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About Mighty Be Our Powers

As a young woman, Leymah Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. Years of fighting destroyed her country — and shattered Gbowee’s girlhood hopes and dreams. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action, propelled by her realization that it is women who suffer most during conflicts — and that the power of women working together can create an unstoppable force. In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia ’s ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace — in the process emerging as an international leader who changed history. Mighty Be Our Powers is the gripping chronicle of a journey from hopelessness to empowerment that will touch all who dream of a better world.

By Sadna Samaranayake

Image via Next Billion

We’ve all had those moments we call coming “full circle.” Distinctly different from landing “back at square one,” coming full circle implies we’ve arrived back at the beginning of a journey, or back to an old insight, with the benefit of maturity and wisdom. This year’s Columbia Social Enterprise Conference, on the topic of Social Innovation in a Networked World left me almost certain that the social entrepreneurship movement is currently witnessing such a full circle moment on several fronts, most notably, when it comes to our collective understanding of what a “networked world” means. I expected an agenda stacked to illustrate the potential of technological innovations in social entrepreneurship and the promise of social media. What I witnessed instead was a collective ease with revisiting “old-school” concepts of “the network” — the power of human capital and the value of harnessing personal connection and social networks in the most interpersonal sense.

This year, Columbia Business School convened social entrepreneurs, impact investors, students, and one newly minted Nobel Laureate, named that very morning — Leymah Gbowee of Liberia. Her grit and leadership, memorialized in the 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, is credited as the driving force behind the mass uprising of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest of Liberia’s then president Charles Taylor and his ruthless warlords, who were eventually ousted.

We heard from Nancy Barry, formerly the president of Women’s World Banking, and now President of NBA Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, Matt Klein, executive director of Blue Ridge Foundation, and Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, as well as academics, practitioners, and investors that spanned geographies and sectors. With synchronicity that could not have been designed, these speakers returned to themes that underscored that social entrepreneurship is growing up, and getting back to basics.

Social Networks, Back to the Beginning

Leymah Gbowee represents a rare success story in peace building, and peaceful protest. Perhaps the toughest permutation of social entrepreneurship there is, peace building has no dedicated investment funds, no revenue streams, no easy measures of successes, and often happens under the threat of violence.  It’s the kind of environment where one hopes technology can add something extra — a boost, a platform, some efficiencies in organizing and communicating, as has been the case in the Arab Spring.

Gbowee spoke about her organizing efforts in 2003, pre-FaceBook and Twitter, distinctly low-tech, yet highly networked, that tapped the energy of human networks, and created a people-to-people infrastructure that seeded revolutionary change.

“In a matter of months our movement had spread to nine of Liberia’s 15 counties — we’re talking hours away… those who had cell phones called. Where there were no cell phones, people went and used word of mouth. The churches were important, the mosques were important, the market areas were important. We would use those areas as a means of spreading our message.”

Given her success with grassroots organizing, we couldn’t help but wonder what Gbowee thought of the Occupy Wall Street movement. She responded:

“A key factor of the work that we did is that we had an agenda. If you are doing a protest, you need to have an agenda… The uprising is a good sign…but those who are protesting need to come together now and say ‘these are the reasons why we are occupying Wall Street.’ …There has to be some plan.”

The Power of Intentionality

The theme of intentionality, and a call to social entrepreneurs to constantly ask of themselves: “What is it that I am trying to accomplish here?” was resoundingly echoed at the conference. According to Klein of the Blue Ridge Foundation, in the evermore crowded space of social innovation, and in a time where digital time cycles are getting shorter and donors expect results and metrics to keep pace, intentionality is increasingly important.

“Without the intentionality of the hypothesis in the beginning, and some internal accountability to know whether your pilots, experiments or intuitions are correct, I think there is less of a tolerance for the view that because the work is motivated by good reasons, that it should continue. There is more of an expectation that yes, it might not work, but you have to know why it’s not working, and how you plan to change.”

Said Barry, “You cannot stop innovating and asking yourself, is this thing having the desired impact?” She added,  “I feel extremely strongly that big problems require big solutions. I see many social entrepreneurs hide behind poor management, poor leadership, poor systems, poor business models, poor executing plans, poor financing plans — to say we are still looking at impact. If you don’t have a model that works, get out of the business.”

More than just the compass check that every social entrepreneur should take on from time to time, to course correct for the impact they set out to achieve, the real “power of intentionality” is perhaps that it is the last-best-antidote to several ills of social entrepreneurship; being stuck in a series of small scale experiments (Pilot-itis), lack of clarity on what to measure and how to translate data into action (Paralysis through Analysis), and worst of all, the kind of large-scale departures from social value creation, in favor of financial returns that, left unchecked, can be a blight on entire industries — like the current controversies surrounding microfinance.

Failure

Perhaps the surest sign that conversations around social entrepreneurship are reaching a new stage of maturity was the willingness of participants, students and speakers alike to discuss the taboo “F” word in social entrepreneurship — Failure.

“We need to be more open about, and accepting of, and generous toward failure- because of the lessons that can come from it, but also in recognition of the challenges that Social Entrepreneurs are facing,” Klein advised. “People don’t talk about failure for a lot of reasons. It’s brutally painful. If we could talk about failure and lessons learned with generosity, it might give people more freedom to innovate and acknowledge where they have gone wrong and help those who are motivated and talented to adjust and iterate.”

The Long View of Social Entrepreneurship

Dorsey offered an observation on how she believes history will view social entrepreneurship. “We are evolving how we look at problems and we begin to believe that we can actually solve problems as opposed to just ameliorating the symptoms.” She posits the long view of the social entrepreneurship movement will tell a story of a shift in our collective consciousness towards understanding that the capacity to solve our problems is within our reach.

None of us know how the story of social entrepreneurship will ultimately be written, but if the comments and insights offered at this year’s Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference are any indication, we are having a more open dialogue, more nuanced, less taken with trends, technology, and other trappings, and more centered on individuals, intentionality, and impact.

By Elly S. Brown

Image via Next Billion

What is technology’s role in the social sector today and how does it advance philanthropy?

The 2011 Columbia Social Enterprise Conference session on “Bold New Ventures: Visionary Philanthropists and Impact Investing at the Cutting Edge” kicked off with thoughts from moderator Melissa Berman, president and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. Berman reflected on the i-generation spawned by Steve Jobs and the increasingly central role of technology in our daily lives, including philanthropy.

The session included various representatives from the funder and nonprofit community, including Doug Borchard, managing partner and COO of New Profit, Mike O’Brien, CEO of iMentor, and Bonnie Oliva, director of InVenture Foundation.

The two social entrepreneurs, O’Brien and Oliva both decided at the genesis of their respective organizations to center their services on the deployment of technology to advance social impact. Through its online platform, iMentor created a successful mentoring model without sacrificing the quality of relationships. Under this model, mentors meet with mentees once a week and conduct a majority of their interactions online. The flexibility and the ease of access lowered barriers for potential mentors and significantly increased the participation rates compared to more traditional mentoring programs. iMentor became a national model and now partners with 24 organizations to replicate this model through sharing knowledge online and providing capacity building support.

InVenture Foundation, a hybrid social enterprise, provides capital, guidance, and financial tracking needed to empower microbusiness owners in lifting themselves and their communities out of poverty. The micro-entrepreneurs, selected through a strict due diligence process, create an online profile and seek investments through the technology platform. After the investments bear fruit, the investors of the micro-entrepreneurs are paid back their principle and can choose to reinvest the profits of their investments, Social Enterprise Expansion Dollars (SEED), into other potential investments.

Borchard also described the case of Single Stop USA, a Pathways Fund grantee, to illustrate a powerful application of technology in supporting an organization’s outcomes. Single Stop USA is an organization that helps community college students stay in school and complete their degrees. Recognizing the financial barriers that many students face in completing post-secondary education, Single Stop USA developed a “Turbo Tax-like” online technology that allows students to identify eligible state and local financial benefits.

For all three organizations, technology overcomes access issues and enables the successful matching of resources to their target beneficiaries. It also serves as a convenient tool to track interactions and the performance of their programs.

A theme emphasized throughout the panel was the importance of incorporating the human experience into the technology, a concept that Apples’ Jobs fully embraced. In a March speech introducing the iPad2 (more details from a recent Economist article), Jobs outlined this aspiration: “Technology alone is not enough… It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” Societal impact cannot be created by technology alone. Technology is an enabler; it addresses solutions for accessibility, scalability, and efficiency. O’Brien referenced this idea when speaking to the brilliance of technology’s ability to solve problems but limitations when relying on technology alone. For example, when incorporating a new technology into a school, O’Brien emphasized, “it will not work if you don’t have emphasis on teacher training and implementing that solution into how the school functions.” Deploying technology without analyzing its effects on people and processes will be set up for failure.

Despite several examples of success highlighted in the panel discussion, the social sector has yet to unlock the potential of technology and its ability to increase donor activity in a formalized matter. According to Borchard, some organizations such as Donors Choose, Kiva, Global Giving, and InVenture Foundation, are leading this effort and learning what works. Particularly when engaging with individuals, donors and investors are seeking transparency around how their specific contribution has been invested. This highly granular approach in tying donations to specific investments creates a tangible connection for donors.  For example, Donors Choose may identify a $600 contribution as earmarked to set up an ecology program in a particular school. Although best practices are emerging with some examples of successful applications, we are still years behind an effective social media model that transforms the way organizations find funding.

Posing a question to the panel, O’Brien seemed to underscore the panel’s outlook on technology and philanthropy: “Instead of a bricks and mortar replication model, can we use a combination of technology and consulting to partner with other organizations to do something that is more collaborative?” The key challenge facing technology in the social sector is enabling and incentivizing organizations to share best practices, collaborate, and further the field.  Jobs’ successful recipe of cutting edge technology coupled with a dose of humanity might just be the winning combination to “make our hearts sing” in the social sector as well.

Columbia Business School successfully hosted the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference last Friday, where a record number of enlightened attendees witnessed a unique lineup of keynote speakers and breakout sessions focused on supporting innovation, promoting sustainability, advancing technology, and building communities. One session particularly looked at supplying social innovators with the skills needed to create new business models to capture social, economic, and environmental value. In Designing a Better Social Enterprise, Drew Boyd, executive director of the MS-Marketing Program and assistant professor of Marketing and Innovation at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, shared how to use an effective, repeatable, and trainable innovation process for designing social enterprises and bringing systematic inventive thinking to the social enterprise space.

Key takeaways from Professor Boyd’s session (download slides here) include:

• Creating a social enterprise is more daunting than creating a nonprofit or a for-profit firm. The hurdle is higher. Earning money in a capitalistic way with a mechanism that also generates social benefits takes special skills. Social enterprises need systematic innovation even more than the others.
• Innovation has a tainted image thanks to many myths such as “outside-the-box” thinking. Social enterprises need to embrace methods with documented results. Check the data!
• One such method is Systematic Inventive Thinking. For thousands of years, innovators have been using five simple patterns in their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are coded into products and services like DNA that can be extracted and reapplied to other products and services. Professor Jacob Goldenberg identified these patterns in his research: Subtraction, Task Unification, Multiplication, Attribute Dependency, and Division. You can use these to create new Social Enterprise models.
• Learning how to innovate means retraining your brain to work in a new way. Good innovators are two-way innovators. They can flex between PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION and SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM creative thinking. The key is to activate what humans already do well: going from the configuration to the market benefit. It is called Function Follows Form.
• Social and nonprofit enterprises need to build competencies around innovation just as multinationals do. Innovation starts at the bottom, not at the top. It is a skill, not a gift. Train it at the grassroots level, and work its way up the organization. Keep the CEO out of it!
• Creativity methods based on wildly divergent thinking where participants must “defer judgment” tend to inhibit ideas, not promote them as previously thought. Better approaches use small teams, usually pairs or triads, to apply structured approaches.
• Organizations without resources will not have the same market impact as organizations with resources. Small firms need a vital pipeline of new ideas and the ongoing ability to keep it full if they want a higher share of philanthropic support.
• Involve your constituents in innovation workshops. Invite diverse, multi-disciplined teams. Make sure the participants are motivated and committed.

Leymah Gbowee, founder and executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa, was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. As her first public speaking event as a Nobel Laureate, she delivered the keynote address, in conversation with Harold Evans, editor at large at Thomson Reuters, at last Friday’s Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference. See video of the talk, as she discussed her incredible experience leading a grassroots women’s movement to end the 14-year civil war in Liberia.

By Grant Tudor

Image via Next Billion

Last January, The Economist ran a piece on mobile technology in developing countries. The article, of course, wasn’t the first to conclude that “clever services on cheap phones make a powerful combination.” And it certainly won’t be the last to opine about the mobile-driven transformation of development.

But it did profile a few radical innovators capitalizing on the rapid and broad-based distribution of mobile technology. As a preview to tomorrow’s Social Enterprise Conference, I had the pleasure of speaking with one such innovator: Nathan Eagle, co-founder and CEO of Jana (formerly called txteagle), who will be leading a session on Reaching the Next Billion Consumers Through Mobile Phones.

Currently generating revenue in more than 50 countries, Jana (Sanskrit for “people”) enables global organizations to directly engage with BoP consumers through mobile phones. In exchange for free airtime, Jana incentives 2.1 billion emerging market consumers to fill out surveys and purchase products. In other words, it enables organizations to understand next billion consumers — and then engage them.

Take, Eagle explained, a hypothetical laundry detergent brand. Say it wants to know more about rural Bolivian women: what detergent they currently use, where they buy it, when they buy it — the basket of market intelligence that underpins successful marketing. Through its proprietary technology, Jana gathers data by distributing free airtime to rural Bolivian women who in turn answer survey questions on their phone.

With the new data in hand, Jana’s marketing team can turn market intelligence into something actionable: informed marketing that effectively targets rural Bolivian women. For example, deploying an additional incentive — say, printing a unique ID on the inside of the detergent pack that offers “50 cents off your next purchase of Brand X” — initiates the process of building a relationship between a global brand and a low-income customer, often for the first time.

As Eagle expounded, the implications for marketing to the BoP are anything but negligible. “If you want information on women from Kansas, there’s a ton of data out there. But there’s a total dearth of data in emerging markets. Mobile changes that.” Typically, brands learn about and speak to a small fraction of consumers at the top of the pyramid in emerging markets — through traditional research methodologies and usual communication channels. “But what if suddenly, global brands took just 25 percent of their ad budgets and redirected them from billboards directly into people’s pockets?”

The release of the newest iPhone stole headlines this week. But as Eagle cautioned, it’s very easy to get caught up with the great new specs of the latest technology. It’s not next generation technology that’s driving the mobile transformation of development, but rather the less glamorous phenomenon of very low price points. The accessibility of mobile phones today — from US $15 to $35 for a ‘grey market handset’ — “is the game-changing component behind the fastest growing technology adoption in human history.” It’s Jana’s proposition that those who capitalize on this already-existing and increasingly ubiquitous technology will successfully engage the next billion.

(Remember, if you’re joining us at the conference, be sure to check out Nathan Eagle’s session on Reaching the Next Billion Consumers Through Mobile Phones for more!)

By Luke Justice ’12

Image via The Huffington Post

One of the most significant legacies of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed under George W. Bush in 2001, is its impact on the way we use data to measure the performance of our educational system. While NCLB’s accountability measures where focused on school-level performance, 10 years later we are starting to develop teacher performance evaluations that, for the first time, incorporate student testing.

In 2009, The New Teacher Project published a now widely read survey of teacher evaluation systems across the country, titled The Widget Effect, and found that most systems were an extremely limiting and binary ranking of “satisfactory/unsatisfactory,” and that almost all (98 percent) teachers were annually ranked “satisfactory.” Even if there were a more accurate scoring in that old system, it would still tell us virtually nothing substantive about an individual teacher’s performance. Ten years after the passage of NCLB, some large urban districts are now developing systems that include the use of hard data in an attempt to paint a rich portrait of a teacher’s performance.

New York City is piloting a teacher evaluation system that uses a mix of student test scores and more qualitative measures, such as peer observations. Most of the focus on using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance has been on so-called “value-add” measurements that attempt to demonstrate the level of improvement students make under a particular teacher.

So far, the data seem to have been rather unreliable for the majority of teachers and more consistent at the extremes. That is, year-to-year, the value-add scores of exceptional — and exceptionally bad — teachers tend to persist, while those in the middle 80 percent jump around. Opponents of using student scores to rate teachers have latched onto this unreliability, while supporters note that the value-add measurements make up only one piece of the larger evaluation and are important data to have, especially if you are trying to identify the best teachers for recognition and the worst for improvement, if not removal.

Another significant drawback to value-add measurements is their limited application to a few grades and subjects. More complex material, such as essay-writing, can’t currently be captured by standardized tests. But the use of hard data to pin down an objective measure of student progress and thereby teacher performance may be just the first step in a larger cultural shift toward a more rigorous and integrated evaluation of both student and teacher. As The Widget Effect highlights, even districts with evaluation systems that have wider spectrums for ranking teachers suffer from a compliance mindset. That is, the most well crafted performance evaluations are useless if they are not applied with rigor and a genuine desire to understand one’s effectiveness.

As the culture around evaluations shifts, however, we are more apt to find methods for evaluating teacher performance that act as reliable predictors of student achievement in lieu of hard, standardized data on student outcomes. As but one example, Cincinnati has begun using rigorous teacher observations as part of its overall Teacher Evaluation System (TES). Researchers have found that the scores of these observations predict student achievement gains for subjects than can be accurately tested (e.g. reading and math), thus concluding that such observations can capture a significant portion of measurable differences in teacher effectiveness in harder to test subjects and grades.

It seems then that while data are directly relevant for understanding student achievement and teacher performance, the larger value of a focus on the numbers lay in the impetus it provided for a deeper cultural shift that seeks to develop an understanding of teacher effectiveness at all levels.

Continue the conversation at Friday’s Social Enterprise Conference session, Replicating Models of Success: Scaling Innovation in the Education Sector. Read a research report on Measuring and Creating Excellence in Schools.

By Elly S. Brown

Image via Next Billion

“You, as the asset holder, have to challenge the status quo and provide the leadership necessary to co-create the world you want to see. It is that simple,” Lisa Kleissner, co-founder of KL Felicitas Foundation.

After successful careers in Silicon Valley, Charly and Lisa Kleissner founded KL Felicitas Foundation in 2000 with a vision to scale social innovation through impact investing. The foundation supports social enterprises everywhere along the spectrum from the seed stage to startups that are rapidly expanding. Led by visionary social entrepreneurs, these companies are addressing some of the most challenging issues in society including climate change and environmental destruction.

Along with capacity building assistance, KL Felicitas Foundation offers a wide range of investment vehicles including grants, social loans, loan guarantees and private equity. The foundation has committed to allocate 92 percent of its portfolio to impact investing vehicles by 2013. Placing a strong emphasis on knowledge-sharing and partnerships, Charly and Lisa are committed to building the field of impact investing. Along with Morgan Simon and Sean Foote, they co-founded Toniic, a global network of impact investors. Complementing GIIN, the industry-wide standards and frameworks for impact investing, Toniic provides a forum for members to learn how to be effective impact investors and to aggregate capital for investing (Click here for past NextBillion coverage on GIIN and TONIIC).

You can meet Charly and Lisa Kleissner from KL Felicitas Foundation and learn more about impact investing at the Columbia Social Enterprise Conference session titled “Impact Investors Spreading Social Innovation” on Friday October 7th between 9:45 a.m. and 10:45 a.m.

By Kimberly Parker

After 14 years of civil war in Liberia, Leymah Gbowee and the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women, barricaded the exit to stalled peace talks in Ghana and demanded a resolution. When Gbowee was threatened, she threatened back and began to take off her clothes to shame and curse the men who tried to intimidate her. Two weeks later, a peace treaty was signed.

We define revolutions in moments, but years of work, pain, and anger bring us to those moments. It was anger that guided Gbowee, and she knew she could use her anger for either good or bad. “You get angry, and you decide to put it into two containers — the good or the bad container… Those who decide to fight for peace…they were angry too, but they decided to put it in a good container,” she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Gbowee, executive director and founder of the Women Peace and Security Network – Africa (WIPSEN-Africa), is one of the keynote speakers at this week’s Social Enterprise Conference and the subject of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a film being screened on October 6. She is a Liberian and African peace activist, a social worker, the reluctant subject of a documentary, author of the recently published memoir: Mighty be our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, and a mother of six.

On September 20, Gbowee spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative and is in the middle of an eight-city book tour, which is being financed from the personal funds of Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes and Noble. On October 7, she may also receive of the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the recent buzz over the Arab Spring.

After all of the accolades and numerous awards Gbowee has received, another defining moment in her life and career is approaching. On October 11, 2011 Liberia will hold its second free presidential elections since the end of the Civil War and the 2003 ousting of Dictator Charles Taylor. Gbowee has created a coalition of women from nine West African countries to monitor the elections. It is imperative that the elections are fair and peaceful in order to maintain the peace in Liberia for which Gbowee and so many others have fought so hard.

Leymah Gbowee was only 17 when the first civil war in Liberia started in 1989, 22 years ago. She has been fighting for peace almost as long, and will continue to fight, because it is a lifetime of work and dedication that brings us to those defining moments.

By Kimberly Parker

Image via Nonprofit Jobs

Social enterprises apply business principles to social causes, and new and exciting technologies have helped them to work smarter. Technology being created in Silicon Valley is being used for the greater good and becoming an essential part of any strategic plan that aims to make a difference.

Mobile technology — with its accessibility and endless potential  — is at the core of many new social enterprises, such as mPedigree and txteagle, which are serving populations that are often hard to reach. mPedigree President Bright Simons was a panelist at the 2010 Social Enterprise Conference, where he discussed the dangers of counterfeit drugs in places like Ghana and Nigeria, and how mPedigree is using texting to verify the authenticity of pharmaceutical drugs in the third world. At the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference, Nathan Eagle of txteagle will discuss the potential of mobile technology for economic development in the third world and explain how txteagle taps into the consumer potential of the base of the pyramid.

Nonprofits are also harnessing the power of technology, such as Remás, which uses mobile and web technology to improve the financial options of immigrants in the United States, and Benetech, which develops technology to serve social problems.

Even if technology may not be at the core of their mission, it is especially essential for nonprofits, which often encounter a lack of resources and a lack of staff. TechSoup Global is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits obtain and utilize technology, and Susan Tenby of TechSoup will discuss at this year’s conference how social enterprises are using multi-platform engagement channels for constituency development and to increase revenue. There is a network of organizations that also strive to connect nonprofits to technology — such as NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) and NPower — in order to streamline processes, bring down costs, and improve outreach and effectiveness.

In an increasingly networked world, technology connects us to each other — and to what matters to us. TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good) uses crowdsourcing to choose and support social projects. Facebook is playing an important part in the way we live our lives and in movements such as the Arab Spring, even if Mark Zuckerberg downplays the relationship. Other social networks, like Chris Hughes’ Jumo and Ami Dar’s Idealist.org, are specifically designed to connect people around their ideals. Online tools such as Causes, harness the power of the internet to fundraise for social causes. We live so much of our lives online it not only makes sense, but is imperative, that we use these tools in our efforts to make the world a better place.