A Good POV | "A Starbucks Moment for Nonprofits?"

In April I wrote and raved about Robert Egger of the DC Central Kitchen, as a social entrepreneur with a vital point of view. Egger just dropped some knowledge and insight about this pivotal, transitional moment in the nonprofit trajectory:

This is where the company [Starbucks] made a brilliant set of decisions that created a model which, if modified, could offer the nonprofit sector a business example which might prove critical to its future economic growth and social vitality.

The full post is a thoughtful and fluid read, and highlights an enthusiastic and hopeful perspective on the opportunities of these turbulent times:

This could be a great moment for the nonprofit sector. If we can see this era of economic duress as an opportunity to attract new employees that can help us sell a new approach to creating a civil society, then this may be the year we finally move from selling the metaphoric empty calories of fast food, to a healthy, whole lifestyle where commerce and justice share equal seats at the table.

Click here for the full post.

Poop-to-Power: "European Farmers Turn to Biogas Plants"

My dear friend Matthew Dalton reports for The Wall Street Journal from Europe:

BERGHAREN, the Netherlands -- European governments are quietly transforming the practice of turning manure into energy from a fringe technology into a tool for both slashing greenhouse gases from farms and boosting domestic energy supplies.

Plants that convert manure, corn, grass or organic waste into electricity were historically built by just a few environmentally conscious farmers. But the European Union now counts about 8,000 so-called biogas plants, and -- fueled by rising subsidies -- thousands more are expected to be built over the next decade. Farmers are building plants to make a profit, not to protect the environment, and orders are rising at companies that provide the technology.

Click here for the full article. Thanks, Matt.

"Everything Is Amazing, Nobody Is Happy"

I had the pleasure of attending the Influx Curated conference on Thursday up at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The forward-thinking branding outfit Influx Insights hosted the event in which 30 speakers came to speak on a range of topics for five minutes each. It was, in the post-coital words of the host, quite the "over-stimulus fest" and just the ticket for a blitz of inspiring ideas around branding, crowd participation, doing 'good', and the necessity and ubiquity of hope.

It started (with hindsight, pretty brilliantly and appropriately) with a viewing of a clip of comedian Lewis C.K. on Conan O'Brien, on how the technological advances in our generation are nothing short of miraculous, and yet everyone seems miserable. Take five minutes to watch the clip. It's hilarious, and it puts some amazing perspective on our modern American life.

As I said, the topics and speakers were a motley bunch: from magazines like GOOD and Wired to brands doing 'good' like Mozilla (Firefox) and Method. Our host Ed Cotton just posted Ten Themes Coming Out of Influx Curated which tells the tale nicely and drives home the requirements for making better brands and a more progressive business culture:

1. Stand for something
If you are fighting for an idea or trying to build a new business, have a point of view and stick to it.

2. Get Out of Your Shell
Everyone has the power within themselves to do something great and to think creatively and imaginatively, it's just that most of us don't. We need to find ways to come out of our shells.

3. Hope is Everywhere, You Just Have to Look
Listen, look and learn and you will find hope and inspiration

4. The Crowd Has Power
Power to create, power to dictate and the power to change

5. The Crowd Needs Motivation
There has to be a leader that has something to spark the imagination of the crowd

6. Story is King
Look hard for them, create them, tell them, share them

7. Be an Optimist
Happy people make ideas good

8. Be a Pessimist
Amazing things can come from dark places

9. The World Needs Ideas
There are huge problems everywhere and we have the potential to solve many of them from the ground up.

10. More Corporations/Creatives Should Be Good
What's the problem with doing good, does it cost too much?

One insight that came through out of this day of conversation concerns the definition of 'inspiration' and verges on the esoteric.

Inspiration seems to be dependent on the thing observed: something inspiring happens and so a person bearing witness to it feels inspired, and thus, inspiration is born. You watch Kobe Bryant pull off some ridonkulously artful move, and you are inspired.

But there's a different kind of inspiration centered not in an event, person, or object, but rather, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. In this way, inspiration is a way of seeing, and so, everything can be inspiring, even the most mundane of happenings.

Therefore, if you can change someone's quality of perception, say, around an issue or concern, the inspiration that is built in that change is long-term, sustainable, maybe even world-changing. Create something - a brand, an image, a piece of art, a movement - create anything that makes that kind of inspiration... and anything is possible.

Kiva Brings Its Game-Changing Loan Program to the US

Kiva has been a growing international microlending phenomenon for a while now, connecting a vast network of unique entrepreneurs who use tiny amounts of loaned funds to build out their businesses and raise themselves sustainably out of poverty.

Today, Kiva announced that they are now including U.S.-based entrepreneurs in the network:

Today Kiva got a little closer to its mission of connecting people around the world for the sake of alleviating poverty. Starting today, lenders can make loans to microentrepreneurs in the US.

When Kiva first started, it focused on lending to entrepreneurs in Africa. In the last 4 years we have expanded to many more regions around the world, focusing in developing nations. However, our desire has always been to be a truly global organization, and to allow individuals anywhere in the world to make loans anywhere else in the world. Kiva believes that poverty exists in many forms throughout the world and that we can play a part in helping alleviate that poverty by allowing people to lend through our website.

Therefore, to be a truly global organization, Kiva is expanding into microfinance markets in the developed world. Since over 70% of our lenders are currently from North America, the United States was a natural first choice. We know there is much more to be done to fully achieve our mission of connecting people throughout the world, but we are very excited about this first step. We look forward to the day when money is flowing in all directions around the world through Kiva: a Guatemalan woman making a loan to an entrepreneur in Detroit, a man in Uganda making a loan to an entrepreneur in Rwanda, and an Italian lending to a Filipino farmer. We are excited about these possibilities and look forward to seeing them become a reality.

The 'Level' | Furniture Gets Its Own LEED-like Certification

From the Environmental Leader:

Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) International, the trade association for the commercial furniture industry, has launched its “level” product certification program. The sustainability standard takes into account material use, energy and atmosphere impacts, human and ecosystem health and social responsibility.

I'd love to see some metrics on the impact of this type of certification on an industry's output. I'm sure it helps raise the sustainability bar, but how much? what are the barriers to compliance? Anyone with some additional knowledge, please drop it.

This Just In: Yunus Calls for Social Stock Market

A friendly reader forwarded me this bit of Yunus news after reading my post earlier today about the Grameen Bank Family of Companies. In a lecture (full transcript here) to mark the British Council's 75th anniversary in London, Yunus called for "a social business fund and social stock market to ensure social enterprise is at the heart of a recovering economy":

The Nobel Laureate also called for banks to create a more inclusive financial system that benefitted everyone not just the ‘privileged', as part of his lecture to mark the British Council's 75th anniversary in London on Friday, chaired by Lord Neil Kinnock.

‘2009 is a good year to ask the same question again: who is credit-worthy? Is it the large banks with large clients? They are collapsing, going bankrupt, whereas the poor people taking tiny loans, without collateral, are paying every penny of it and changing their lives,' he said.

‘Definitely, one lesson we have learned is that it cannot remain the exclusive club of privileged people. Banking should be an inclusive system, not an exclusive system. Almost two-thirds of the world's population do not qualify to receive the services of conventional banks.'

Thanks for sharing, Robert.

India Has Really, Really, Really Big Plans for Solar

Over the weekend, Worldchanging reported on a leaked Indian Government national solar energy plan that is - to say the very least - big and ballsy.

The draft strategy "outlines plans for a national target of 200,000 megawatts of solar generation capacity by 2050. This is 1.3 times India's current installed power generation capacity of 150,000 megawatts across all energy sectors."

After years of hearing other regions' alternative energy plans that sound like paltry salt-shakers compared to this - i.e., 5% of energy use from alternative sources - this is a Tim-Taylor-bit-of-bravado that makes me smile. Is it actually possible, though?

Given India's "2.97 million square kilometers of tropical and subtropical land and an average of 250-300 clear sunny days a year," there's every reason to believe that a shift to a new model of energy production might be scalable.

And here's where the real green comes in:

Crucially, however, once the high upfront investment costs have been circumnavigated, the shift to renewables would actually be cost positive, the reports conclude. "The fuel savings up to 2030 would amount to $2,170 billion, seven times more than the additional investment costs," said Sven Teske, an author of Energy [R]evolution. "Over 30 years, India would make money."

Needless to say, this ambitious plan would put the current solar power leading nations into the back seat to say the least.

Putting the 'Family' Back in Multinational | Grameen

The man won a Nobel Peace Prize three years ago, so I can guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks Muhammad Yunus is the bee's knees of social change. (Check here for an old post I wrote about him.)

As part of GOOD Magazine's excellent Transparency series, they've just put out the above infographic:

Founded in 1983 by Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank (Grameen is Bangledeshi for “village”) provides small loans to rural borrowers in Bangladesh. In the years since, the Bank has become so succesful (Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006),that a whole community of Grameen enterprises—known as the Grameen Bank Family of Companies—have sprung up around it. Some bring phone service to poor Bangledeshis, while others invest in technology startups. The whole range of companies is like a massive, multinational corporation, except this company’s goal is social change.

Click the image above to launch the larger version.

Building 'Climate Positive' Communities | Raising the Bar to 'Less Than Zero' Emissions

The NY Times Green Inc. reports today on the Climate Positive Development Program, a joint venture between the Clinton Climate Initiative and the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

The mission of the Program is to develop 16 large-scale urban communities on six continents "with enough energy-efficient bells and whistles that its on-site emissions are actually less than zero." The Program includes London's Development Agency's $2.4 billion Elephant & Castle regeneration program (pictured above), among others.

All sixteen are in very different stages of development but will share certain key characteristics, such as high densities, mixed use zoning and transit accessibility. [President and Founder of the U.S. Green Buildings Council] Mr. [Rick] Fedrizzi says they will also rely on state-of-the art energy efficiency building technology, such as super insulation, high performance glass and natural ventilation systems.

As the mainstreaming of sustainability concerns continues, we'll undoubtedly see more such raisings of the bars of what is considered "sustainable." One such bar-raising debate has already sprung up around certain industries "trying to expand the meaning of 'renewable energy'." Because of billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks available to those in the 'renewables' market, it's clear there's a "follow the money" fever going on here.

In some states, the definition of “renewable” or “alternative” has already expanded. In Pennsylvania, waste coal and methane from coal mines receive the same treatment as solar panels and wind turbines. In Nevada, old tires can count as a renewable fuel, provided microwaves are used to break down their chemical structure.

One of the main drawbacks of this growing elasticity of 'renewables' is that it defeats "the whole purpose of the renewable standard, [which is] to encourage the development of some of these newer technologies and bring the price down," says Jeff Bingaman, Democratic Senator of New Mexico and chairman of the Senate energy committee. If you add in the burning of garbage for energy, among dozens of other such waste-to-energy initiatives, the numbers and the issue gets complicated.

Complicated or not, we need all the help we can get right now. So while "climate positive" and cradle-to-cradle initiatives might be the cream of the proverbial sustainable crop, shouldn't we encourage the slightly less green upcycling of waste? It might pale in comparison to the former, but it certainly beats the horrifying standards set by industry up to now.

The Red Dragon Goes Green | Wales Zeroing Out Waste by 2050

Being part Welsh, this bit of news from Worldchanging makes me proud:

Wales today laid out radical plans to make it one of the most energy- and resource-efficient countries in the world within a generation.

The government development plans, which are legally binding, are far in advance of anything planned for England or Scotland and would see it become energy self-sufficient in using renewable electricity within 20 years and reduce waste to zero by 2050.

The proposals would make Wales one of only three countries in the world legally bound to develop "sustainably."

...

The plan commits Wales to becoming possibly the only "one planet" country in the world, ie a nation whose use of resources could be sustained for the entire global population.

Maybe it's time to check out the Welsh family roots a bit - beginning with ... WTF?! what a cool flag!

Top Photo: North Wales Molly258

"How Did You Pray Before Someone Told You Who Your God Should Be?"

File this under ... "You Know The Times Have Changed When...."

Just watched this phenomenal, hair-raising bit of spoken word courtesy of... the White House. Picture that happening under POTUS 43.

Mayda del Valle performing the spoken word at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009:


Click here for video.

You Are Brilliant, and The Earth Is Hiring

If you've read Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest, you know that there is no other writer/activist in our time with quite the macro- and uber-optimistic-perspective on the challenge of our times.

I just stumbled upon this brilliant commencement address he gave to the Class of 2009 at University of Portland on May 3, 2009.

If I could distill this speech into liquid form I would get drunk on it every day of the week. Period. So without further ado, in its entirety (click the "Click Here to Read On" nub):

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful." Boy, no pressure there.

But let's begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.



This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, and don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food, but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn't afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data.

But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description.

Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force.

It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisher-folk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider.

"One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself.

The founders of this movement were largely unknown - Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood - and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty.

But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy.

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body?

Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party.

Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence.

Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

...Click Here to Read On

Social Enterprise is an Old Sonofabitch

Social enterprise might be a big, hot buzzword these days (at least on my radar), but it pays to note that "social enterprise" as a concept ain't all that new. It's almost as old as Sookie's Bill Compton, in fact.

Thanks to Uncivil Society for unearthing this tidbit (see image excerpt below), proving the existence of social enterprise as a working paradigm for the scientific philanthropy movement of the nineteenth century. It's a rich part of the fabric of American ingenuity and has been for generations.

Of course, that's obvious, right? Doing good while doing well must be an age-old concept. In fact, maybe it's the corporate greed, corruption and all-profits-at-any-cost style of Business that's the newbie on the block, relatively speaking....

One Minute Well Spent | Support the Summit in Copenhagen

In December world leaders will get together at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen to decide how the world tackles climate change and global warming for decades to come. In the words of Oxfam's Campaigns Director, Thomas Schultz-Jagow, this conference is "the most important meeting mankind has ever had."

Here's a video to get the message out. Please pass it along, embed it, tweet it, digg it, all those good things.



Join the global movement for action on climate change, and support the summit in Copenhagen this December at: www.oxfam.org.uk/climateaction

Written/Directed By Gio Messner; Starring: Luke Frydenger

Food, Inc.

In theaters June 12th, 2009, a new documentary about the food industrial complex and what everyday consumers can do (if they wanted) to demand more nutritious, sustainable food:

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. Food, Inc. reveals surprising — and often shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Watch the trailer (and more) here.