My (social) life

Microlending goes niche

2009-07-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

I have become a slightly obsessive fan of Lend4Health, a micro-lending site that allows users to lend directly to families struggling with the bills for alternative treatments for their kids with Autism, Aspergers, and related conditions. It's simple, transparent, and meaningful.

So it's got me wondering how many other micro-sites are out there doing micro-lending. Kiva is the big daddy, of course, and is joined by other microfinance brokers like Rangde and Microplace. And there are small business lending sites like Lending Club.

But with the ease of mashing up apps like PayPal and ChipIn, it seems like anyone can get in the micro-lending game, and that this innovation, and people's desire to feel more connected with their philanthropic activity, can be taken in many new directions. After all, loans to parents with kids with Autism is a pretty niche area. Of course with the widening of microlending, there are risks (such as fraud), which is why I like Lend4Health because founder Tori is so transparent about what she's doing. But most things worth doing are risky, so I'm still on board.

I'm curious about groups and websites that are taking this approach in new, niche, directions, in the way that Lend4Health has. I can't find many examples, but I'd love to compile a list. Can you offer any?

Lend4Health. Category: health. Sub-category: Autism and related conditions (with potential to be applied to any health issue)
United Prosperity. Category: microenterprise. Sub-category: loan guarantees
Unithrive. Category: education. Sub-category: student loans (another uses donations rather than loans)
Lend4Peace. Category: microenterprise. Sub-category: Middle East.
Vittana. Category: education. Sub-category: Student loans (developing world)
Save Together: a "Kiva-like platform for matching the savings goals of the working poor"
(this one is in "idea" stage - see comments section): P2P lending site specifically focused on renewable energy - both green entrepreneurs and consumer energy lending in emerging markets

Kiva and white-label?
And while we're on the topic, I keep wondering what Kiva is up to. They've moved into U.S. lending, but the real jackpot is their platform. Now that start-ups like Lend4Health have shown that P2P lending can be niche, targeted, and high impact, disintermediating even microfinance institutions, it seems that a white-labeled Kiva platform could be licensed out to great effect. Revenue stream for Kiva: check. White label to protect Kiva's reputation: check. Opening up a well developed tech platform to new ideas, new innovations, and lending (and other) situations we haven't even thought of yet?: that would be incredible. I am hopeful Kiva is sitting on this idea and plans to roll it out in the near future, but that's just a guess.

JS.

* Update: If you have ideas about how that Kiva (or similar) platform could be applied to a niche capital need, let's hear them! I never would have thought of loans for families living with autism...what else is out there?

** Update: suggestions are coming in through the Comments section - I'm adding these to the list above as they come in.

** Update: Some cool models are being suggested via twitter (I'm @jessicashortall) - not all fit the exact description above, but are cool enough to note here:

Kickstarter: "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..."
Sell-a-band: Platform to allow indie bands to raise funds for next album directly from fans

social entrepreneurship Jargon Glossary

2009-03-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

...courtesy of the Skoll World Forum 2009
jargon i'm hearing / seeing on twitter, and my best guess at what these terms mean.
i'm of the opinion that we won't really succeed from inventing new and complex terms, but i do like some of these.

ethonomics - a true neologism (just wanted to sound smart and say "neologism").
change agent - VERY popular term; seems to describe everyone from social entrepreneurs to people who like to hang around entrepreneurs. seems to best apply to people who would have a hard time describing their "job" in less than 30 minutes.
spontaneous community - nice way of saying slum (thanks to Jeff Chu)
gastropolitical awakening - using food to bring people in conflict together, catalyze change
interconnected prosperity - "Hope, joy, empathy, community." (Jeff Chu again)
primary constitutents - instead of "beneficiaries" or "clients". oh boy.

And in the "no idea what this means" category:

strategic apex
disconnected ambiguity

No offense intended! Just like to shine a light from time to time on the interesting gap between the words social entrepreneurs use (things like "I'm running out of money") and the words the wider world of thinkers and supporters use. I love language and all it can do, but not so sure about the erupting lexicon coming from the direction of the Western-world social entrepreneurship elite...

social enterprise: supply & demand

2009-03-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

At the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, talking supply (of capital) and demand (of the same) for/by social enterprises.

Very interesting session in which we ID'd issues on the demand and supply sides...as follows:

Demand issues

issue of role models - in some communities and economies, there are very few social enterprise role models to follow - similar dynamic can happen in economically deprived areas with entrepreneurship in general
smaller pool of potential entrepreneurs due to many social enterprises providing low/no financial upside to entrepreneur
historical antagonism by non-profit / charity sector to market models
need for "pre-finance" mentoring and business services to get social enterprises bankable and investment-ready
Many potential social entrepreneurs can't afford start-up - have low funds to begin with

Supply issues

Assumptions by investors that all social enterprise = less money to be made
Philanthropic funders are risk-averse, due to governance issues (boards), skills issues (grant officers not experienced in deal structuring)
Grantmakers seem happier taking -100% financial return than -15%, 0%, or +2% (see point above for possible reasons
Need more forward thinking philanthropists to seed fund - see last "demand" point above
Exit - some of this can be addressed through quasi-equity, which almost no one is doing (Bridges, Venturesome, and Acumen are exceptions)

We also discussed what I call the "ecosystem" of social enterprise - something I see in London but not many other places. It involves activity and commitment from public sector, private sector, charities, foundations, media coverage, competitions to spark ideas, schools to teach SE, awards and prizes, and the whole spectrum of social finance from grants to commercial investment.

twitter, huh?

2009-03-19T14:07:00.001-07:00

My husband asked me yesterday, "Why the hell do you use that thing?" (meaning Twitter). So I decided to write down why I use it and what I've learned from it so far...

First of all, a good article: http://blog.mrtweet.net/twitter-law-of-reciprocity

Second of all, my Twitter profile: www.twitter.com/jessicashortall

I should start by saying that I by and large am building my own little Twitterverse around people interested in social innovation.

The main thing I have learned over the past few weeks is that Twitter is action- and interest- oriented. It’s about utility. For me, Tweeting has/should have almost nothing in common with Facebook status updates: the audiences are completely separate. FB is for friends, and I post stupid/useless information. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter just because we’re friends. I am developing a kind of rule where I only tweet stuff that will have at least one of the following outcomes:

It might be RT’d (because it is interesting/useful enough to be retweeted)

It asks for people to do something they are able to do – introduce me to someone, send me a link, look smart, etc (A tweet like this might go: “Looking for experts in small business economic development. Can you intro me?”)

It will amuse my Tweeps (This is fully dependent on you knowing who is following you and having kind of an ongoing dialogue going)

It will create a conversation amongst the people who follow both me and the person I am tweeting about – kind of a more complex one. If I see a tweet from someone in Austin, I kind of have a sense of who else might be following them. By replying to their tweet publicly you can sometimes start a conversation amongst interesting people.

It will build my general profile & personality in the Twitterverse. It should contribute to the story about myself that I want people on Twitter to know. That doesn’t mean it has to be completely focused – I do sometimes just Tweet what I’m up to, or a link to a news article, if it’s interesting enough. But those things also build me a 3-D profile. There are people I follow who I’ve never met in person, but now we have moved on to sharing emails and being “friends” because they or I seemed interesting and cool and useful enough to get in touch with. So, it will make me look cool/smart/interesting/knowledgeable/worth knowing.

Unless it meets one of the criteria above, I never tweet a “what I’m doing right now” update.
Now, on to Retweeting. Couple of recent observations:

For me, Retweeting should still fill one of the three goals above.

Twitter is about building social capital. If you RT someone’s tweet they are likely to remember and be grateful and pay more attention to your tweets. Also, it’s a nice thing to do. You should never expect a direct or even indirect ROI out of being generous on Twitter, but the irony is that being generous is the only way to get something out of it. So it’s selfish-unselfish.

I will sometimes RT stuff that has little/no interest to me directly, if I feel like my twitterverse might find it useful.

In general, I think there is a chicken-and-egg situation which makes Twitter hard to really wrap your head around, and then once it clicks it jumps the value of Twitter up significantly. For me, it’s about slowly finding and building a community of followees (which I control 100%) and followers (which I don’t fully control) that I can build a sense of. What are the interests among this group of people, some of whom are connected to each other, some of whom are not? What resources might they have at hand, or 1 or 2 degrees removed? (I recently tweeted asking for opinions on box vs “tumbler” composters, and one of my tweeps introduced me to his wife, who recommended the best product – fyi it’s a tumbler) How can I be valuable to them?

And finally, I don’t follow everyone who follows me, and I unfollow people who annoy me. Like, people who tweet all day long, or whose tweets are boring/not useful/don’t follow my criteria above, or who will tweet 5 things within 2 minutes, which is not how you are supposed to do it at all.

Now, if you're reading this and you use Twitter, tell me what you know.

Social investing: back to Step 1.

2009-02-20T11:49:00.001-08:00

Small but ambitious social enterprise, seeking capital, offering low returns and high risk. First-timer in the business world, no experience with debt or equity, great social impact.

The above isn't your typical "get rich quick" opportunity for an investor, but the demand and supply sides for social investment capital are growing. They just aren't always growing in the same direction.

I'm currently working on a brief guide for social enterprises in developing countries, to help them understand how the world of what I call "investment-minded funders" (everyone from venture philanthropist grantmakers to sub-market debt, equity, and quasi-equity folks) works. The experience of writing and re-writing and re-writing the paper to work for the audience is reminding me that, like it or not, those of us who like to talk about social investing (or PRI or MRI or whatever American foundations are calling what they like to talk about but hardly ever actually do) tend to act like this is a fully formed field, and that the demand side of this capital equation is up to speed on how this all works.

What we are really dealing with is a demand side that doesn't know a whole lot about how the supply side thinks and makes decisions. Some of this is experience - many social enterprise founders and management, globally, come from development, not business, backgrounds. Imagine a commercial start-up venture going seeking angel or VC funding, never having heard the terms "valuation" or "exit", and not really being sure what "equity" is all about. This is not a conversation that's going to go very well.

In the social enterprise context, there are some very sophisticated players out there, but the vast majority of social enterprises I see have a long way to go in understanding how investment-minded funders think, how they have to present themselves to these funders, how the relationship is vastly different from working with a traditional grantmaker, and why they would want money that expects more of them (repayment, for instance) than grants. I think part of the responsibility lies on the part of funders and intermediaries to help social enterprises understand what's going on. Of course, this benefits funders too - by improving deal flow and the quality of materials being submitted by social enterprises. And then it's up to the social enterprises to learn what is expected of them and provide it.

So I'm developing some thoughts on what has to happen on both sides of the supply/demand equation, in order for these guys to find somewhere to meet in the middle. My not-fully-formed list starts here:

What can social enterprises do?
1. Start getting educated. Set a goal for yourself to understand how equity investing works, how debt and lending works. Read definitions on investopedia.com. Ask stupid questions. If you don't have a board member that is/was a banker, venture capitalist, or "commercial" entrepreneur, get one, and make it clear to him/her that his/her job is to get you up to speed.

2. Research funders/investors you're interested in. Find out where they fund, what financial instruments they use, what social impacts they look for, and most importantly, what level of financial returns they expect. Then ask yourself whether that fits with your operation. I've been talking to a lot of social venture capital and venture philanthropy funders lately, and the #1 error they see, across the board, is social enterprises assuming that their fantastic social impact will somehow allow an investor to make an exception to the level of returns that investor is seeking. These social enterprises are not making the connection between the fund's responsibility to its investors or limited partners, and the return the fund therefore has to seek from the social enterprises it invests in. I have seen so much time wasted by social entrepreneurs convinced that "once they see the impact we're having, they'll be fine with making a little less money."

3. Read business plans (grant applications don't count). Lots of them, in any industry, social and not-social. The more you read, the better you will understand how they are structured and how much the language differs from grant proposals. Then keep yours under 20 pages. Keep the social impact stuff to one clear section, rather than peppering it throughout the plan. Figure out where you want to be in a few years and work backwards to explain how you will get there - operationally, strategically, and financially. Include both full and "snapshot" versions of your financials - a few years of history and 3-5 years looking forward. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow. List your major risks and provide optimistic, "base", and pessimistic scenarios of your financials to show that you are prepared for the bumps in the road. And remember that most of the people who read your business plan will skip everything but the Executive Summary, Management Team Bios, Financials, and maybe Social Impact sections.

What do social investors and venture philanthropists need to do?
1. Transparency. Some social investors choose not to clearly and publicly explain what kinds of financial and social returns they're looking for. And they could all benefit from providing education to social enterprises to help them improve their approach.

2. Simplicity. This especially goes for venture philanthropists and social investors who come from the investing world. You might have worked at Goldman Sachs / McKinsey / Apax. The social enterprises who need your capital didn't, and they don't understand half of what you're saying. Help them out a little.

And the rest of us?
I have been asked a crazy number of times to "map the social investing landscape", for other funders, academics, and social enterprises. I am not a firm believer in the "social stock exchange" concept (mostly because I don't the approach of like putting "social" in front of every investment term we can think of, and calling it a day), but I do think it would be awfully useful to both investors and social enterprises if we had an industry-accepted (and supported?) space to map out all social investors and venture philanthropists in the field. There are a few who take a stab at this - xigi.net is one of them - but the key information is not easy to find, and the listings are not comprehensive. I would love to see a system whereby social enterprises seeking growth or capacity-building capital could answer some basic questions about cash flow, company structure, capital sought, financing instruments they're interested in, geography, and social impact areas, and be given a list of investors whose own criteria might make for a good match.

Gotta get back to the kind of work that pays the bills now

JS.

Back on the horse - in Austin

2009-02-04T06:35:00.001-08:00

I'm trying to pick up blogging again after a long hiatus. Whenever I'm in transition I have a hard time thinking beyond my current reality, and we had a big transition in 2008 - my husband and I picked up our life in London and, in a several-weeks-long journey, made our way to our new hometown - Austin, TX. For a change, we followed our desire for good quality of life and sunshine, instead of careers, and it's turned out to be a great decision. This is a wonderful little city and we are enjoying getting to know it, along with our recently adopted dog, Blue.

I find myself in Austin at an interesting time for socially minded start-ups. Austin has the luck to have all the basic raw materials to be a leader in this field - it's a town of entrepreneurs, of socially conscious people, of great educational institutions, and of wealth. However the picture is still fragmented here, which I see as both a challenge and a great opportunity. I am of the belief that a community does not become a leader in this or any field without changes and innovations occurring in a number of areas, from public sphere to private sector (I blogged about this on Nell Edgington's blog, here). But there are also some promising signs that entrepreneurs are not sitting on their hands, waiting for Austin's infrastructure and capital markets to open their arms to social innovation.

Commercial companies like Blue Avocado and Greenling are following in the footsteps of older brother and local hero Whole Foods, building what they hope will be profitable businesses with clear social benefit embedded within.

Social enterprises are appearing, too, although they are still a bit thin on the ground here. English at Work is working toward financial sustainability, providing highly valuable services to employers by working with their employees to improve English skills. Emancipet, an organization with the mission to end unnecessary euthanasia of animals in Austin, earns a great deal of its budget through its spay, neuter, and wellness services. Southwest Key, a large Austin-based nonprofit, is making forays into income-generating social enterprise with a cafe and a maintenance company. If you're reading this and have other examples - anywhere on the social enterprise/social business spectrum, let me know!

Interestingly, as far as I know, most of the organizations above are entirely bootstrapped (with some grant funding for some of them). I applaud and support bootstrapping where it makes sense, but have to wonder what will happen when these start-ups (and others) reach that critical growth phase. For the highly commercial businesses, this might not pose a problem - if angels and VCs can see the business value and not get thrown off by the social impact, and if our economy doesn't completely implode, they should be able to get their hands on some capital. But for those who might provide investors with below-market financial returns, through equity, soft debt, or other mechanisms, where is this capital going to come from?

We seem to have a supply and demand problem that is highly chicken-and-egg. With so few social enterprises in Austin, can we go to funders and high net worth individuals with examples of success that might convince those potential investors to experiment with social finance? Or, if we can find some social investing pioneers to take a punt, will we be able to produce the deal flow to make it worthwhile?

My glib answer to these questions is Thank God for entrepreneurs. With some help and support, social enterprises will continue to appear in Austin, because entrepreneurs tend not to be hindered by the (lack of) resources at hand. But this is a big issue, and one that deserves intelligent attention. I'm excited to be here.

The "secret society" of people caring for their parents

2008-08-05T04:43:00.000-07:00

Jane Gross writes an engaging and sometimes heartbreaking blog on the New York Times about aging in America. She also wrote this post: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E2DF143AF931A15754C0A9679C8B63 which talks about the "secret society" of people who are suddenly, dizzyingly immersed in their parents' lives in ways in which they never imagined. Care homes, finances, health, ambulances, arguing with doctors and insurance companies, cajoling and arguing and shouting and pleading and worrying with their own parents about decisions big and small.

In this post Jane says that when she meets someone in the same situation as her, "These conversations generally end the same way. 'We should form a support group,' one of us will say. 'Who has time?' says the other."

There is so much latent need in this group for connections and peer to peer support, for "I've been there" advice and stories, for recommendations about planning, care, local services, dealing with siblings, giving oneself a break. The internet poses an interesting potential solution to the "no time for a support group" phenomenon. It takes away the constraints of time and space and lets people connect on their own schedules, anonymously if that's what works for them.

Drop me a line at info (at) supportmyparent.com if you're interested in participating.

This...

2008-06-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

...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?

2008-05-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

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:

NEED
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

2008-05-16T02:37:00.000-07:00

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:

Of course I feel guilty. Why is this even worth talking about?
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

Doing my job
Taking care of my kids
Actually participating in my marriage
Drinking wine with friends

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...?
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:

You probably feel guilty. Let's talk about that.
You should join a support group.
If your parent lives far away from you, make sure you do the following:

Find local sources of support

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

2008-04-07T01:39:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-04T06:22:00.001-07:00

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

Social change and the internets

2008-04-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-11T07:15:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-09T02:16:00.001-08:00

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

2007-07-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

video from this year's skoll world forum on social entrepreneurship
i like this as a reminder for when my practical side overrides my idealism

social enterprise in thailand

2007-06-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-01T01:31:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-25T01:56:00.001-07:00

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

2007-04-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-03-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

'ethical mark fatigue': eth·i·cal mark fa·tigue [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

2007-03-06T02:35:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

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.