This...

...says a lot about what's wrong with modern "news". This, from the people who brought you the "terrorist fist jab" comment (for the record, it's called a "dap"). Glib, offensive, distortive, completely beside the point, and racist. As a woman, I think it's ridiculous. As a person of moderate intelligence, I think it's insulting (did they think my attention wouldn't be caught if they had simply headlined it "Obama tells press: 'Lay off my wife'"?). As someone who cares about race in America, I think we ought to be more pissed off, and more worried, about stunts like this one. Here's why I am pissed off:

1. As a society we are allowing news outlets to treat us like idiots who will only respond to the most base, inflammatory, or ridiculous headlines and stories. And over time, if we let them, these very stories will fill the airwaves and newspapers and internet sites, and will crowd out anything with complexity and fine-grained subtleties and respectfulness, and slowly, slowly, we will become dumber and less able to see or care about that complexity - a self-fulfilling cycle.

2. This is racist, racist, racist, in that nasty 21st century way that winks at you and says, "We're not racist, it's just a cultural reference, don't be so sensitive!" And when you point out that it's racist, it says "We weren't being racits - you must be racist for thinking it's racist". This has no place on television, where we and our children can see it, and where our neighbors around the world can see it and shake their heads at our "race problem". It has no place in our conversations about who will lead our country, nor about the spouses of the contenders for that job. It should be condemned and it should make us feel disgusted. I do not subscribe to rampant political correctness. This is not that. I draw a line at insidious, faux-playful racism that does nothing but reinforce ugly stereotypes under the guise of humor and catchy headlines.

Not that they give a damn, but you can email them to complain at americasnewsroom@foxnews.com.

what do you mean, where's the need?

I recently applied for a small amount of funding to support the website I'm building to support adult children who are in turn supporting their aging parents. The point of the site is to recognize and respond to the changing paradigm of aging in the West - no longer are adult children able to look after and support their parents 10, 20, 30 or more hours a week. They can't - they live far away, or they have careers (especially women, which is a big change to a generation ago), or they are raising children at the same time. Or maybe it's all three. They have totally different needs than those well-known "caregivers" for whom caregiving is a significant portion of their day or week. They need information fast. They need it at a distance. They need to be educated on how to even play their role, because they don't know - remember that each person is going through this for the first time. They tell me, often and with resignation, that the existing sources of information and support out there don't make any sense to them. They're fragmented and aimed at that previous generation of caregivers, and "they don't tell me how to solve this specific problem, now, from 500 miles away."

The funder came back with a single, pointed question: How do you know there is a need for this? My slightly bewildered answer was that there are no demographic studies out there about these people. There is no market research about their role in their parents' lives. In the UK, the most recent Census had a tick-box to self-identify as a "carer" (the UK term for what Americans call "caregiver"), but the people I talk to do not think of themselves as "carers", so they wouldn't appear there. The best studies out there on informal care for older people focus on government definitions of "carers"/"caregivers" - 15 or 20 hours per week or more.

My point, which I tried hard to make, was that the whole problem is that nobody is seeing these people as a group with definable needs. Yet they exist, they exist, THEY EXIST. I swear it, and if you ask someone who fits that description they will swear it (possibly in both senses of the word "swear") too.

And they have their own needs. And they make lots of big and small purchasing and life decisions for and with their parents. And they, not the traditional model of caregiving, are the fastest growing group of people who are supporting elderly people in the US and the UK. Do I have hard numbers to back this up? Heck no. But you do the triangulation: Society is aging = more elderly people. People are living longer = more elderly people. Numbers of adult children co-habitating or living less than 1 hour's drive from their elderly people are dropping = fewer steady caregivers for older people. That widening gap between those two factors of demand for informal care (the old folks) and supply of informal care (the adult children) is an entire group of people. They haven't washed their hands of their parents, they are just trying to support and manage from a distance, and while doing a million other things.

Spouses fill some of this need, especially as male mortality improves (leaving fewer female widows), but divorce rates negate some of that, so spouses are not going to fill nearly all of it.

I feel like I'm spending half of my time talking to people, pointing to something large and obvious directly in my field of vision, and their response is usually, "Oh, yeah, I guess I see what you're talking about". But I am not sure that they do. To me, this group has two things tattooed on its collective forehead:

1. NEED
2. OPPORTUNITY

Of course this is essentially the same thing. But I am not just talking about market opportunity. There is a real opportunity here to bring people together around a common experience, and to help them be the best they can at a role they very much want to be good at - supporting their parents in the final quarter of those parents' lives. By bringing them together we not only benefit from collective wisdom, so people don't have to start from scratch every time a parent is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or left bereaved and isolated at home - we also bring together a group of savvy, smart, and motivated people who are not going to accept the bare minimum for their parents, or for themselves in 20 or 30 years' time. The advocacy and political potential of such a group is great, too.

So, if you have an opinion or insight on this, or if you're one of these people I've described, shoot me an email at jessica AT jessicashortall.com.

Thanks

JS. London.

Time to change the tone

It's exciting - and frustrating - and scary - to find and talk to people whose parents are old. Exciting because they have so much to say, and they naturally identify gaps in what's available to make their jobs easier. These are a new generation of adult children of older people - they are internet savvy, professional, used to advocating for their own health care and rights, busy, and very, very, very, very (did I mention very?) pragmatic.

It's frustrating because they all talk about the same needs and yet no one is meeting them. They want real information that clearly understands their issues and problems. They want it to be intuitive and easy for them to use, but also reliable and very trustworthy. This is their parents we're talking about after all - they are not going to just go with whatever fly by night dog and pony show they come across on Geocities.

Scary, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to try to do something, which is always scary. A friend said to me recently, "You sure like to bite off big mouthfuls." Fair enough. I get it. I am exploring a field that is crowded (albeit with, in my opinion, for this group of users, content and offerings that don't "get" them), highly attractive to big players with lots of resources, and fraught with emotion, l

There is so much out there about "caring" (if you're from the UK) and "caregiving" (if you're a Yankee like me), but the tone (not to mention the content) just doesn't work for the people I am talking to. People don't want hugs and pictures of smiling older people. They don't want hearts and logos of a stylized group of people holding hands. They don't want advice about how they should look after themselves, too, and plan ahead, and make lists, and try not to feel guilty. The way they really feel goes something like this:

1. Of course I feel guilty. Why is this even worth talking about?
2. Why would I want to belong to a caregiver support group to continue talking about something that already takes up so much time? When I am not caring for my aging parent, I would like to be
1. Doing my job
2. Taking care of my kids
3. Actually participating in my marriage
4. Drinking wine with friends
   
3. Telling me to find local sources of support for my parent is the most useless advice in the world. I don't even know what questions I should be asking. I have never in my life dealt with social services, so why should I know how to do that now? If I am looking for someone to check in on my Dad, should I be asking social services, the agency on aging, a local charity, a paid helper...?
4. I bloody well know my parent is declining. I don't really need help with seeing that. What I need is specific answers to my specific questions, about my specific situation.
   

Yet the way information and support is structured for these guys goes like this:

1. You probably feel guilty. Let's talk about that.
2. You should join a support group.
3. If your parent lives far away from you, make sure you do the following:
1. Find local sources of support
4. Watch for the following signs you parent is declining...

The gap between these two is amazing. It's as if nobody has asked the question: What is it that would be helpful to you?

I'm trying to ask the question now. If you have an answer, let me know.
JS.

SI Camp, rebellion, and Web0.0

Had a fantastic weekend at www.sicamp.org - basic concept was to throw a bunch of geeks and aspiring social entrepreneurs in a building for a weekend to see how far you can get in 48 hours toward using the web to create social value. 6 projects were selected aheadbof time, and they all looked interesting but you know how it is, when you have your own idea waking you up nights, you don't really want to focus on anything else.

So at lunch on saturday i had noticed that several geeks and other people were still floating and hadn't chosen a project to work on yet. I asked the organizer permission to be cheeky, stuck my hand up, and announced i was creating a 7th project and would love some help. I was approached by Angel, a spanish guy with mad Druple skills (i pretended i had heard of Druple before in my life) and we found some space to get working.

The best thing about working with Angel was that he wasn't just a coder; by talking me through the ideas he actually brought out new questions and ideas. Knowing no other way to 'build' a website i set to work with flip chart paper, scissors, markers, and blue tack, building giant mock ups that had components i could rearrnge and change. Once the front pageof the app was 'built', web 0.0 style, angel got me to walk through all the inputs and pages that a user would interact with to get to that stage. Then he started coding while i moved on to mocking up my paper app in photoshop to get some look and feel. Soon a stream of smart people started trickling through to see what the camp was calling the 'rebel' team. We got amazing support and critical thinking from a digital lawyer, marketing and user experience experts, html designers, and more. We worked past 10 pm saturday, and came back bright and early sunday, amidst a london snowstorm with flakes the size of half dollar coins - on my way in i saw a south east asian family taking pictures in the snow in what looked like their first time experiencing a real snowstom. We had until 2pm to ramp up to the pitching to judges.

At 2, we were told we were welcome to pitch but ineligible for the 2k prize money, due to our 'rebel' status. This elicited sympathetic groans from our competitors, which i thought was a great proof of the collaborative spirit of the weekend. Nonetheless the 5 minute pitch, in which i told a user story and walked through the mockups and various apps we had in mind, was great practice and we received really positive feedback from judges and competitors alike about the quality of the idea and presentation.

i've come away frm the weekend simultaneously exhausted and energized, with a stack of business cards and a much clearer picture of what i want to do, and how difficult but ultimately rewarding it will be to accomplish. Long story short, the event was an inspired idea executed well, and i feel ready to get a move on. Big thanks to sponsors NESTA, young foundation, and office of the 3rd sector, and the hard working team that ran the show.

spec'ing a website and other nightmares

i'm spending the weeknd at a web-based social innovation boot camp - see www.sicamp.org. Perfect opportunity to meet loads of geeks and show them my quite sad 10 page powerpoint website spec and ask them how on earth to get started. Great opportunity to learn and meet but what i'm finding most of all is how not-easy and nonlinear the process of spec'ing and launching a web-based service is.

Do you go quick and dirty to save money and time, spend a few K to get smething up, get reactions from people, and see if there's traction? Pros are quick and cheap, get out to users fast, don't do too much without their input. Con is that if it takes off in 6 months you will have to scrap and rebuild.

And then what kind of geek do you get? How do you know if s/he is any good? His input will have a major impact on the site. It feels like getting married. Or at least agreeing to go on a long road trip with a complete stranger and no air conditioning in the car. What if the other person litens only to meatloaf (the singer, not the meal) and sucks at map reading?

And all of this is supposed to take place sprinting alongside me doing user interviews, focus groups, and strategizing. And of course, i haveno proof until it's up and running that it's a good idea and well executed.

Back to camp now...
JS.

Test post from my phone

If this works, i am a tech genius (well, sort of).

Social change and the internets

Looks like I'm taking a dive back into start-up mode. How do I know this? There are lots of signs, including the facts that I'm working on a business plan, clearing out my schedule, and have gotten a bit of seed money to do so. But the real sign, the oh-shit-yikes-hooray sign, is that I haven't slept through a whole night in about a week. Love the ideas that keep you up at night. Now I just have to find time to (BTW I published this post and THEN realized I hadn't finished the sentence that precedes this parenthetical. Which in the words of Lisa Simpson, seems apt. APT! So I'm leaving it.)

If you're curious, oh 3 loyal readers, the basic idea is, like all ideas, not new. Our society is aging. The demographic chart looks like a dude with a spare tire for a waist. The big bump is still ahead of us. This affects old people, certainly. It affects us young people because the world we also happen to inhabit has always been defined by the Boomers, and now it will be defined by their aging - from automobile design to our ever-dwindling claim on social security benefits. Loads of stuff going on to address that aging process, as well as to support the aging themselves and those who care for them. But what about the rest of us....?

I guess that's all I'll say for now...never good at keeping secrets but I'll try. Anyway, this means that if this really does get going, this blog is going to be taken over, along with my brain and my life, by this idea. One that still involves social change, entrepreneurship, and impact, but which will probably be seen through the lens of what I am trying to do now. I'm a bit of a Web2.0 virgin so I'll probably write about that a bit too.
xJ.

technology and democracy

I'm having a 21st century moment. As I type this, I am sitting in my flat in London, listening in on a conference call with Barack Obama (no, I am not a political high-flyer, just a member of Democrats Abroad UK, who organised the call).

The connectivity that allows me to sit in London and listen live to a presidential candidate talk about his platform is part of the same world of technology that can connect communities, create social value, and drive some exciting forms of social enterprise. Just a couple of examples:
1. Vodafone's M-Pesa project (click), which could transform banking in Africa
2. Community building sites like Netmums (click) which allow traditional users of public and private services to reorganise the world in a way that makes sense to them
3. Organisations like Benetech and PATH, who spend their time thinking about how technology can make people's lives richer, and how it can address some of society's fundamental problems

Mr Obama is now talking about the work the US is going to have to do in the world which affects not just people living in other countries, but our own interests as well: building economies and schools, investing in infrastructure, providing people the basic tools to make their lives better, and finding alternatives to fossil fuels. That's partly the job of social entrepreneurs, so if anyone out there knows Senator Obama, tell him we're ready.

the importance of people

I'm fascinated by the entire entrepreneurial process - to the point that when someone occasionally refers to me as an entrepreneur, I take it as the highest compliment I could be given (perhaps second only to "that was the best meal I've ever had").

One of the most important part of the entrepreneurial process is managing and developing the role of key people. As some of my previous posts reveal, I am dead-set against some of the cult of individual 'heroes' that surrounds many social entrepreneurship initiatives, funding schemes, and communities. That said, I believe firmly that people and teams are a key component to building any successful business or organisation, so in that sense getting the right individuals in the right role at the right time, with the right support, is absolutely essential to social businesses and social enterprises.

Last night at our 2007 conference for social business CEOs, I was talking to Patrick Shine of UK grantmaker UnLtd. Patrick had a couple of really insightful points about the role of people in growing businesses

1. There are two types of entrepreneurs - First there are those that blaze a trail and keep forging ahead, leaving a trail of dead and dying sherpa-like suppliers behind them. The second type are those that blaze trail one mile at a time, and at each mile, make six trips back and forth bringing the others along and creating a clear, wide path for people to follow. I've known and worked with many of both types and the difference really is tangible.

2. We then were talking about how social businesses (and indeed other entrepreneurial businesses) can transition from founder-leader to a more professionalised organisation - often founder/chief execs take the first step to this by hiring a COO or MD. Patrick noted that in his experience, 'the first COO never lasts'. That first COO most often ends up hating the job, being hated by staff and the founder, and leaving in frustration. It's this experience that prepares the entrepreneurial organisation for what it's going to be like to professionalise and grow up. After the first COO, a second COO can step in, work with the team, and begin to build in structure to the business. Kind of a John-the-Baptist approach - the first one comes in with a message nobody wants to hear, gets his head chopped off, and paves the way for the next one who can make his message heard. (Important to note, for Patrick's sake, that the religious analogy is mine, not his.)

I'd add one additional thought for now - sometimes it is in everyone's best interests to hire someone who really annoys the shit out of you. I am not referring to anyone in particular I have worked with over the years - let's call it more of a generic observation across the more than 15 social businesses I have worked with over the past year, and over life in general. That really annoying person probably has completely different skills to yours, will grate on you in various ways that make you better at what you do, will bring completely different ideas and approaches to the table, and will certainly prevent you from falling into the "hiring in your own image" trap. So off you go - find that pain in the ass and give him a job.

the apartheid of the media

The recent flooding in the UK, leaving hundreds of thousands of people people without drinking water, has received lots of press around the world in the past week. This has got me thinking - because the 1bn people who are without safe drinking water every day don´t get this kind of press. There are the "humanitarian crisis" articles, of course, but this much more significant crisis is not making front page news in the way that the flooding of the Thames and Severn rivers has. Most tellingly, many of the news articles about the UK flooding list by name the victims who have died. I have never seen the equivalent response in Western media to developing-country deaths due to water crises.

Why is this? I read an interview recently in which a woman who has traveled the world to learn from tribal people referred to "the apartheid of ideas" - meaning that people, businesses, and governments the West (or North, depending on how you look at the world) often think that we´ve got a lock on the best ideas on how to do things - how to run countries, build economies, do business, live as communities.

I think a similar phenomenon happens in the world news. We expect the rest of the world to care about our news, our crises, our tragedies - but we give so much more significance and attention to our own problems than to "theirs" that the term "apartheid" doesn´t seem so far off.

The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. Why does news coming from the developing world not seem "real" to us? Why do we seem to respond with greater emotion to crises and tragedies in other developed countries, than to similar (or worse) events in places where people are poor? Is it because we are so numbed by bad news from developing countries? Or because our developed-country neighbors seem more like us and therefore elicit more empathy?

Take, for example, the steady stream of bad news coming out of Iraq. How would we react if this same news were coming from a different place, one that is on our side of the news apartheid line? As an experiment, I looked at today´s news coming out of Iraq, and changed the locations to developed-world places on "our" side of this apartheid line.

"The United Nations estimates that some four million of California´s 36 million people have fled the violence in the state, including those who left before the 2003 Canadian invasion."

"Two suicide car bombers ripped through the throngs that poured into Edinburgh streets carrying the national flag aloft in a rare moment of shared joy after the national soccer team's surprise run to the European Cup final. Police said at least 50 people were killed and 135 were injured in the blasts."

"Today Toronto police reported recovering 20 corpses, all of men shot dead and left in the streets."

My response to my own experiment: I feel really uncomfortable. And not that proud of myself, for the fact that reading this news in these contexts feels somehow different to me. I´m starting to think that for all my good intentions, I am part of this silent apartheid.

JS.

skoll video

social enterprise in thailand

I'm headed out on Friday for Bangkok, where I'll be spending 2 weeks with PDA, a very successful social enterprise working across the country in HIV prevention and education, economic development, and rural health.

I'll be blogging about this (internet access permitting) from the road, at www.catfund.com/thailand.

Back in July

JS.

you go, peggy

I don't always agree with conservative writer Peggy Noonan, but I almost always think she's got her head screwed on and her heart in the right place. In her most recent column she succinctly puts her finger on one of the core truths about the broken and dangerous Bush administration:

"What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks."

Peggy Noonan's column is online at:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

unfashionable

Just in case they decide not to print it, I'm copying in my recent letter to the editor of The Economist. This blog post might not seem 'social' per se, but what the hell.

Sir –

What’s Pervez’s favourite outfit? Who does Barack’s hair? Every week I search your pages – in vain – for news of fashion trends amongst the world’s most powerful men. However this spring alone The Economist has kept me informed about Segoline’s dress (‘tangerine’), Hillary’s hair (‘perfectly coiffed blonde’), Cherie’s domestic tastes (‘used to living in a certain style’), and Belinda Stronach’s social life (‘glamour’! ‘romance’!).

In the spirit of The Economist’s clear interest in fashion and beauty, I’d like to offer to write some balancing articles, starting with an analysis of Gordon Brown’s evolving fashion choices as a clear barometer for his economic policies. When can I start?

Jessica Shortall
London

25 May 2007

Carbon wake up call

Yikes.
I just did a carbon footprint test at www.slate.com. Here's the damage:

Your annual carbon emissions are 23,836 lbs.
That's equivalent to the emissions from 2.34 passenger cars.
Average carbon emissions per year, per person:
United States: 44,312
Qatar: 117,064
France: 13,668
India: 2,645
Kenya: 440

So I can congratulate myself on emitting just over half of the average American - but I know America and Americans, so I'm not that impressed with myself.

And what's terrifying is that I answered the "good" answers on most of the questions on this quiz. I don't use a dishwasher, wash all my clothes on cold, line dry everything (no clothes dryer), don't own a car, rarely take taxis, turn off lights like crazy, don't have air conditioning in the house, recycle everything, carry my own bags with me to the store, buy most of my food locally, compost about half my food waste... etc etc etc.

Wow - after writing the paragraph above I again realise how much living in the UK has changed me. Of that laundry list of "greenish" practices, I think that when living in America, I did... hm. I don't think I really did any of those things. I owned a car, loved air conditioning, never thought about bringing my own bags to the store, always drove to the store, and to work, and everywhere else, used the washer and dryer even though I had a backyard where I could have dried clothes...it's funny what the culture around you will do to you over time. And heartening for campaigners who try to bring awareness to issues like climate change. Over time, it can seep into the culture and change people's behaviour.

But back to my point - I do all of these greenish things and STILL I am a really crappy global citizen, in carbon terms. Kind of depressing - is it just the Western / Northern lifestyle that is unsustainable, no matter how "green" we go within that lifestyle? And I imagine having kids someday, and not having the luxury of time that I now have as a kid-free adult, and I have to admit that clothes dryer and having a car are going to start to look really attractive.

Maybe all of it's a moot point - corporate-level emissions dwarf mine to almost nothingness. A colleague told me yesterday he recently read about a guy who lived a "carbon neutral" lifestyle for a year - and then calculated that he had held off catastrophic climate change by about... 7 seconds.

There's not upbeat ending to this one, but it is a theme I think about a lot and hope to revisit. In the meantime, go take the test at www.slate.com and report back.

ethical consumerism: how macro can you go?

'ethical mark fatigue': eth·i·cal mark fa·tigueəˈtig/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciati [eth-i-kuhl mahrk fuh-teeg]
1. The confusion and inertia experienced by mainstream, 'light green' consumers, resulting from overexposure to ethical certification marks, including Fair Trade, Soil Association, Forest Stewardship Council, Rainforest Alliance, Utz Kapeh, Against Animal Testing, Rugmark, etc.

In my line of work, if you want to talk about ethical consumerism, you have to get your head around three completely different camps: those making ethically certified products, many of whom are passionate about taking an 'ethical first' approach; those retailers wanting to incorporate these ethically marked products into their offering, for a variety of reasons; and the mainstream consumers who are getting exhausted and paralysed about the 'ethical mark' glut staring out at them from their grocers' shelves.

It's this latter group that I think is experiencing 'ethical mark fatigue' - friends ask me, since I am 'social', which is better - buying Fairtrade to support producers in the South, or buying local to minimise carbon miles? When faced with Fairtrade OR Organic, which is 'better'? How about Fairtrade vs. ethical packaging? It's exhausting - I just tell people to do their best, do their homework, do what makes sense to them, and try to achieve a balance - but I have no idea if that's the right advice.

It's an interesting trend that will affect those two other groups I mentioned - the ethical brands themselves, and the retailers who carry them (or, increasingly the UK, develop in-house ethical products, like Tesco's own Fairtrade stuff). And more and more, from the retailer end, I am observing a macro approach that is moving the emphasis away from the particular benefits of each specific ethical mark, and moving it toward a holistic ethical shopping experience. Of course Whole Foods figured this out ages ago - you don't go to Whole Foods to buy Fairtrade or Organic or GM-Free, you go to Whole Foods to buy whatever it is Whole Foods is offering, because they are generally 'ethical'.

So take Marks & Spencer in the UK. Their 'Plan A' (tagline: 'Because there is no Plan B') commits them across a range of metrics: climate change, waste, sustainable raw materials, fair partnerships, and health. Whole Foods aside, in the mainstream this looks to me like a new proposition. M&S is telling us, 'Stop fretting about This vs. That. Shop here, and we'll do the heavy lifting to make sure that being an M&S consumer means being an ethical consumer.'

This has a few implications worth considering. On the positive side, M&S are experts in their own supply chains, which are far-reaching. Add that to their sheer size and the potential for scale and scope of impact is great. Another positive is that if mainstream retailers go ethical in a big way (like, if H&M were to use only ethically produced fibres across all lines, instead of having a small line of organic cotton clothes), 'ethical consumerism' will become, well, just 'consumerism'. Kind of a nice vision for the future.

And now the negatives - the biggest for me is that this trend might give consumers the day off on discerning between different versions and levels of 'ethical'. If my retailer is 'ethical', great, I can just shop there - but how ethical are they? Most clothing certainly won't come close to the high ethical calibre achieved by the likes of People Tree (www.peopletree.com). And what if internal pressures or politics cause the decision makers at this big retailer to choose one ethical path and ditch another - for example, could a food retailer, for totally non-ethical reasons, push Fairtrade and stop bothering with local food, forcing on the consumer a monopolised ethical economy?

A couple of things are clear:
1. The market for ethical marks is officially oversaturated. Please, no more.
2. That oversaturation doesn't mean we should do away with the whole system - indeed, those pioneers in ethical marking are largely what's gotten us to such widespread ethical consumer trends.
3. If retailers are going to change the game, placing ethical behaviour and monitoring in their own hands rather than those of the individual brands, we are going to have to keep them accountable. H&M and the Fairtrade Foundation are fundamentally different animals, driven by different economic goals, and it will be up to external bodies, consumers (and maybe governments?) to verify retailers' claims and keep them honest.

See you at the store...

"social" purists, dot.coms, and lessons about toast

The Guardian newspaper here in the UK recently interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the VP for technical strategy and innovation at IBM, who is about to retire.

What on earth has this got to do with anything?...I can hear you asking yourselves. Well, I found this interview really applicable to what I think I see going on in "social business" trends, and the frequent reluctance of "mainstream" businesses to really commit their business strategies to sustainable, social-value-creating practices.

In this interview Irving (I will call him that, because I refuse to type and re-type Wladawsky) talks about the rise and spread of the internet over the past decade, and he says:

We were very, very excited but I don't think we knew how big it was going to be. People were saying in 1997 that if you were an existing business, you were toast, and that the internet was reinventing all the rules of business, and only those businesses born to the web were going to make it because they had a special sensibility - where they realised it was only about eyeballs, it had nothing to do with revenue and profit and cash. We were maybe among the most aggressive saying No, no, no: anybody can leverage the internet for business value. And of course that's what turned out, that the internet became a major part of every business.

I guess I don't have too much to add to that, except that I think it is a really useful reminder to all those - leaders of businesses, politicians, shareholders, women-on-the-street - who think that today, and here is how things are always going to be. We forget so quickly that things have been different before, have been turned on their heads before, have seemed like the end of the world before.

Just think about this - the 1997 conventional wisdom about the internet was "if you were an existing business, you were toast."

I work with private-sector businesses that are inherently "social" - kind of like those "special sensibility" internet-born companies old Irv mentions above. I think in the case of the internet and the world we are in today, those "special sensibility" companies are essential to prove ground, test models and ideas, highlight areas of value-creation and value-destruction... That's why I am in business, to help these pioneers prove that social value-creation can be leveraged for business value - and that it should become a major part of every smart business.

There is another important lesson here: those who half-assed it - the ones who took a wait-and-see, lukewarm, we'll-try-it-but-we-won't-commit approach to the internet - didn't do so hot. If the world starts shifting and you try to straddle the fault line, you're soon going to end up in a pretty uncomfortable position.

I was talking with a social entrepreneur the other day - someone who has found quite a bit of success in the UK with fair trade products - who echoed some things that I have heard from other people who I would call "social entrepreneur purists". This person said that she found it difficult to trust companies that were publicly owned or entrepreneur owned but ostensibly working toward a double/triple bottom line. She felt that one could never be too sure that the social wasn't being sacrificed for the financial, or just used for window dressing. I hear this from a lot of people - people who, with honourable intentions - believe that social entrepeneurship is best left to the social entrepreneurs, and that mainstream businesses will only corrupt and subvert it. To me, that sounds a lot like leaving the internet to the IT geeks. Not only is it short-sighted, but there is no way to stop the spread of something that can be found to build a better business. I admire the purists' intentions, but I feel their approach is a luxury that we don't have time to afford. It's time to figure out the best way for everyone to play in this field, because they are going to anyway.

So here's my hope: That the business world will not fail to recognise this old story, just because it happens to be dressed up in "social" clothing instead of fancy IT duds. Because soon, just as in the 1997-and-after world, it will be time for the old school companies to step in and play, without looking back.

you're not on the list

Here's the open secret that is a never-ending joke in the social entrepreneurship community:

The "top tier" of social entrepreneurship sometimes feels like a fraternity. A bouncer-at-the-door, you're-not-on-the-list kind of thing.

People joke and whine about this all the time. Have you ever met someone who is an Ashoka, Skoll, AND Schwab fellow? I know a couple. And they deserve it - absolutely, and the "anointing" organisations have identified and supported inspiring and pioneering individuals who were the vanguard of a movement.

So here's your caveat: I am writing about the downside of this thing, in a spirit of constructive, not destructive, criticism. I am writing this because I love the social entrepreneurship movement, and most of its goals, and all of its good intentions, and I applaud its huge successes AND its inspirational entrepreneurs, and the organisations who have supported them and helped their ideas grow. And I feel about the movement the way writer Barbara Ehrenreich feels about America: "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots."

Social change should not be a love-fest. We should be kicking ourselves and each other in the arse at every possible opportunity, because what we are trying to do is really, really important, so we had better be open to some criticism to improve the way we do it.

When The Campus Kitchens Project (www.campuskitchens.org), the organisation I was helping to build before moving to the UK, was a finalist for the 2005 Skoll award, a well-known guy in the field told me and my co-director, Karen Borchert, that if we got it, we would be in a "club" and from then on - we would have more credibility and connections and funding opportunities and management advice and capacity-building support, and that once we were in, boy, were we in.

That sounded absolutely great to us. I sort of pictured us at a cocktail party with Fruchterman and Yunus and Bill Strickland. We'd clink glasses and laugh about the old days when we couldn't break into that beautifully steep part of the J-curve because we were too busy chasing drip-feed grants to have time or resources to figure out how to break that cycle and really do some business. Ho-ho-ho, remember those days? Thank goodness we're up here at the top now. (Of course it's not actually like that, but a girl can dream.)

Then we didn't get the award. And you could hear the door shutting. The chasm between the anointed and the almost-anointed is staggering. I'm not saying these top-tier guys don't have resource constraints, don't face barriers, don't lose sleep at night - of course they do. And I'm not saying that I wouldn't wish that anointed status on Karen, who still works her ass off leading The Campus Kitchens Project - buddy, if you can get it, take it. I'm just saying that sometimes it feels like a rich-getting-richer scenario.

Now that I'm on the other side of the coin - providing support and strategy for social entrepreneurs through my business - I can say this without, I hope, it sounding like sour grapes. I meet people with great ideas and great models all the time, frustrated and running-out-of-time people, and sometimes it feels like the only way to get real traction and serious support is to get one of those coveted slots as a "fellow" or "genius" of some sort.

And, interestingly, it's not just an overt, awards-ceremony thing. There seem to be lots of ways to decide who's great and who's just good, and to make the distinction clear. Last week, I was talking with some fellow London-based social entrepreneurs about the "old guard" here in the UK. All of us expressed frustration that every meeting, panel, and conference is chaired and led by the Chers and Madonnas of the UK scene - the people who are so ubiquitous they have stopped needing last names. Liam, Adele, JohnByrd (which breaks the "Cher" rule but is one of those names everyone always says first-and-last together)... Nobody is trying to create the chasm between these guys and everyone else, it's just happening through repetition.

I don't have a solution, but I have a few opinions (big surprise):

1. We are focusing far too much on individuals. It is time for our aspirations and interests to grow up. People retire. They eventually die, for goodness sake. Focus and support for organsiations and the "macro" might not offer the same kind of cool stories as individuals do, but what that focus would create is field-building. If we are serious about changing the world, let's start celebrating organisations and best practices, which will outlive all of us. If we only support Johnny Appleseeds, but not those systems that manage and improve the orchards for generations to come, we're going to end up with...well, this metaphor has collapsed, but I hope you get my meaning.

2. We are being too risk-averse. What on earth is the point of doubling and tripling up on awards? To open the doors for the same person twice or three times? I am afraid we see it as less risky to "invest" in someone if the other guys at the top are doing it too. There's comfort in numbers. But this is not building a field. From where most of us sit, it looks like cherry-picking. And there are a lot of un-anointed social entrepreneurs out there that need strong management support and the kind of step-changing interventions those at "the top" can offer. Their "good" ideas can become "great" models too, with the right support and dissemination.

3. This field needs things that other sectors take for granted - things like M&A, for example. Or even just more collaboration and partnerships. How is that going to happen if the message we are sending is the individual entrepreneurs are the reason social change is happening? How is succession of leadership going to happen?

So here's my question: Why are we in this? Are we building a field here, or are we throwing a cocktail party?

JS.

The most dangerous weapon in the world

Spoiler alert: I'm going to write quite a lot of details about the film The Last King of Scotland, as well as its conclusion. So if you haven't seen it and don't want a sneak preview, stop reading...now.

Last night Clay and I went to see this film with our friends Hester and Stuart. I have been wanting to see it, but had some reservations. Namely, I was sure there were a million stories to tell about Idi Amin's brutal rule of Uganda, and I was confused/annoyed that the one being told had to be through the eyes of a white Northerner. Was this the only way to get people to care about African history and African tragedy? Was the presence of a Northerner in Amin's inner circle really the most interesting or compelling aspect of the whole sad tale?

I didn't have much time to think about this once the film started. Running into a friend in the lobby afterwards, he asked "how was it?" and I replied, "like being punched in the face." This film is pretty full on, and it doesn't let you off the hook very often. In a nutshell, young, bored Scottish physician literally spins a globe and ends up working at a rural clinic in Uganda, just as Amin's coup is taking place. Through a series of coincidences he becomes Amin's personal physician and, at times, advisor. As a white Northerner myself, sitting in the dark of the theatre, I watched Amin's madness and brutality unfold through the naive eyes of this young doctor, whose sheltered place at the heart of the Amin regime does not spare him from getting blood on his own hands. You want to like this young guy, and you sympathise with him, because he doesn't "get" Uganda and you probably wouldn't either, because he is idealistic about Amin's plans for Uganda and you probably would be too, because he is enticed by power and you would be, and because he stumbles his way through life and frankly you do too sometimes. But there is something truly, deeply, and un-pin-pointably wrong with this young Scot and his actions or lack thereof, throughout the film. In the end you can't sympathise with him because he turned up to Uganda uninvited, not speaking the language and not knowing even the basics of the culture of history of the place. He turned up and got special treatment because he was a Northerner, and got heady with power. He helped put a legitimate face on a wide swath of brutality, oppression, and murder, and convinced himself Amin's "heavy hand" was for the greater good because "this is Africa, and you have to meet violence with violence."

By the end of the film, our young doctor has seen his pregnant lover (Amin's wife, no less) dismembered by Amin for trying to abort his (the Scot's) baby. He has been the half-witting cause of the death of a worthy public minister. And he has been at Amin's right hand during a period in which this dictator murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people. In the end, the doctor betrays Amin, in a failed attempt to poision him - He does this not to rid Uganda of Amin's menacing presence, but in revenge for the death of his lover. Even at this late stage, knowing of the brutality and killings across the country, our young doctor is driven to act only when his own self interests are harmed.

The doctor pays quite a physically brutal price for his betrayal of the president - a scene I watched through one half-open eye. But in the end, he is hustled onto an airplane by a goodhearted Ugandan doctor. And he escapes. Battered and bleeding, with a heavy conscience and much to grapple with, but he escapes. The film ends with his airplane lifting off from the runway, leaving Uganda (and its eventual civilian death toll of 300,000) behind.

So much for my annoyed, oh-so-enlightened, make a movie on Africa-about-Africans argument. The telling of the Amin story through this white doctor is a brilliant intellectual and psychological ploy, revealing after it's too late to escape the true weight and nature of the argument being made. I believed the trailers when they told me this was a film about Idi Amin and Uganda. I believed this for most of the film, to be honest. But I finally, really got it as that plane left the runway, taking the most dangerous weapon in the world today with it - the arrogant, half-informed, and ostensibly helpful Northerner.

The fundamental problem at the heart of all these centuries of playing chess with nations is that the chess players always have the option of that last flight out. Take the evacuation of Saigon - in the end, the US army left the underprepared, corrupted ARVN forces to slug it out with a well equipped, well trained force from North Vietnam. Why? Among other things, before even going in, we just didn't bother to deeply understand what was going on in that country. Did you know that before the US invasion, Ho Chi Minh wrote to a number of high-level US officials repeatedly, offering friendship and asking for help? Did you know that a quick look at Vietnamese history reveals Vietnam would never have joined forces with the Chinese? - but the United States assumed they would, because they assumed all Communism was the same, and that it overrode all other historical and political factors. And so we invaded. And when the American public had had enough of the dying, we left.

Iraq today - Democrats in the US Congress likely will soon show how smart and compassionate they are by forcing a massive reduction in US troops - yet I haven't seen anything that proves to me the country won't collapse once this frail support structure is removed. The same goes for my current home country, the UK.

Just to be clear: I am no hawk. My point is not that we should stay until "mission accomplished" - it's to ask why the hell is it our right to determine the mission in the first place?

And now you might think that I am a complete cliche (Vietnam = Afghanistan = Iraq, etc. - although interestingly, the enlightened phrase "Let's bomb them back to the stone age" featured in the press during the decision-making phase of both debacles). However, I think a review of European colonial and American neo-colonial practices worlwide consistently see the movie coming to the same end: the embarassed and battered North getting on the transport plane and escaping to "intervene" another day in another hot climate. At least Nero stuck around Rome to fiddle.

Open letter to the Gates Foundation

16 January 2007

To: Ms Scott, Ms Stonesifer, Bill & Melinda, et al

Appalling. I can’t think of another word to describe your organisation’s misguided and arrogant response to public criticism regarding your investment practices. I have in the past admired the Gates Foundation, and having done some work in the area of paediatric ARVs, have had significant reason to applaud your work.

Having an antiquated, double-blind approach to charitable giving vs. investing is one thing. The Foundation could be forgiven for realising it’s behind the times, and for getting up to speed, post haste. But having and then defending, without apology, said approach, says a great deal about your organisation, and none of it good.

Whilst the public proclamations by Ms Stonesifer and Ms Scott (‘changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues’ and that employee agreement and consent on what makes for ethical investing is difficult to achieve) might not detract directly from the Foundation’s admirable programmatic work, they do cause several grievous problems for the Foundation, for the general public, and for the Foundation’s ‘license to operate’ in its broadest sense.

Firstly, if not for its public stance as a leader in fighting some of the most challenging issues in the world today, then at least for the sheer size of its corpus, the Foundation is, like it or not, a role model. And denigrating ethical investing – indeed, all but claiming it is too difficult to achieve employee consensus on the topic (Too difficult for intellectual giants the likes of Mr Gates? God help the rest of us who don’t have the brains or the budgets to sort it out) – sends a clear message to the general public that is likely to be repeated, amplified, and adopted by all too many individual and institutional investors. In short, your stance has provided a global advertisement against ethical investing. The rationale goes that someone is going to fund these companies’ activities, so why bother withholding funds on mere ethical grounds? History has, of course, shown us that collective action will never achieve results when the opponent is strong and well funded, so why bother? (see: Montgomery bus boycott)

Second, you have missed a truly great opportunity. The Gates Foundation is a celebrity in the foundation world, and receives celebrity-like levels of press coverage. You could have, through your own actions, inspired myriad individuals and institutions to follow suit with ethical investing (or at the least, negative screens to filter out the likes of Nestle) – and, importantly for your own brand and status, you would have gotten the credit for it. Tsk – time to hire a new PR agency.

Finally, and quite simply, the Gates Foundation is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Please tell me how Bill and Melinda have rationalised away the inherent ‘conflict of interest’ (see: COO Cheryl Scott’s statement on the Foundation website: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/Announcements/Announce-070109.htm) with Nestle. The conflict, to make it perfectly clear, is that the Foundation saves children’s lives with the right hand whilst using the left hand to invest in a company that is unscrupulous about those same children’s lives.

Surely through running and growing their software start-up the Foundation’s generous benefactors have learned a few simple lessons about business. That great businesses are those that align their mission, vision, and values on all fronts. That today’s democratic media trends (see: blogosphere) will not allow hypocritical, big-corporation, shut-up-and-don’t-ask-questions-because-we-know-best behaviour to go unnoticed, unchallenged, or unpunished. Or perhaps the Foundation has inherited too many of the tendencies of the corporation founded by Mr Gates.

Appalling.

Jessica Shortall

London, UK