Social Innovation

Joanne Weiss’ career demonstrates that social innovations are often created and driven by people who reach across the nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors. Weiss started her career by co-founding and leading several for-profit companies, most of which were in the educational field. She then joined the nonprofit NewSchools Venture Fund, which for the last 12 years has funded nonprofit and for-profit educational reform organizations. And last year Weiss was recruited to be the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund. The Race to the Top Fund is not a typical government program. Instead, it borrows from the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, most notably the idea that competition can stimulate change. Rather than getting grants based simply on how many children are in school or how many schools are failing, states must compete for money by putting forward innovative programs that improve their educational system. Some states will get money and others will not, based on performance and outcomes. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Weiss explains what the department hopes to accomplish with Race to the Top, what criteria will be used to judge the states’ proposals,…

Springfield, Mass., the birthplace of basketball, was once a thriving manufacturing center producing everything from Indian motorcycles to Rolls- Royce sedans. But the wave of factory closings that began sweeping the United States in the later part of the 20th century has hit the city hard, and no one has suffered more than Springfield’s children. In 2001, at least one-third of those younger than age 9 were living in poverty, 20 percent of babies were born to teenage mothers, and students regularly ranked among the lowest academic achievers in the state. For the staff and board of the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, a local grantmaker established “to improve the lives of individuals and families” in Springfield and surrounding Hampden County, the persistence of child poverty and related problems prompted a reassessment of their strategies and mission. “There was a feeling on our part that we were giving out all this money, and so what?” said Mary Walachy, executive director of the Davis Foundation. At the same time that the grantmaker was reevaluating its role in the community, national researchers were producing compelling data on brain development and the payoffs that come from investments in early childhood education.…

Over the past decade or so, the term social entrepreneur has become a fashionable way of describing individuals and organizations that, in their attempts at large-scale change, blur the traditional boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Given the ceaseless appearance of innovations and new institutional forms, we should welcome a new term that allows us to think systematically about a still-emergent field. One danger, however, is that the use of the modifier social will diminish the contributions of regular entrepreneurs—that is, people who create new companies and then grow them to scale. In the course of doing business as usual, these regular entrepreneurs create thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed, the intertwined histories of business and health in the United States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship. The pantheon of model social entrepreneurs should thus include names such as railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, meatpacking magnate Gustavus Swift, and software tycoon Bill Gates. THE STEW OF POVERTY People tend to think that advancements in health care, for example, are the achievements of either government or the social sector. More recently, they note how the work…

In 2000, while working for a national refugee resettlement organization in New York City, Jane Leu decided that the federally funded system of matching immigrants to careers was a failure. “We didn’t have an incentive to focus on [the] quality” of the placements, she remembers of her six years of putting highly educated, English-speaking foreigners in low-skill jobs. “It was just about quantity.” So with no funding, a borrowed laptop computer, and her kitchen table as a makeshift office, Leu started the nonprofit Upwardly Global, whose goal is to help highly skilled immigrants reclaim their careers in the United States. The beginning was rocky. With no funds and no employees, Leu was limited to one-on-one sessions with job seekers, reaching out to foundations for grants, and making employers aware of a hidden talent pool: 1.3 million bilingual workers with degrees and professional experience in every possible white-collar profession. Successes trickled in. By 2002, the organization received its first grant and hired its first paid employee. In 2003, Leu’s work was recognized by the Draper Richards Foundation when she became its first fellow, earning a $300,000 grant. Today, Upwardly Global employs 29 people to serve some 600 job seekers a year.…

In the midst of the worldwide financial crisis, funders are increasingly suggesting that nonprofits consider merging—that is, fusing their boards, management, and legal entities to form a single organization. In 2009 alone, my consulting firm delivered nearly 60 presentations and workshops on mergers and other partnership forms to more than 6,000 participants—double the previous year’s tally. Similarly, our strategic restructuring practice (which handles mergers and other partnerships) grew 60 percent last year, during the worst part of the recession. Now 2010 is upon us, and the urge to merge shows no signs of abating. Underlying this trend are two core beliefs: The nonprofit sector has too many organizations, and most nonprofits are too small and are therefore inefficient. Mergers, the thinking goes, would reduce the intense competition for scarce funding. Consolidating organizations would also introduce economies of scale to the sector, increasing efficiency and improving effectiveness. Yet a closer look at the nonprofit sector suggests that this thinking is too simplistic. Mergers are risky business. They sometimes fail, although not so frequently as in the corporate world. They usually cost more than anticipated. They sometimes create more problems than they solve. And the problems that they allegedly solve—too many nonprofits,…

In recent decades, many economists have advised governments to stabilize, privatize, and liberalize markets. Economists do know how markets work, and they can often predict how mature market economies will respond to certain events and policies. But developing economies lack both mature markets and the institutions that support them—including institutions that define property rights, enforce contracts, convey prices, and bridge gaps between buyers and sellers. These are precisely the institutions that political leaders must establish and then modify as economic growth introduces new problems and opportunities. The work of the Commission on Growth and Development tended to confirm that political leaders play pivotal roles in the success—and the failure—of economic development. As detailed in its publication The Growth Report, the commission closely examined 13 nations whose gross domestic product (GDP) grew at least 7 percent a year for at least 25 years after World War II. In other words, these economies at least doubled in size each decade. Although these high-growth countries used different economic models and political structures and had different resources and histories, their governments followed broadly similar paths. Often ushered in by a crisis, new leadership chose a promising economic model and then stabilized the nation long…

Rubicon Bakery is deservedly famous for its 12-layer chocolate cakes and other rich confections that generate some $2 million annually in sales. Each sale helps underwrite job training and other programs for poor and disenfranchised people. This social enterprise works wonders for the 4,000 people in the San Francisco area that Rubicon Programs reaches annually with its bakery and landscaping businesses, along with its housing, mental health, legal aid, and other social services. But for those who are down and out in most other communities, chances are slim of finding the same kind of help. After 23 years at the helm of Rubicon Programs, Rick Aubry has decided it’s time to take “the next big leap forward,” and design social enterprises that can succeed on a national scale. “Most social enterprises have remained local or at best regional,” he says. Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army are rare exceptions, both using a thrift shop model that’s more than a century old. Figuring out what those national solutions might look like is the task facing Rubicon National Social Innovations. The best fit for scaling, Aubry predicts, will be a sustainable idea that fills a widely occurring need. Similar to for-profit franchises,…

Her suit is Prada. Her hair is neatly coiffed. Her handshake is firm and her eye contact steady. Her body leans forward ever so slightly to show that she is interested, but not anxious. Her easy banter manages to convey her many achievements without seeming arrogant. Her replies arise after thoughtful pauses. Her compliments seem sincere. And her next job is quite likely to be the one you are offering, suggests a new meta-analysis of several dozen studies. Combined, the studies show that hiring managers are remarkably susceptible to a job candidate’s appearance, gestures, postures, flattery, and self-promotion. Alas, the study also finds that these interviewer-wooing tactics have more to do with whether a candidate gets the job than how well she performs at it. “Many executives and managers have too much confidence in their ability to read people,” says Murray Barrick, chair of the management department at Texas A&M University and the study’s lead author. “They don’t want to hear that self-presentation tactics are having this much impact on their hiring decisions.” “I also didn’t think that our effects would be this strong,” he adds. Barrick and colleagues’ study offers an antidote to the beguiling wiles of potential hires:…

On Wednesdays in Rwanda, just before sundown, the radios come to life. Farmers lay down their tools to gather under shade trees, fan clubs take their usual seats in the bars, and a hush settles over prison courtyards. Each week, an estimated 85 percent of radio listeners in Rwanda tune their radio dials to the soap opera Musekeweya (New Dawn). Using a Romeo and Juliet plot to symbolize Hutus and Tutsis, the program teaches listeners how to prevent ethnic violence, embrace reconciliation, and heal the wounds of the past. In 1994, radio-borne hate propaganda helped prompt a Hutuled genocide of 75 percent of the ethnic minority Tutsis. Within three months, the genocide wiped out 10 percent of the Rwandan population — some 750,000 victims. Now, Musekeweya is reclaiming the radio to help survivors live together again. “Musekeweya helped me calm down,” says Kennedy Munyangeyo, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Kigali who lost his two brothers, several uncles, and a sister to the genocide. “I used to think that we should react by hating the people who did the genocide, but after a year of listening to the show, I realize that if someone did a bad thing, the answer is not…

Had the proto-green architect Frank Lloyd Wright lived in the 21st century, he might have built something like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offices in Santa Monica, Calif. Although framed by a century-old structure, the retrofitted downtown site now includes the latest and best eco-friendly features. Reflective roofing and hanging plants cool its surface. Light wells suffuse the interior. Sensors allow artificial illumination only when rooms have occupants. A smart air conditioning system ignores areas that are already cool. Solar panels generate a fifth of the building’s energy, and wind farms provide the rest. As a result, the building’s total energy costs are 44 percent lower than those of a comparable 15,000-square-foot office space. As befits the NRDC’s mission to protect the planet, its headquarters’ materials are also of the greenest caliber. Named the Robert Redford Building, its wood comes from forestry operations that meet the highest sustainability standards. Its paint and other materials emit almost no toxins. And its renovators recycled all but 2 percent of the waste they generated during construction. For these many environmentally friendly specs, the nrdc headquarters received a platinum rating—the highest possible—by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Created by…

In his recent remarks at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan focused on chronically underperforming schools. “They’re often unsafe, underfunded, poorly run, crumbling, and challenged in so many ways that the situation can feel hopeless,” he said. And they’re a full 5 percent of our nation’s schools — some 5,000 in total. Education reformers offer two strategies for redeeming these schools: turnaround and fresh start. Turnaround strategies keep the same students and site, but change many of the school’s core elements, such as staff, programs, partnerships, and buildings. In contrast, fresh start strategies open a new school from scratch — often with new students, staff, and programs. In most cases, fresh start schools are charter schools — that is, independent public schools that a state board of education, school district, nonprofit, or other authorizing entity creates. Both turnaround and fresh start strategies assume that the school is the critical unit of change, so both rely heavily on school leaders. Both strategies also require a compelling vision and the ability to make it operational. And both demand substantial initial investment. Because these two strategies have much in common, many school-change organizations — EdisonLearning,…

Why is inequality so bad? It’s not just that the poorest people in highly unequal societies may go without food, shelter, or other basic subsistence goods. It’s not just that extreme inequality makes it difficult for the less fortunate to participate fully in their country’s social institutions. It’s not just that lavishing mansions, cars, and jewels on a few lucky people violates some primitive sense of justice and what’s fair. Although inequality may well be problematic for these conventional reasons, The Spirit Level tells us that it’s mainly bad because it makes status differences more extreme and salient and thus generates insecurity about our worth and where we stand in the social hierarchy. We should dislike inequality, in other words, because it produces anxiety and because such anxiety in turn leads to chronic stress, health problems, and other undesirable outcomes. The great achievement of The Spirit Level is documenting that this inequality-induced anxiety has so many bad effects. It makes humans feel stressed and deprived and more likely to get depressed, smoke, overeat, or engage in violent behavior. It also leads to conspicuous displays of consumption, such as buying fancy cars, big houses, and luxury clothes, all of which serve…

In the time it takes to update your Facebook page, you could be making the world a slightly better place. That’s the idea behind The Extraordinaries, a Web-based platform for microvolunteering that’s been generating plenty of buzz since its launch last year. The goal is to harness thousands of currently untapped hours by making volunteering fast, convenient, and bite-sized. While waiting for a bus or cooling your heels at the dentist’s office, you could be using your smart phone to tag photos for the Smithsonian, send a study tip to an at-risk student, or map your local parks. “We want volunteering to be as fun and ubiquitous as playing a game,” explains Sundeep Ahuja, cofounder and president of the San Francisco-based business. The Extraordinaries (www. beextra.org) was founded by a trio with deep experience in social media. Chief technology officer Ben Rigby pioneered the use of mobile phones for youth voter registration when he founded Mobile Voter. CEO Jacob Colker was one of the first to harness Facebook to organize political campaigns. Ahuja was a product manager at MySpace before helping to launch Kiva, the microphilanthropy site. Traditional community service “has been about carving out a Saturday afternoon or an…

In Afghanistan, grief is never far away. “You are always losing somebody,” says Sakena Yacoobi. A native of Afghanistan, Yacoobi has lost friends and colleagues to bombings and kidnappings. She has seen routine health matters turn fatal for want of basic medical care. When the losses pile up and Yacoobi gets to feeling “a little down,” she asks her bodyguard to drive her to a nearby preschool. There, it doesn’t take long before this short woman in a hijab is smiling. “I see kids singing, drawing, playing, learning. Their happiness is my happiness,” she says, “and I am ready to go 100 miles per hour again.” For more than a decade, Yacoobi has devoted her considerable energies to rebuilding educational opportunities in a country that had almost forgotten how to learn. The Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which she founded in 1995, now reaches 350,000 women and girls annually with programs that extend from preschool through university. In addition, men and boys benefit from AIL’s leadership training, which promotes peaceful strategies for resolving conflict. AIL also provides health education, operates medical clinics, and teaches income-generating vocational skills like carpet weaving. Through all these initiatives, AIL emphasizes critical thinking “so that…

In 1988, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s famously conservative prime minister, approved a revolutionary reform: Allow secondary schools to shrug off local control and become autonomous, central government- funded entities. To convert into one of these so-called grant-maintained schools (GMs), a school had to secure the majority vote of its students’ parents. By 1997, some 900 of the United Kingdom’s 3,500 state-funded secondary schools had gone GM (the rough equivalent of a conversion charter school in the United States). Damon Clark’s father was the principal of a GM school. Two decades later, Clark is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Florida, where he has uncovered the first evidence that GM schools fare better than standard schools on national exams. “GMs increased the pass rate on their Grade 11 exams by about 5 percentage points,” from a 40 percent to a 45 percent pass rate, he says. He further finds that upturns emerged as early as two years after the GM conversion and persisted eight years later, at the end of his study. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, advocates of charter schools and their analogs contend that giving schools greater autonomy not only will…

The fundamental tenets of strategic philanthropy are that funders and their grantees should have clear goals, strategies based on sound theories of change, and robust methods for assessing progress toward their goals. Although these ideas are gaining traction, some prominent philanthropic thinkers continue to express reservations about how they may affect the balance of power between funders and the organizations they support. For example, former Ford Foundation president Susan Berresford expresses concerns about “funder-led strategic planning that imposes wearying and unnecessary demands on applicants and grantees,” and wistfully asks, “Has the role of the quiet, patient, and responsive funder become less appealing?” 1 She quotes the Indian social entrepreneur Sheela Patel’s complaint about funders’ imposition of logic models and their demand “that in a period of two years, we can implement perfect strategies and produce complete solutions.” Similarly, Sean Stannard-Stockton, the founder and CEO of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors and philanthropic blogger, argues that the idea of a theory of change makes sense in a “static landscape, where you can learn more and more about what works and what doesn’t and finally craft the perfect theory,” but “fails in a dynamic landscape, such as social change, where what you learned on…

In June 2009, people going about their ordinary routines in Stockholm encountered a series of perplexing and—most important—fun diversions. One day, commuters at the Odenplan subway station found that the staircase had been replaced with a musical piano keyboard, replete with sound. Young and old alike abandoned their usual ride on the adjacent escalator to scamper up and down the steps. Couples played duets. Children picked out tunes with their parents. Dedicated soloists hopped up and down, losing track of their destinations. During the one-day test, 66 percent more people than usual chose the stairs over the escalator. Meanwhile, pedestrians out for a stroll in a municipal park came upon the World’s Deepest Rubbish Bin—a trash receptacle with sound effects that made it seem as though items were falling into a deep chasm. Some onlookers circled the container, peering inside to get a glimpse of the mighty crater within. A child eager to hear the sound of falling trash scooped up litter off the ground and threw it in. Apparently she was not alone in her enthusiasm: The acoustically enhanced trash can attracted more than twice as much trash—158 pounds in total—as a neighboring ordinary bin. Other passersby came across…

Like any primate species worthy of its opposable thumbs, we humans like our social hierarchies. Yet too much inequality wrecks our health, rocks our politics, and chafes our social ties, find scholars across the social sciences. These same scholars also hotly debate where inequality comes from, yet arrive at little consensus. A new study of 21 modern small-scale societies around the world, however, finds a clear pattern in the disparities: “How much inequality there is in a society depends on how inheritable the wealth is, which in turn depends on the kind of wealth that it is,” says economist Samuel Bowles, director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute and one of the study’s lead authors. Specifically, parents in crop farming and herding economies tend to value and create material wealth (such as land, cows, and money), which they then pass on to their offspring. Over time, this inherited wealth accumulates in certain households, widening the gaps between the haves and have-nots. In contrast, parents in subsistence farming and hunting-gathering economies tend to rely on and generate other kinds of capital, including embodied wealth (like height, strength, and skills) and relational might (such as social alliances and…

On the morning of Jan. 26, 2001, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western Indian state of Gujarat. More than 20,000 people were killed and 160,000 injured, many of them crushed by falling buildings. International aid agencies flocked to the scene and began reconstruction. One year later, civil engineer Elizabeth Hausler traveled to Gujarat on a Fulbright scholarship, hoping to learn how she could use her skills to build homes that withstand tectonic shifts. She found that many survivors didn’t want to live in their new, donor-built earthquake-resistant houses because they were made from odd materials and in strange styles. “One approach I kept seeing over and over was designing a house with the toilet inside,” says Hausler. “People don’t want the toilet in the house, because the houses are so small. So that ends up being wasted space. And they don’t use the toilet, so they don’t have a toilet.” It wasn’t enough for a house to be solid, realized Hausler. It needed to fit. Even when donor-built homes suited people’s needs, they were frequently too expensive. “I didn’t see a single example of a technology introduced by a local or foreign organization that continued to be used without…

Inside the steel and glass office towers of Chile’s capital, Santiago, computers, printers, and faxes hum. Out on the streets, business executives and taxi drivers chat away on some of Chile’s 14 million cellular telephones. Urbanized, well educated, and home to 17 million people, Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. And as is the case in the United States, all its electronic gadgets are beginning to lead to a whole lot of electronic waste. The country currently discards 300,000 computers a year, and by 2020 it will be grappling with an annual pile of 1.7 million trashed computers, estimate Daniel Garcés and Uca Silva, researchers at Plataforma RELAC (the Regional Platform on E-waste in Latin America and the Caribbean, a project sponsored by a Chilean NGO). Worldwide, e-waste is the fastest-growing solid waste stream. This widening river of trash poses both human and environmental hazards. Each cathode ray tube in a television or computer monitor, for instance, contains several pounds of lead. Electronics also harbor mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metals. Many consumers and manufacturers dump these materials into landfills, where toxins leach into groundwater and poison people and animals. Even when people attempt to…