times
It takes a community to sustain a small farm
image credit: wikimedia commons
excerpt:
These days it seems the most popular person to be in the food system is the “local farmer.” Farmers markets are popping up everywhere, and their size and popularity grow all the time. Local food is trendy—even the First Family is in on it.
But as anyone who has ever raised grain or livestock can tell you, the farmer is not the only person in the chain of players from her farm to your fork. In addition to producers, your food chain includes processors, distributors or transporters, and retailers.
full article here via grist
Three Things To Watch With The Social Innovation Fund
excerpt:
The New Year is bringing with it an accelerated buzz and excitement around the forthcoming Social Innovation Fund. A few weeks ago, the Corporation for National and Community Service released funding guidelines and asked for public comment. Sean has been curating that conversation on Tactical Philanthropy and an excellent guest post by nonprofit consultant Adin Miller prompted me to think about the three things I’m watching for with the Social Innovation Fund.
full article here via Social Entrepreneurship
St. Augustine School Chicken Project
excerpt:
In fact, the 200 students at this parochial school know more than many city kids do about where the food on their plates comes from. Behind the four-story brick 1905 school building is St. Augustine’s own chicken coop, where 15 hens with black feathers and speckled breasts lay large brown eggs. In the community garden across the street, students this year grew beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and broccoli. If all goes as planned, by June tilapia will be swimming under a blanket of hydroponic herbs in a tank in a new greenhouse. And, yes, even live turkeys are a possibility for the future.
full article here via changeobserver
Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: hybrid, social entrepreneurship, society | Tags: Detroit, Hantz Farms, localism, social entrepreneur, social innovation, systems change, urban farming | 5 Comments »
Urban Farming in Detroit
One of the greater ironies of the early 21st century might be that Detroit, oft considered the poster-child for post-industrial blight and decay, may well end up as a cutting edge example of how Urban America can best respond to the difficult realities of the emerging post-abundance paradigm. Recently, a growing chorus of voices has begun to sketch the outlines for the metamorphosis of Detroit into a shimmering “Urban Prairie”, a thriving agrarian hub rising from the denuded ruins of the once proud industrial mega-city. Detroit, with over 103,000 vacant lots, clearly is a prime candidate for urban agriculture, although the most ambitious plan for sparking this renewal, a working commercial farm in the heart of the city proposed by former financial guru John Hantz, has raised several issues that illustrate the difficulties of implementing any wide-scale systems change.
The subject of a flurry of recent articles, Hantz Farms aims to eventually convert over 5,000 acres of now deserted land into a fecund expanse of organic crops, all to be consumed within the local foodshed. Although many local leaders are encouraged by the prospect of new farm-labor jobs in Detroit, several community activists have taken issue with the structural inequities that they perceive as emblematic of such large-scale ventures. The project clearly offers some public benefit in the form of economic activity and community re-development, but many feel that private enterprise by its very nature ends up exploiting community members rather than offering opportunities for empowerment. One vocal critic speaking at the Food & Society Conference in San Jose lat April went so far as to describe the Hantz proposal as nothing more than a “plantation” amidst several hundred thousand poor and challenged urban residents.
It’s an understatement to say that the future will hold some serious challenges as we shift into a lower energy world, and the responses that we enact will often represent compromises based on pragmatic realities rather than Utopian “solutions” that promise to continue the status quo into infinity. Within this new headspace, we need to have the ability to see past the public-private dichotomy, and start realizing that what we perceive as polar opposites are in fact two sides of the same coin. Absolutist ideology provides grist for extremist politicians on both sides of the aisle, but the real world works in much more subtle and nuanced ways. Systems change exhibits emergent characteristics that do not follow the rules and expectations of previous cognitive models, and we must adapt our understanding of these new conditions to form a clear vision of how the transitions can be best managed. There is always a danger that power will be abused, but bereft of an organizing entity of some sort, it would be impossible for any type of collaborative effort to be realized. This threat exists in all forms of political organization past, present, and future.
I think we have to realize that although Hantz Farms will probably not please everyone or make good on all of its promises, it nevertheless represents a positive step towards acknowledging our predicament and crafting a creative solution to deal with the future pro-actively rather than re-actively. As a high profile experimental model, it will doubtless serve as a test case that will flush out land use and zoning and tax issues and create new legal precedents for the re-allotment of public and private spaces that will be immensely valuable. Urban farms of the future hopefully will likely be heterogeneously imagined, as communal co-operatives, individual micro-farms, private entities, and everything in between. There is no quick fix to anything, but if we are able to think beyond the wall of our previous psychological investments, it might be possible to craft a new consensus reality in which a sane a sober path through the rapidly changing world can be found.
Posted: December 10th, 2009 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: fourth sector, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship | Tags: animals, culture, ecology, food, localism | No Comments »
Connections are important. Not the kind that land you plumb jobs in shiny skyscrapers, but the kind that reveal to us causal relationships that are often taken for granted. Often times we shuffle through or daily lives with only the most abstract and rudimentary understanding of the vast machinations and support structures that allow the enormous wheels and cogs of industrial civilization to function without interruption. Most of the food we eat, for example, is grown, processed and packaged thousands of miles away from where it might be consumed. Most of our clothes and consumer goods are similarly produced in far off locations by faceless, nameless people that we likely will never meet. It’s kind of weird when you stop to think about it.
Oh to live in a time where you knew the man who made your shoes, the woman who baked your bread, the carpenter who built your house….one can rhapsodize eternal about the misty and hazy pastoral origins of our (post)modern industrial world. It seems like we always want to be somewhere that we are not-the melancholy hangs thick in the air like the scent of a sweet absinthe gone bad.
So when Heifer International’s holiday catalog self-titled as “The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World” arrived in our mailbox the other day, I was primed and ready to melt into their hands, reduced to a blubbering mess by the photographs that accompany the donation offers. Contributions help Heifer arrange for the purchase of an animal that will be donated to a farmer in a less industrial part of the world. The strategy is one of empowerment rather than dependence, as the animals can contribute to the small local economy that the farmer is a part of. It is a worthy and scrupulously reasoned endeavor all around. Very Fourth Sector.
I’m most struck, however, by what the photographs say on a basic level about the relationship we have to our food, and how this conversation might be re-imagined. The connection that we often miss is the realization that all human activity exists within a finite world of resources, and that we cannot transcend the ecological limits of our biosphere. In this sense, all human activity is both local and universal, it’s just that this intimate inter-connectedness is often obscured by cultural blind-spots that have grown larger over time. We can learn a great deal from the peoples in these supposedly “less-advanced” worlds, mostly that animals are loveable, and that the way in which we raise them is a direct expression of the love that we have for ourselves.
The Lateral Hippogriff approves.
Posted: December 7th, 2009 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: fourth sector, hybrid, social entrepreneurship | Tags: coffee, fair-trade, public-private | No Comments »
As the editor and birthing agent of this preposterously named blog, you might imagine that I spend a good deal of my time with head in clouds daydreaming about imaginary mythic beasts and other exotic denizens of the folkloric bestiary. You would be wrong. What I actually have been doing, at least today, is thinking about the interesting and peculiar relationship between coffee beans and Nordic Biking. The collision of these two unlikely subjects came to my attention early this morning when office mate Sarah suggested that I look into something called Peace Coffee. Surfing the eponymous website I discovered, among other things, that around here Coffee Delivery Fair Trade style falls to an elite group of bicycle couriers who are in possession of some pretty hardcore contempt for the brutal dispensations of Minnesota winters. This crack squad braves all manner of sub-zero weather to distribute Peace Coffee to various local customers spread throughout the Twin Cities area. A snapshots on the Peace Coffee website shows a hardy bike delivery personnel flexing and grimacing beside a pre-delivery load that looks like it weighs about 2 tons. I can almost smell the caffeine laced testosterone.
It would be one thing for a local business to operate a Free Trade Certified coffee distribution network with $3.1 million in sales annually, contributing to a growing network of “fair trade” roasters who work with over 20 coffee growing coops world-wide. This alone would be a laudable venture deserving of praise and rapturous lionization in the Forth Sector community and worthy of note by the Lateral Hippogriff. But no, this was not enough for the overachievers down at Peace Coffee, who had to go and get rid of carbon-based distribution systems in favor of the human engine method of product disbursement. As I leafed through the online gallery of photos that accompanied a singular passage in which one bike delivery person described “biking 40 miles on a day that barely saw negative 15 degrees”, this Los Angeles transplant began to realize that something else was at work here besides the actual physical transportation of beans.
If the primacy of political action has the ultimate ability to trump or at least mitigate the primacy of economic action, a central tenant of the Free Trade concept, then the “how” of a business model is just as important as the “what”. In this case, the hybridized, hippogriffic value added by a bike delivery method serves as an additional cultural emblem with tremendous symbolic significance. The lateral and adaptive models of systems organization that will characterize public-private activity of the future are currently being birthed within the imaginations of creative entrepreneurs and problem solvers, and as these diaphanous threads of possibility concretize into real and working models of systemic structure, they simultaneously enter into the ether of public opinion. Policy is forged in the crucible of common sentiment, and large-scale action and implementation follows.
I’m not really sure that Peace Coffee saves all that much petroleum by bike-delivering their goods in the grand scheme of things, but the resonance of the gesture is enormous. After all, what is being created is a cultural consensus in which value systems are normalized and then adopted by a larger audience. As exemplars of sustainability, Peace Coffee has created a recipe for policy action that will only make more and more sense as industrial civilization comes into contact with the hard ecological limits of a finite world. By holistically envisioning an enterprise that can see beyond the profit motives of the short-term shareholder and imagining the needs instead of long-term stakeholders, more sane and reasonable approaches to mitigating resource depletion and exploitative free-trade practices can be laid out for later macro-economic adoption.
The Lateral Hippogriff approves.
Posted: December 7th, 2009 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: fourth sector, hybrid, social entrepreneurship | Tags: fourth sector, humor, localism | No Comments »
I can’t think of a better subject for the inaugural post of “The Lateral Hippogriff” than to showcase my recent discovery via boingboing-the aptly named media project I Love Local Commercials. The two principal auteurs, Rhett and Link, possess an eerie resemblance to Bret and Jemaine from “Flight of the Conchords” and demonstrate with limpid clarity how two raffishly hip dudes are able to adroitly harness all their god-given man-cuteness and channel it into a hybrid venture that might best be described as “mission related social entrepreneurship”-gulp. Tooling around America in a boxy black Scion-they who love local commercials-want to work with you, yes you, hooking your business venture up with your very own free commercial. For free. The resulting “Rhett & Linkommercials” such as spots for Cullman Liquidation or a School Band Rap for Ray’s Midbell Music just might be some of the sharpest and funniest youtube clips I’ve seen all week, which is a long time on the internet.
“How are we able to make completely free local commercials for business across America?”, Rhett or possibly Link (I’m still figuring out who is who) asks in the above intro vid. Turns out MicroBilt has sponsored the whole venture, allowing deserving local business to elevate their media profile while demonstrating to you America, how the “For-Benefit” model can work in a manner that is at once playful, celebratory, and deadly effective. When collaborations are envisioned and executed in which the tragic commons described by Garett Hardin are not reflexively looted by selfish free-market agents, but instead hybrid systems are implemented in which everyone walks away with a mutual benefit, the added value of wide-bound and inclusive organizational structures is easier to see as the way of the future and not some pie in the sky dream of the idealists over at the Aspen Institute. It’s hard to see who loses in the whole situation, and easy to see how everyone wins: MicroBilt elevates its profile nationally while simultaneously enabling participating business access to some advertising band-with….all free of charge.
I Love Local Commercials is the type of project that gives me hope in Fourth Sector thinking and shows how clever strategies executed with enthusiasm and brio can actually advance the public good while reaping privatized rewards. The Lateral Hippogriff approves.
Cullman Liquidation Commercial
