I have worried that there is a danger as a social entrepreneur teaching a class on social entrepreneurship (especially one that features a series of amazing guest lecturers who are also social entrepreneurs), in painting an exclusively rosy picture of the field. The real story is of course more complicated, and my belief is that in order to really understand all that is great about the field, it is essential to also understand its shortcomings and limitations. To this end, throughout the course I have asked the students to consider social entrepreneurship through a more critical lens, including perspectives such as Marshall Ganz’s piece that Social Enterprise is Not Social Change and Jon Krakauer’s book, Three Cups of Deceit. For those unfamiliar, the book is Jon Krakauer’s expose of how (according to Amazon): Greg Mortenson, “humanitarian hero,” lost his way. In many ways it’s an unlikely choice for the class because it’s the story of how someone who was celebrated as an incredibly successful social entrepreneur turns out to have lied about a bunch of rather significant details of his story and engaged in some pretty unethical behavior in his leadership of the organization he founded, the Central Asia Institute (CAI). I do assign it though because, for me, Mortenson is the least interesting aspect of the story. I assign the text because of what it says about the larger ecosystem in which social entrepreneurs operate - the roles of philanthropy, boards of directors, donors and the media. I assign it because I want the students to look more closely at the stories we tell about social entrepreneurs and the ways that these stories both reflect and reinforce age-old biases, while also incenting behaviors and beliefs among everyone involved, not least of all the social entrepreneurs. It’s worth noting that Jon Krakauer himself is a minor character in the story. Krakauer was a not-insignificant donor to the Central Asia Institute, and his ire at being duped by Mortenson is palpable throughout the read. Three Cups of Deceit is very readable - Krakauer is a great writer - but I was disappointed by his oversimplification of the story: the philanthropists and donors are gullible innocents swindled by Mortenson, who is portrayed as an almost old-fashioned con man. There is little acknowledgement of the myriad ways that the system incentivized and then lavishly rewarded Mortenson’s behaviors. While Mortenson is obviously an extreme example of a social entrepreneur run amok, I kept thinking that his behaviors were not all that surprising to me. He probably is a con man, but I suspect like most great con men, he believed his own con. I came away thinking that it was surprising that more nonprofit leaders didn’t fall into the same trap: it is the rare human who can successfully sell the hype without buying it himself. Perhaps my favorite aspect of Three Cups of Deceit is the story it tells about CAI’s Board of Directors. Nonprofit board membership is a critical component of the nonprofit sector and perhaps the single most important organizational structure to ensure that a nonprofit is actually operating for the public benefit. It is a huge responsibility that almost no one who does it is fully prepared for, trained to do, or entirely understands. And when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, they are the humans left holding the bag. The bag the CAI board was left holding was a particularly large and messy one. Kevin Starr’s piece on the accusations against Mortenson in a 2011 SSIR article, “It’s Not About the Tea,” captured the situation well. I particularly appreciated the observation, “The whole thing had an unhealthy cult-of-personality vibe.” Most notably, though, Starr (CEO of the Mulago Foundation) is emphatic that while the lies in Mortenson’s stories are offensive (”it’s not nice to portray one’s hosts as kidnappers”), the greater offense was in misrepresenting accomplishments and in wasting so much money. To the point that the story is most important in what it says about the other actors involved, Starr adds, “In the end, though, the responsibility for this mess lies with the donors. By and large, CAI’s supporters went for a feel-good story, didn’t do their homework, and didn’t ask the right questions. It appears that there was never a systematic attempt to verify whether schools were up and running, and the fact that there was only one audited financial statement over CAI’s history is jaw-dropping. If you smothered me with adulation and gave me a ton of money without much oversight, I’d probably run amok too.” Earlier in the semester, the social entrepreneur Alexandra Bernadotte (see my earlier blog on her guest lecture) asked my students to consider the idea that the systems we choose to fix are not broken, as is so often said, but rather they are operating exactly as designed. I think that is perhaps the most critical idea inherent to Three Cups of Deceit. Greg Mortenson’s story fulfilled a narrative of a white man rescuing a broken people, despite allegedly being kidnapped and threatened with death, paying back his debt of gratitude for having healed him in his moment of need. It is the perfect noble savage trope, with an American hero who was going to defeat the Taliban by building schools. Even as people came to realize that Mortenson himself was unwilling to fulfill the most basic of reporting requirements - financially, to the board, with the staff - his ability to raise money and inspire people who wanted to hear this story made it feel impossible to those responsible for doing so, to stop him. It is important to recognize that Mortenson experienced what for most of us was unimaginable fundraising success because his behaviors and stories, while unethical and fabricated, were exactly the behaviors and stories that the system was designed to reward.
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Our fifth class focused on US-based nonprofits operating globally, with Willy Foote, the founder and CEO of Root Capital joining our class via Zoom from Cambridge, MA (I cannot type those words without hearing the Car Talk brothers in my head referencing “our fair city”). I hadn’t anticipated it, but Willy’s talk was an excellent continuation of the discussion that has been emerging in the class around the role of corporations in contributing to - or hindering - social change. Willy’s talk ran headlong at the issue, posing possibly the ultimate social entrepreneurship question to the students: “How do we use the tools of capitalism without being controlled by them?” Willy’s story is a particularly relevant one for students studying social entrepreneurship through a business school, having started down that path himself. Raised in a family that valued public service, Willy described early influences - his father, moving from Missouri to Miami in 1981 - and then travels and other experiences that ultimately encouraged him to trade in a job in finance for a fellowship in journalism. I particularly appreciated the way Willy described starting Harvard Business School, but then dropping out shortly after because he just couldn’t shake the notion that there was something he might actually do - right then and there - to unleash the power of “moving large sums of capital to where it was needed most, not where it was least risky.” I couldn’t help but think of Paul Shoemaker’s excellent book, Can’t Not Do while Willy was talking. I sometimes hear people say that they want to be a social entrepreneur, but they’re not sure what it is they want to work on. Part of me thinks of this as a great indication that social entrepreneurship is becoming more of a recognized thing, and more people wanting to contribute to positive change in the world is certainly an unqualified good. But there is another part of me that can’t help but think that that’s not at all how I’ve experienced it, and I worry that people are responding to the hype around a few very visible social entrepreneurs, as opposed to the more intrinsic experience of being incapable of inaction. A common theme of being a social entrepreneur that has emerged among our speakers so far in this class is that they didn’t choose it so much as it chose them. Willy is palpably passionate when talking about the challenges facing small-hold farmers globally, but even more so, he is emphatic when describing their power and import as the climate vanguard, and the most effective guardians of our most precious ecosystems. In this way, Willy’s talk about working globally mirrored some of the most important thinking that is happening in the sector around how to most effectively - and respectfully - operate in the nonprofit sector, both globally and domestically. Besides his assets-based mindset, Willy referenced Bryan Stevenson’s four steps to change the world: get proximate, change the narrative, stay hopeful and put yourself in uncomfortable places. I cannot think of any better advice that students of social entrepreneurship might receive. Willy also talked about more familiar business concepts, and shared stories of ups and downs. He referenced the strategic imperative of exploring adjacent markets, he described efforts to diversify markets and the power of not trying to do too much and instead identifying the “slipstreams that unlock other value.” Willy closed his remarks by talking about Root Capital’s endgame - not trying to be the sole funder of the “misfitting middle” (those too small for traditional bank loans and too big for microfinance), but rather to inspire replication and adaptation by other institutions. This was a good reminder that it is in the endgame that we see the greatest difference between more traditional nonprofit organizations led by social entrepreneurs and social enterprises more broadly defined. The second half of the class included the remaining two student presentations - one on Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Tom’s and one on Josh Nesbit, the founder of Medic Mobile. There was also a brief group discussion on Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit and I am planning a bonus blog on my choice to include that text in the syllabus later this week. Next week we will be talking about democracy entrepreneurship, and joined by Yordanos Eyoel, the founder and CEO of Keseb. Perhaps reflecting my own fascination with the topic (but also because this is such a new field), I’ve assigned a little more in terms of readings and watchings this week: READ: The Messy World of Data Behind Tech’s Campaign to Get Out the Vote https://www.protocol.com/ballotpedia-ballotready-voting-data “Democracy Market Analysis, Leadership Now Project” file:///Users/jillvialet/Downloads/Democracy+Market+Analysis+1.1+-+PUBLIC+(April+2019,+updated+Nov+2019)+(2)+(1)%20(2).pdf “The Role of Proximate Democracy Entrepreneurship in Building a Multiracial Democracy”, Eyoel, Nonprofit Policy Forum https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/npf-2021-0046/html?lang=en WATCH: Unbreaking America: Solving the Corruption Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k Why Voting Isn’t Enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi7HFSCjKs8&ab_channel=TEDxTalks Highlights 2022 Global Democracy Champions Summit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wr-rslmrmE&ab_channel=KesebGlobal Dune Lankard is a Native Eyak of the Eagle Clan from Cordova, Alaska, who has committed his life to protecting Eyak culture, his ancestral lands and “a wild salmon way of life”. Dune started his talk with the class with a brief review of the more recent history of the Eyak people, a story that includes earthquakes, the Valdez oil spill and climate change resulting in measurable increases in the ocean’s temperature and acidification. Dune shared beautiful pictures of the land and water where he grew up, along with images of the visibly melting glaciers and the devastated coastline and impacted wildlife left behind by the Valdez spill. The heart of Dune's talk, though, was about how he and his organization have worked together to save the land so that, as he put it, “there would be something to fight about later.” In describing this part of the journey, Dune exemplified the aspect of the social entrepreneur as someone who sees a problem, becomes obsessed, and then leverages whatever resources they have access to in an effort to realize the change they can see in their heads as though it has already come to pass. Along these lines, Dune’s efforts through the Native Conservancy have included writing federal policy, kelp farming, experimenting with innovative freezing processes to achieve food sovereignty for the elders in his community, hosting famous musicians on rafting trips down the Copper River, and building better fishing boats out of hemp resin using 3D printers (to name just a few). In describing these projects, Dune also referenced the many ways in which a corporate structure - in direct contrast to traditional indigenous practices - contributes directly to an extractive relationship with the world around us. He referenced the ways that Alaska had created a corporate strategy for the individual ownership of oil rights and fishing rights that had led to Native people unwittingly forfeiting control (and by extension losing access to their role as stewards of our lands and waterways), and warned against the dangers of allowing a similar approach to the further annexation of our oceans. It made me think about the conversation we had had as a class the week before on Patagonia’s journey, and wonder about how we might more deeply explore the implications of this concept, especially as we exist in the context of the business school. While Dune talked about the importance of his mother as an inspiration, and about the importance to him of honoring and caring for the elders in his community, I also appreciated that he mentioned the importance of leadership of the next generation. He talked specifically about Nick Tilsen and the NDN Collective, and he apologized to my students on behalf of our generation for not leaving them a world in better condition. I was particularly moved by his ask of the students that as they consider their respective paths, that they incorporate the role of guardian into their lives. It is worth noting that Dune did all of this while we were experiencing mild Zoom hell. The screen reportedly turned off while Dune was speaking, though his vivid storytelling overpowered the technical interruptions. I mention it only because it is easy in discussing these classes to share the high level concepts, while the experience of teaching - and I imagine, learning - is also shaped by these more mundane details. One nice post-script to the class, I have already received an email from a student asking if I thought Dune and his organization might be willing to consider her for an internship. The second half of class was focused on the students’ team presentations on social entrepreneurs, and we were only able to get through three because of the technical SNAFUs. I’m always interested to see which leaders the teams select - so far they’ve done Warby Parker, and two social entrepreneurs I hadn’t heard of previously, Jessica Schreiber, founder of FABSCRAP, and Hla Hla Win, founder of 360ed. We’ll have the final two presentations this coming week. One thing to note here is that Melissa and I are experimenting with having the students contribute to the grading of their peers’ presentations, working from a presentation evaluation rubric. I have not taken a look at those yet - I wanted to wait until all the presentations were done - but I will be interested to see how their assessments compare to my own. We will be joined by Willy Foote from Root Capital this week and the readings include one from Willy himself: “To Invest in the Future of Coffee, Starbucks Turns to the Capital Markets,” Willy Foote, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyfoote/2016/05/23/to-invest-in-the-future-of-coffee-starbucks-turns-to-the-capital-markets/?sh=51e123341174 along with finishing up Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit This past class featured Dina Buchbinder, the founder and CEO of Education for Sharing (Educacion para Compartir), an international nonprofit organization founded in Mexico fifteen years ago. Dina is a good friend, an extraordinarily accomplished social entrepreneur and a disarming speaker, and she started off her remarks by noting that she had no idea fifteen years ago that she’d still be doing this work. I particularly appreciated Dina’s candor as she described her journey as one that had unfolded organically, responding opportunistically to invitations to expand the program, and investing more deeply in areas where they found traction. Dina’s talk hit many of the themes that we have been discussing as a class – the importance of the team in building a social enterprise (despite the narrative focusing so much on the social entrepreneur), the critical nature of the business model (beyond merely revenue generation), and the power dynamics that impact who has access to the resources that facilitate leading social change efforts. In describing the work of leading her own organization in different countries – and within countries, in different regions – Dina talked about the importance of recognizing and incorporating context in all aspects of an organization’s operations. Dina noted her preference for unorthodox approaches and a dispositional resistance to following the rules. It’s been a theme that has come up now with all of the speakers – an abiding sense that the rules were a part of the problem and basically fungible. And, true to form, Dina was quick to shift the conversation from a description of her own story to a questioning of the students about their respective passions and the origins of these passions (which made me wish I had thought to ask the students the same questions earlier). One of the things I realized last year in teaching this course was that the students possessed a number of misconceptions about the nonprofit sector. While our discussion of social entrepreneurship isn’t limited to nonprofits, it became clear that myth-busting around social entrepreneurship required some clearing of confusion around how nonprofits actually function. To this end, during the second half of class we walked through some of the more prevalent myths about nonprofits – that they can’t make a profit, that all employees are volunteers, that overhead is evil, that they can’t lobby (this actually appears only to be a myth within the sector; outside humans haven’t ever really thought about it), and that US nonprofits get all their money from foundations. In walking the students through all this, I was struck by how strange it is that while 10% of the population is employed by nonprofit organizations, there is so little understanding and awareness of our sector. This obviously has huge implications on everything from our ability to hire people to attitudes impacting philanthropy, and in teaching this course it sometimes creates what feels like a tension between fostering awareness vs. designing a rigorous learning experience. It is my hope that both can be achieved, but I am aware at three weeks in (out of fourteen) that it will not happen unless I make a concerted effort to encourage the students to go deeper. One timely topic that came up during the discussion of the myth that nonprofits can earn a profit was the Patagonia sale. In describing the key difference between nonprofits and for-profits as the prohibition on nonprofits from distributing its profits to an individual, one student noted that Yvon Chouinard had essentially created that same condition for his for-profit with the recent announcement of his donation of ownership. This prompted a good discussion around nonprofit compensation - what, exactly, is reasonable? And regarding the Patagonia decision, we talked about the implications of the complicated legal machinations involved (why do we make it so hard to do something like this?), and an international student noted that it was interesting to contrast the differences and implications of lower taxation rates in the US. I was pleased to see that the students were thinking more broadly about what actually makes a social entrepreneur, and the significance of legal/corporate structures in creatively addressing social issues. For this coming week, the students are preparing for their first presentation on a social entrepreneur of their choosing and we will be joined by Dune Lankard of the Native Conservancy and our Readings (and listenings) include: Podcast: Kelp, condors and Indigenous conservation https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/podcast-kelp-condors-and-indigenous-conservation/ Readings: 5 Ways Social Entrepreneurs are Promoting Sustainability Around the World, PBS News Hour Begin reading Three Cups of Deceit, Jon Krakauer (to be discussed at our October 3 class) One of the things that teaching Social Entrepreneurship has really brought to my attention is the challenge of defining the terms involved. In part this is the result of people being a little fast and loose with language, but I also believe that context is significantly responsible. When we used the term social entrepreneurship ten years ago, we probably did mean something different from what we mean today, and presumably it will be different ten years hence. There are any number of definitions for the term social entrepreneurship itself (I have included the list of different references and definitions that I shared with my class below), and when you throw in ‘social enterprise’, ‘systems change’ and ‘scale,’ while inspiring students’ eyes to roll back in their heads, you also realize how important it is to try and find some common understanding about what you’re actually discussing. One of the ways I am trying to encourage my students to understand what social entrepreneurship means is by having them meet a wide assortment of social entrepreneurs sharing their (varied) experiences of actually being one. This past week Alexandra Bernadotte, the CEO and founder of Beyond 12, joined us via Zoom, sharing her journey to launching and leading Beyond 12, along with some powerful insights about what she sees as critical to achieving educational equity. Alex talked about the role of technology in their work, and the importance of marrying technology to human interaction (“humans don’t scale, machines don’t analyze”). She shared the insight that the systems we are trying to “fix” are in fact not broken, but actually operating as designed to compound privilege and I was struck that this last statement did not seem to be even slightly controversial to my students. I unsuccessfully tried to spark a bit more of a conversation about the idea and couldn’t help but wonder if being a young adult in this moment has made questioning and deconstructing the system the default response. Students did actively engage with questions about Beyond 12’s revenue breakdown and other operational issues, and they were also curious (and notably well-informed) about the tech-related challenges of data privacy and bias. Just as the definitions of our sector have and will change over time, the conversations about the path to scale and its challenges are grounded in the context of the moment. After Alex’s remarks, we talked a bit about the readings – especially the Marshall Ganz piece arguing that social enterprise is not social change (and calling out Ashoka specifically) and the response from Michael Zakaras (from Ashoka) in SSIR. I noted the importance of language in the two pieces, with Marshall Ganz referring more broadly to social enterprise while Michael focused exclusively on social entrepreneurship, and of definitions, with Michael maintaining that social entrepreneurship is more defined by its commitment to systems-level change than its relationship to markets and revenue models. As I told my students, I do believe that is true now, but I don’t think that was necessarily true ten years ago. The Ganz piece was also a great springboard for noting the impact of power and privilege on the sector, a theme I hope to reference throughout the course, and its connection – or lack of connection – to government and policy work as tools of systems change. This is an area of growing personal and professional interest for me and I am particularly excited to have included a class on the emerging field of democracy entrepreneurship as part of the course. The group work focused on the students coming up with their own definitions of social entrepreneurship and preparing for their first group projects, ten minute presentations on a social entrepreneur of their choosing. Dina Buchbinder from the Mexico-based Education for Sharing joins us this afternoon and the readings for this week are: “Are Social Enterprises Different?” Jeff Skinner, London Business School “Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise” Osberg, Sally and Martin, Roger, HBR “For Love or Lucre,” Fruchterman, SSIR A sampling of descriptions and “definitions” of social entrepreneurship: • Ashoka Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. • Austin, J., Stephenson, H. & Wei-Skillen, J. (2006) Social entrepreneurship is an innovative, social value-creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, businesses or government sector. • Bornstein, D. (2003) A path breaker with a powerful new idea, who combines visionary and real-world problem solving creativity, who has a strong ethical fiber, and who is ”totally possessed‟ by his or her vision for change. • Dees, J.G. (2001) Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector, by: Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value); Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission; Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning; Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand; and, Exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created. • Johnson (2000) Social entrepreneurship is emerging as an innovative approach for dealing with complex social needs. With its emphasis on problem solving and social innovation, socially entrepreneurial activities blur the traditional boundaries between the public, private and non-profit sector and emphasize hybrid model of for-profit and non-profit activities. • Light (2006) A social entrepreneur is an individual, group, network, organization, or alliance of organizations that seeks sustainable, large-scale change through pattern-breaking ideas in what or how governments, nonprofits, and businesses do to address significant social problems. • Mair, J. & Marti, I. (2006) Social entrepreneurship: Innovative models of providing products and services that caters to basic needs (rights) that remain unsatisfied by political or economic institutions. • Martin, R.L. & Osberg, S. (2007) The social entrepreneur should be understood as someone who targets an unfortunate but stable equilibrium that causes the neglect, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity; who brings to bear on this situation his or her inspiration, direct action, creativity, courage, and fortitude; and who aims for and ultimately affects the establishment of a new stable equilibrium that secures permanent benefit for the targeted group and society at large. • Nichols , A. (2007) Social entrepreneurship entails innovations designed to explicitly improve societal well being, housed within entrepreneurial organizations which initiate, guide or contribute to change in society. • PBS “The New Heroes” A social entrepreneur identifies and solves social problems on a large scale. Just as business entrepreneurs create and transform whole industries, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent and disseminate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value. • Schwab Foundation What is a Social Entrepreneur? A pragmatic visionary who achieves large scale, systemic and sustainable social change through a new invention, a different approach, a more rigorous application of known technologies or strategies, or a combination of these. • Skoll Foundation The social entrepreneur as society’s change agent: a pioneer of innovation that benefits humanity. Social entrepreneurs are ambitious people with the qualities and behaviors we associate with the business entrepreneur but who operate in the community and are more concerned with caring and helping than “making money.” mission driven, strategic, resourceful and results oriented. We have liftoff! Thirty students managed to find their way to the Haas Innovation Lab, better known as the ILab, for the first Fall 22 Social Entrepreneurship class. Last year the class was held in one of the more traditional Haas lecture halls, and while beautiful and LEED-certified, I found the location a bit stuffy. The ILab, by contrast, is a more open space with movable chairs and desks, located improbably in the bowels of the Stadium. My friend Susie Wise (check out her wonderful new book Design for Belonging), has taught me a lot about space as a lever of design, and I was struck by how palpably different it felt to be launching the class from this explicitly collaborative classroom. We jumped right in with Bill Drayton who Zoomed in from Washington DC, immediately challenging the students to see themselves as changemakers and social entrepreneurs. Bill focused his remarks on a couple of different Ashoka Fellows, the shared qualities of social entrepreneurs and their collective orientation to systems change. He also talked about the historical context of the rise of social entrepreneurship. I have heard Bill make similar remarks any number of times, but as I was listening this time, I was particularly struck by his defining the moment by the explosion in both the rate of change and the rate of interconnection. This was at the root, he explained, of the new inequality – the defining distinction between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ being their respective ability to move from a world of work that emphasized repetition to a world where the key to success was the ability to adapt to (if not drive) rapid change. Bill described his own youthful start as a changemaker during the civil rights movement, the power of recognizing patterns, and the importance of questioning/not always following the rules. The irony of that final point as I launched into an overview of the course structure and expectations – including the (in my opinion) delightful no screens policy that is a Haas norm - did not escape me. Watching the students watching Bill was both fascinating and a little nerve-wracking for me. Did they get what a big deal he was? Was he being too abstract? I think they did and that he wasn’t, but I was also struck by how language can so easily ‘other’ us. When Bill was talking about ways of measuring the presence of changemaking, he referenced YouTube ‘clientele,’ as opposed to calling them followers, and the use of this term from a bygone era created just a brief moment of disconnect. It wasn’t a big deal in any way – nothing at all by way of comparison to what my non-native English speaking students are dealing with all the time - but in the moment it was notable and made me wonder about ways to address these more subtle manifestations of difference. As planned, I introduced myself and Melissa, the course Reader, talked a bit about her experience working with Teach for Malaysia and studying in the UK. A second year MBA candidate, Melissa briefly described her summer internship learning more about capital markets, and offered to support the students as they needed, available to talk about anything they might want to discuss. As she was speaking, I could not help but recognize how valuable it is to have someone involved in delivering the course who is closer, both in age and experience, to the students. We then broke into groups and I invited the students to go around and answer the “Three Minute Know Me” questions, which I’ve included below. The class wrapped up with some housekeeping, and a few students came up afterwards to introduce themselves. Having taught the previous year in a masked environment, it was a delight to be both unmasked and able to see the students’ full faces. Since the pandemic I have become acutely aware of how much I rely on peoples’ in-person energy and facial expressions when I am speaking to a group. No class this week because of Labor Day, so no blog next week. We will resume on the 12th with Alexandra Bernadotte, the founder of Beyond 12, as our guest. Readings for this coming week: Guclu/Dees/Anderson:“The Process of Social Entrepreneurship,” Marshall Ganz, “Social Enterprise is Not Social Change” Michael Zakaras, “Is Social Entrepreneurship Misunderstood?” Plus a podcast: Innovation That Matters: How to Coach Students Without Trying to Fix Them Three Minute Know Me: I asked the students to share their names, pronouns, year and course of study and then to answer these questions: ● When I want to chill, I listen to ____ ● People know I’m excited when I _____ ● When people meet my family, they are surprised by _____ ● When I need some alone time, I like to ____ ● You’ll know that I’m stressed when I _____ ● My favorite stretch is ____ ● It’s easier for me to ask for help when _____ ● I feel most confident when _____ ● My favorite pick-me-up is ____ ● I feel like being around people when _____ ● A favorite simple indulgence is ______ ● My friends think it’s weird that I ____ ● I learn best by ____ ● I wanted to take this class because _____ I start teaching my course on Social Entrepreneurship today at UC Berkeley. It’s an introductory course for undergraduates, taught through the Haas School of Business as part of the Center for Social Sector Leadership. This is my second year teaching the course, and while the first year was all about figuring out what I was doing, I was hoping this year might allow for a little more reflection on the content and things I am learning along the way. To this end, I was thinking that I might blog about the class for its fourteen-week duration. Part of me suspects that this commitment will be a lot like deciding to sing a karaoke song, finding oneself halfway through Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were Made for Walking" overwhelmed by regret. The other, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed part of me is enthusiastic about the power of writing as a tool of synthesis. Last year when I set about designing the course I was given the previous instructor’s syllabus as a jumping off point, some excellent moral support and a lot of latitude to design the course as I saw fit. I looked around and spoke with folks who had been teaching Social Entrepreneurship – there are courses on the subject at almost every major university, which is a bit wild to me as I still vividly remember when I heard the term for the first time. The resources developed by Debbi Brock and Ashoka were particularly helpful, and I spoke with a number of friends/fellow social entrepreneurs who had taught similar classes. I landed on a course structure that emphasized bringing in a guest lecturer for each session – generally a social entrepreneur or someone who had worked closely with social entrepreneurs and brought a unique perspective to the ecosystem – combined with lectures by me and group activities and discussions. I’m sticking with that format for this year, with the one modification that as Haas had eliminated the mandate that grading happen on the curve, I’m putting a greater emphasis on collaborative learning and all the assignments are group assignments. If I convey nothing else in the course, I’d like to communicate that social entrepreneurship is a group activity. Going into last year, I had thought that I understood what was involved in leading a course. After all, I had spoken at assorted courses on social entrepreneurship, I was an experienced public speaker, I have lots of thoughts and experience with learning design and, perhaps most obviously, I was/am a social entrepreneur. What I realized during the semester, however, was that the trick was in creating an experience for 30 different humans with a wide range of goals. Some of the students aspired to be social entrepreneurs themselves, but certainly not all. Some of the students were far more interested in B Corps and social enterprise, about which I harbor some probably unfounded suspicions. Some students were deeply sad that my course was offered at the same time as Monday Night Football. I’m not entirely sure I mastered the trick of it, but I’m excited to try again. Bill Drayton is my kickoff speaker this afternoon. He’ll be Zooming in and I thought that having the man who coined the term ‘Social Entrepreneur’ tell his story to start was about as badass a way to begin the course as I could imagine. I’m planning to introduce myself and have my Graduate Student Reader, Melissa Kong, introduce herself (Pro Tip to anyone considering teaching a course on SE, Readers are the difference between possible and impossible). We’re going to break into groups to give people a chance to get to know one another and then we’re going to begin exploring Social Entrepreneurship. That’s the plan, at least. This is your invitation to come along. I’ll be posting the readings and sharing highlights (and probably some lowlights) from the classes weekly, and I’d love to hear from you if you have suggestions, recommended readings, thoughts… Welcome back to school! This week’s readings: “Everyone a Changemaker,” David Brooks, David Bornstein, "Changing the Word on a Shoestring” “The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship,” Dees/Duke/Fuqua Case This past Spring I coordinated an experiment involving graduate students from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the Goldman School of Public Policy addressing infrastructure challenges experienced by emerging organizations focused on democracy innovation.
I described the project’s structure in more detail in this blog at the beginning of the semester, and the idea was based on conversations I was having during the pandemic with leaders of different emerging democracy innovations. Admittedly, “democracy innovation” is a fuzzy term, but my thought going into the experiment – a thought that was reinforced by the experiment – was that there is a subset of new nonprofit organizations focused on improving functional aspects of our democracy. For purposes of the project I looked specifically at groups that lean centrist, are 501(c)3s – or at least partially 501(c)3 – and I excluded groups working on media. Most of the groups that ended up participating focused on voting and the structures that promote more inclusive voting, as well as organizations working to promote greater cooperation and collaboration across the political spectrum, including the promotion of more business engagement in the political process. The project got off to a good start with six organizations and 12 graduate students, though we lost an organization and a student about a month into the process. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this attrition. As I said often (and probably somewhat annoyingly), this was always intended to be an experiment and there was as much to be learned from what didn’t work as what did. The group’s reason for dropping out of the process was that the staff person who had been assigned to the project wasn’t continuing with the organization, so they did not have the bandwidth to support the students. This proved to be a recurring theme throughout the semester with staff departures and illnesses significantly impacting the work. The structure of the experiment also assigned an established nonprofit leader as a volunteer coach to each team. My hope was that they would be able to scope the projects prior to each team launching. Perhaps not surprisingly, project scoping took significantly more time than I had anticipated, and for most of the groups the work did not begin in earnest until at least a month in. Despite my relative lack of instruction, these volunteer coaches made some great contributions to both the organizations and the students they were supporting. I think with a little more structure and guidance that role could be leveraged to maximize their contributions. Looking back over the semester, I am left with three main takeaways. The experiment did affirm the core premise that prompted the project in the first place: emerging organizations addressing issues of democracy innovation have significant infrastructure challenges that are limiting their impact and ability to achieve scale. What I did not understand going into the experiment, however, was that while I had a fairly decent idea of where I was hoping to help these organizations land, I was really lacking in understanding around their starting places. It was in a conversation with a longtime campaign organizer in which she described the process of “raising the circus tent” - attracting large sums of money and quickly achieving notable outcomes while building minimal infrastructure - that I came to better understand some of the challenges that our teams were experiencing. I had erroneously assumed that in focusing on how these organizations might have stronger infrastructure that they were comparable to other nonprofits of their relative size and experience, and that the democracy organizations were seeking to build more permanent infrastructure as a key priority. But appearances can be deceptive, and the (understandable) expectations of our grad students around the basic infrastructure elements they assumed to be in place, along with the very real constraints of the organizations we were trying to help (time being the most obvious), made the work hard. My first takeaway was that a better understanding of the organizations’ starting points is essential to supporting them in building the infrastructure they want and need. While the concept of democracy innovation remains an under-defined concept, the experiment convinced me that leaning in to better understand these organizations and how they function – as distinct from other nonprofit organizations, essentially digging in to better define democracy innovation, will be essential to building the supports they require to maximize their impact. My second takeaway was that I fell into the common design trap of failing to adequately define the “who” of my experiment. In attempting to coordinate an experiment for both organizations and students, I unintentionally designed an experience that underserved both groups. The structure of the experiment – as a paid experience for the graduate students – contributed to a more transactional attitude towards the projects. This was not true for all the student groups, but in the absence of a class structure to support relationships among students, coaches and organizations, the connection between the work and protecting democracy was often overshadowed by the frustrations of collaborating as part of a group whose more significant shared characteristic was a shortage of time. On the day of the fellowship’s final presentations, I also sat in on the final presentations from the Haas course Social Sector Solutions (S3). That course is designed to support students in providing consulting services, and it was evident from watching their presentations that the course’s time commitment – and curriculum – ensured that the students were better prepared to address the needs of their organizations and the challenges of working on a team. The more rigorous vetting process – and commitment - for S3 also ensured that the participating organizations were better prepared to robustly support the process. While my experiment had focused on emerging organizations by design, this created a more challenging situation for the students because these organizations tend to be less well resourced and more prone to significant staff turnover. The third takeaway was that I came away wondering if all of these organizations should build lasting organizations; that maybe some of them were best served in achieving their goals by being structured as time-bound campaigns. And not surprisingly, once I started wondering about this for these democracy innovations, I couldn’t help but wonder about the truth of this for other organizations in our sector. Organizations are a lot like living things and living things work really hard to keep themselves alive. How often do organizations lose sight of their intended outcomes because they feel forced to focus instead on their own survival? This isn’t the first time I’ve considered this, but there was something about looking at the needs of an adjacent group that made the challenges of my own sector feel more obvious (sort of like how one realizes so many different things about the US when one is traveling abroad). It was in thinking about this need in the democracy innovation space that I began to wonder if the answer might be a new structure/business model that afforded organizations the benefits of infrastructure without the distraction of maintaining it. While we have fiscal agents and incubators that support emerging organizations, it is less common for these organizations to actively engage with the participating groups in thinking through the often un-sexy, but always essential questions of scale. So, what’s next? I’m thinking about two follow up paths of experimentation. The first, addressing my second takeaway around better identifying the beneficiary, is exploring the idea of creating democracy innovation subcohorts within existing classes like the aforementioned S3. Leveraging these existing offerings and their expertise in preparing and supporting students in consulting projects feels like a more effective way to achieve the intended outcomes. The second potential path involves exploring ways to support these democracy organizations independent of a student experience, a follow up of sorts to the question around the need for a new operating structure. I came away from the project wondering if there might be better ways for me to engage the coaches – possibly supporting existing fellowships for democracy innovation leaders with direct consulting or creating a process to identify veteran social sector leaders interested in serving as board members for these organizations. Could a group like this lean in to better understand the nature of democracy innovations and to design structures and opportunities better tailored to their needs? Could a group like this ultimately spark innovation that contributed to new insights relevant not only to the democracy innovation space, but to the social sector more broadly? Inspiring greater citizen engagement with our democracy is going to require some exceptional creativity and leadership. While the original idea for the project sparked a great deal of enthusiasm among the participants, that proved hard to maintain as they turned to the actual, more mundane work of figuring out how to help these organizations operate more efficiently. That said, a couple of the groups were able to make progress and gain inspiration from the process. There’s a story about the mathematician Richard Hamming and how he used to routinely ask colleagues what the most important work in their field was, followed by a question about why they were working on anything else. After a 35-year career in the nonprofit sector, I have come to believe that creating the opportunities for people to actively citizen and to support efforts to innovate in our democracy are both essential to protecting that democracy and the most important work in our sector. It will be challenging and success is not a foregone conclusion, but we can do hard things. If you or someone you know is doing work in this area, I invite you to reach out. The one thing that I know for certain – and that this experiment reinforced for me – is that we cannot do this work alone. This month marks the kick off of a new project I’m working on, an experiment that I am leading as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. As a follow up to 18 months of interviews with leaders of organizations working in the space of democracy innovation, the project is a semester-long design cycle out of the Center for Social Sector Leadership (CSSL). Six Haas MBA and six Goldman Public Policy MPP/MPA candidates have been selected to work in interdisciplinary pairs as paid fellows to address specific infrastructure challenges at six democracy innovation organizations (Block Power, Bridge Alliance, Business for America, the Institute for Political Innovation (IPI), New Politics and Turnout Nation). The student teams are being supported by coaches with relevant scaling and growth experience from other nonprofit sectors, with the project work beginning this month and continuing through April, 2022. The goal is to have project deliverables and presentations in May. There’s a quote in Konstanze Frischen and Michael Zakaras’ book, Unfinished conversations: On democracy, race, the economy and a path forward, from Eric Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University which has felt particularly relevant to the why of my spring project, “Well, I would say that democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works. The process of self-government involved policy and legal structure and institutions, but what animates it all is civic spirit – a belief that participating in the first place will yield benefits. What we’re seeing in the United States right now and around the world is that democracy is not inevitable. It is not self-perpetuating. The belief in democracy requires constant nurturing and cultivation. And that belief has to emerge from the inside out: Showing up in this diverse community is something I should want to do because it benefits me and those around me.” More than anything, my hope for this project is that it creates an opportunity for a diverse group of humans to show up and contribute, to actively participate and to be reminded that this whole democracy thing is an experiment that requires our active care and feeding. If I’m honest, I’m also hoping that it will be a reminder to those participating that engaging in this way – having the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to something larger than ourselves – can be both energizing and hopeful. On the more concrete level, there are also some outstanding questions I hope the experiment will begin to answer:
While the projects are just kicking off this week, the learning has already begun, including:
There is still much to be learned and my plan is to write more about the process – I’m aiming for a mid-semester update as well as a final one - but there is one observation that I wanted to share in closing. In many ways, this is a very personal project borne out of my deep concern about what I perceive to be threats to our democracy and a desire to translate 25 years of helping people learn to play well together into a practical approach to mending our not-so-civil society. I have been gently called naïve, and I have been repeatedly reminded that the scale and scope of the challenge at hand makes my small experiment seem less than inconsequential. In the face of these entirely justified criticisms, I find inspiration in a sports adage, “Fight fatigue with focus.” We are all tired. Shifting my attention from doom-scrolling to the work on this project has measurably buoyed my mood. I actually caught myself nerdily/optimistically thinking that experimenting with election reforms at the state level might actually get traction in a way that ultimately catalyzes a shift from gradual change to significant sudden change. I invite you to consider this moment and how you’re feeling about it, and to decide to shift at least some portion of your limited time to doing something about the things that worry you. No matter how small or seemingly inconsequential. I invite you to join me and my colleagues in this project in actively citizening. As schools prepare to re-open after the quarantine-prompted year and a half hiatus, school leaders are wrestling with some significant decisions. School closures in response to the pandemic laid bare a host of pervasive educational inequities – from access to broadband to extracurricular learning opportunities. It also served to make the complexities of teaching and learning abundantly clear to many people who had simply not been compelled to consider them before. In particular, the multifaceted nature of teaching – combining both instruction and custodial care (the unfortunate educational parlance for all things non-instructional) - left many families reeling. Given the challenges of keeping one or two kids engaged at home, the idea of differentiated instruction for a classroom of 30 kids was at last understood to be an almost Herculean task. One area where the importance of the “care” side of the equation was made particularly evident is in the practice of substitute teaching. While substitute teaching is very much the “elephant in the classroom” – at 10% of a student’s instructional time and a cost of $4B annually in the direct costs of subs – the practice has an outsized impact on the experience of school. Making it even more significant is the issue of “fill-rate.” The national average of 80% - meaning that for every 100 requests for a sub, on average 80 are filled – leaves schools to either sub in other staff (administrators, school counselors, reading specialists), or to distribute the untended students among other classes – a process that is often referred to as “farming out.” Just as the pandemic helped people to fully grasp just how complicated – and important - care-taking actually is, the real and impactful challenges of substitute teaching were made similarly more visible. Efforts to contain the viral spread of COVID revealed that creating a structure in which subs are not going from building to building also has the happy unintended consequence of enabling them to form relationships – with both students and staff – that contribute to the greater likelihood of their success in the larger educational sense. It may sound cliché, but there are huge opportunities in the challenges we face. Looking at substitute teaching - universally acknowledged as one of our most dysfunctional and un-loved legacy systems – provides some great examples. The opportunity in this moment is in not simply focusing on how to “get back to normal,” but rather to look at the challenges we face, the innovations that have emerged, and to ask the question “how might we build systems that works?” At Substantial, we have been asking just this question about the substitute teaching experience in an effort to shift the debate from “how do we get enough subs?” to “what might we do with 10% of student time and $4B annually?” One example that has emerged is re-imagining the role of substitute teacher as a full time school-based position that not only represents an important pipeline for new teachers, but adds flexibility to school staffing that may help in addressing the unanticipated challenges that are likely to arise in the coming year. Another idea is engaging specialty subs in the short term – guest instructors who supplement instruction with a focus on a topic that might otherwise go uncovered like art or financial literacy. From the use of ed tech to inviting students themselves to assume greater responsibility for the “classroom” experience, reframing the design of our responses to emphasize co-creating systems that work for everyone involved proved most effective when our old systems were rendered temporarily unworkable. This moment creates two very distinct opportunities – responding to our challenges with improvements or innovations – and one very real danger: settling for a “return to normal”. In the case of substitute teaching, a return to “normal” would be asking “How do we get more subs?” Improvement might mean shifting the question to “How might we get the great subs we have to come back, helping them to be even more successful?” Innovation, ultimately, involves asking “How might we design the best possible student experience?” Thinking about the myriad issues that face school leaders as they open from these three vantage points is helpful in sparking empathy for the incredibly heavy lift that they face in this moment. The question we collectively face – not just in education, but more universally, is what will we do with the lessons of the pandemic? Will we hold on to our appreciation for the challenges of keeping students engaged throughout the day? Will we continue to feel thankful for those workers who were deemed essential and asked to risk more than the rest of us? Will we acknowledge the system’s inequities and seek to redress them? As schools re-open, reconsidering the role of the substitute teacher provides an opportunity to imagine how we might hold ourselves accountable to incorporating these lessons. And as we re-open as a society, we might allow these lessons to prompt our thinking more generally on how we intentionally design this next phase of our collective life in a way that honors the importance of relationships and connection. |
Jill's BlogPeople need meaning, the opportunity for mastery, and community to thrive. Creating opportunities for people to contribute, and to find their best selves is some of the most important work we can do. |