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Category Archives: Fostering New Ideas
December 3, 2012, 9:49 am
10 People Honored for Using Technology to Improve Social Good
The SXSW Interactive Festival has announced the 2013 winners of its Dewey Winburne Community Service Award. Ten social entrepreneurs who are using technology to tackle tough problems like educational inequity, environmental degradation, and poverty will be honored in March at the social-media industry event, in Austin, Tex.
The awards are named after one of the festival’s co-founders, a teacher who was devoted to helping disadvantaged youths learn technology skills.
The winners are:
• Madhura Bhat, who co-founded Health for America, a fellowship program for young people to develop technology solutions to improve health care.
• Elizabeth Davidson, who co-founded ScriptEd, a nonprofit that trains volunteers from the tech industry to teach computer programming to students in New York City high schools.
• Arlene Ducao, who leads Open Infrared, a project that maps…
September 11, 2012, 9:07 am
Cash Rewards Spur Poor Communities to Pay for Sanitation Projects
Children try out a new hand-washing station. (Photograph by East Meets West Foundation)
An international aid charity is taking an unorthodox approach to helping people in Cambodia and Vietnam improve sanitation and hygiene: It asks beneficiaries to help pay for the construction of latrines and hand-washing stations, but then gives them cash rewards when they get results. The effort will now spread, thanks to a $10.9-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The East Meets West Foundation, in Oakland, Calif., works with local groups to provide hygiene education, train masons to build high-quality latrines, and broker low-cost loans that families can use to install latrines and hand-washing devices. Families receive a $10 rebate to help offset construction costs after an independent group has…
July 30, 2012, 4:57 pm
Why Today’s Challenges Require Nonprofits to Be Nimble
To tackle problems in a rapidly changing world, nonprofits need to adopt a new mind-set, one that emphasizes improvisation, ad hoc networks, and adaptation, says Andrew Zolli, executive director of PopTech, a New York charity focused on innovation, and co-author of a new book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.
Because the world has entered a period of “extraordinary volatility” and the problems society faces are increasingly complex, he argues, figuring out why some individuals, organizations, and systems are resilient in the aftermath of a crisis while others are not is paramount.
“We’re all ballroom dancing in the minefield,” says Mr. Zolli. “In an environment like that, we have to be able to prepare our companies, our communities, our organizations to be able to deal with those disruptions. And that is a different agenda that we have had, even in the recent…
July 13, 2012, 9:19 am
Harnessing the Internet to Provide Low-Cost Higher Education
A University of the People student from Haiti (Photo courtesy of University of the People)
University of the People has an ambitious goal: to use the Internet to provide an extremely low-cost college education to students around the world. And the nonprofit’s big idea is starting to gain traction with grant makers.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $500,000 to support the university’s effort to gain accreditation. The grant comes on the heels of recent awards by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Intel Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Since its inception in 2009, University of the People has enrolled 1,500 students from 132 countries. Courses are taught by professors from around the world who volunteer their time, and the university offers degrees in…
June 21, 2012, 1:14 pm
‘Random Hacks of Kindness’ Uses Technology to Solve Problems
Programmers in San Francisco and Berlin got together recently to attempt to build a system that would allow immigrants to tell their families they’ve arrived safely at their destination without anyone else finding out.
In Nairobi, a similar group worked on a system to report election results in real time, including incidents of election violence and accusations of voter fraud.
In Toronto, others worked on a system that could allow Nepali women to send ultrasound pictures via mobile devices.
All of them were volunteers, willing to lend their technological expertise to nonprofits and causes.
These projects and others were part of the “Random Hacks of Kindness” weekend, a twice-yearly, 36-hour work session for designers, programmers, and technology experts to solve problems facing nonprofits and other organizations interested in doing good. The most recent events, held this…
March 10, 2012, 1:56 pm
‘Open Source’ Ideas for Nonprofits
Open-source technology thrives by letting anybody know how it works and encouraging them to come up with new ideas and to tailor software to their own needs.
Could your nonprofit work the same way?
Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session Saturday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.
“Just be open, that’s the lesson here, but it sounds scary,” she said, because many organizations are built to keep their work to themselves and out of the hands of competitors.
Nonprofits, though, may be the most qualified type of institution to adopt an open business style.
The principles of open business are community, transparency, meritocracy, rapid prototyping, and sharing, similar to the ideas that guide many nonprofits already.
Ms. Suehle said organizations that want to be more open should…
February 16, 2012, 4:55 pm
Nonprofit Innovation: a Free Webcast
The Taproot Foundation is holding a free Webcast on innovation in the nonprofit world. Scheduled for Wednesday, February 22, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, the panel discussion will feature:
• Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
• Pete York, chief research and learning officer at TCC Group
• Laura Weiss, vice president for service innovation at Taproot
Aaron Hurst, Taproot’s founder, promises it will be a thought-provoking, grounded discussion. He says of the speakers: “Unlike many innovation peddlers, they each bring a pragmatism and humility to their work that is refreshing.”
December 14, 2011, 12:11 pm
Innovation Case Studies in the Arts
A New York nonprofit that helps arts organizations rethink how they operate and develop new ideas, has created a new site that it hopes will become a hub for arts and cultural groups to talk about innovation.
The site, ArtsFwd, was created by the group EmcArts. It features video profiles of arts groups that are experimenting with bold new approaches to their work. In one profile, officials from the Denver Center Theatre Company describe how they developed Off-Center @ The Jones, a nontraditional series designed to attract new and younger patrons with greater audience participation.
Before starting the series in earnest, the organization held three events to test some of its ideas. One of the events, a reading of a play called “An Extraordinary Demonstration of Nikola Tesla’s Most Recent Discoveries,” taught the organization the dangers of incorporating too many…
December 5, 2011, 3:45 pm
Helping Nonprofits Benefit From Fresh Ideas
The Hall of Witness at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Photo by Alan Gilbert, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives)
Nonprofits that are tackling big questions about their mission benefit greatly from seeking ideas from people outside their organization—including those who work in other fields, says Jeff Leitner. The former advertising executive has started a charity to help organizations do just that.
Insight Labs, in Chicago, brings business executives, scholars, government officials, and others together with a charity’s leaders for a three-hour strategy session to thrash out possible solutions to a tough issue the group faces.
“If you take a roomful of people who aren’t directly invested in the solution, that don’t have a connection to either the problem or the solution, you get pretty…
November 15, 2011, 9:29 am
New Fund to Promote Innovation in Philanthropy
The Alliance for Global Good, a grant-making organization in Greensboro, N.C., is starting a fund to promote innovation in philanthropy. While the exact size of the fund hasn’t been decided, organization officials say it is likely to be in the $10-million range.
The alliance hopes that the fund will draw attention to charities that have found new approaches to tough problems and provide money to help them expand their work, says David M. Brand, the organization’s chief executive.
“There are so many great ideas out there,” he says. “How can you get them front and center?”
The alliance will announce the new fund Tuesday at the Inaugural Bipartisan Congressional Conference on Innovation in Giving and Philanthropy, which will feature discussions about social entrepreneurship and the role of technology in philanthropy, as well as a speech by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg…
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