What other sector of the economy refers to itself by what it’s not?
It might surprise you that the not-for-profit sector is larger and more important to Canada than the oil and gas sector. It might also surprise you that the not-for-profit sector is in the midst of a major identity crisis. 
This unique collection of readings maps out the concepts sociologists use to understand the foundations of society - families, economy and labour, education, health, and health care. "On April 11, 2012 Howard Rheingold joined Mamie Rheingold in a conversation about his latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully." 
One factor that is increasingly being cited as an important economic indicator is happiness. After all, what good is increased production and consumption if the result isn’t increased human satisfaction? Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work. 
"Humanity has entered a time of profound change. We are pushed by necessity and pulled by opportunity. The push is a growing systems crisis, evident in the breakdown of financial institutions, climate disruption, resource depletion, unsustainable populations, and more. These powerful Trends are presented here. The pull is the opportunity to rise to a new level of human maturity, partnership, and freedom. The combined push and pull at a global scale make this truly a time of profound turning and transformation for humanity. Many of the other names used to describe this time of Great Transition are explored here". 
Despite the tremendous energy and excitement surrounding social entrepreneurship, many nonprofit practitioners find it a highly elusive and difficult topic. I believe that one of the fundamental reasons behind this elusiveness lies within the social entrepreneurship phenomenon itself. More specifically, in contrasting what is being said with what we know about this phenomenon, I have started to believe that in many aspects, social entrepreneurship is a fetish, an object of desire—more important for what it symbolizes than for its substance and applicability to nonprofits. My purpose here, then, is to discuss some of these symbolic properties and illustrate what makes them powerful, but also what makes them problematic. 
Put aside what you think of Komen, Gates, ALEC, or PCCC for a moment. This is not about any of these organizations per se. It is about public pressure, organized and otherwise, on nonprofits and foundations, about their decision making. It is about making decisions that will be challenged, and striking the right balance between legitimate board governance and respecting people's right to agree or disagree with you. 
Capital Institute's work on financial system reform is very much driven by the concept of system resilience.
In an email exchange last week Bill Rees, co-creator of the "ecological footprint," fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and professor at the University of British Columbia, invited us to look at resilience from a perspective we often fail to consider. As he explains below, while resilience is critical for systems’ survival, in times of great instability, that same resilience can be problematic for the larger system(s) in which a resilient subsystem is housed. This idea, which is also a critical argument advanced by Donella Meadows in her seminal book Thinking in Systems, is included below in her own words. 
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. "...Part of the proceedings has included conversation about systemic and structural strategies to addressing the issues, which includes the invitation for grantmakers to consider multiple roles they might play in helping shift the dominant “rich get richer, poor get poorer” narrative in this country. As highlighted in the “3D Wheel” above, these roles include, but are not limited to: - Convenor TED Talks In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert.
Cain argues that we design our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions for extroverts, and that this bias creates a waste of talent, energy, and happiness. Based on intensive research in psychology and neurobiology and on prolific interviews, she also explains why introverts are capable of great love and great achievement, not in spite of their temperaments -- but because of them. 
Many of us have a mental picture of nonprofits and philanthropy as one of three circles in a Venn diagram, the other two being government and commercial enterprise. The circles overlap in the center, but each sector also has its own functions.
Yet many contemporary observers have commented on the blurring of these sectors. Nonprofits earn revenue, companies produce environmentally beneficial products, and the government invests in social innovation. We have commercial vendors of charitable giving products, nonprofit producers of some of the world’s most widely used software products, and networks of mobile phone crisis responders who don’t fit into any circle. The creation of new corporate forms for good and the impact investing movement have become standard parts of philanthropy conferences. And the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has unleashed a new era of nonprofit activity in campaign politics. |
In addition to the solid data presented here (missing from the 5 minute talk currently creating an anti-TED campaign), it's also interesting this talk was given and recorded over a month before the Occupy Wall Street movement began.
"We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust". 
Conservatives say the American way is to use more and pay less, Walmart-style. No wonder they're scared about the shift to clean energy and sustainability.
Yes, climate change calls for culture change. And a large factor in stemming progress is the fear of change (and of losing power).
"The American Way has been to carelessly consume high quantities of cheap energy, much of it embedded in disposable plastic crap at Walmart. Conservative leaders are telling their flock that there are endless deposits of fossil fuels all around them, if only those pesky Democrats and their regulations would get out of the way. The message is that the American way of life can continue forever, indeed that it is our patriotic birthright, but that Democrats want to take it from them. That goes deeper than energy. It’s about home and hearth". Bernard Lietaer - Money Diversity - One of Bernard's best videos... 
"The concept is informed by design thinking, a rich and dynamic process that emphasizes inquiry, innovation, ideation, building, and problem solving. Critical design literacy applies the protocols of design thinking to practice social innovations that lead to social transformation. In the learning environments that we will pilot we want students to become literate in critical thinking and critical designing. The former encourages students to look at their community through an inquisitive lens while the latter encourages students to design for community impact.
Critical design literacy challenges some of our most ‘common sense’ notions of schooling. In general schools seek to produce good, loyal, and dutiful citizens. But what if the mission of our learning institutions is to create engaged, critical, and future-building citizens? Keri Facer reminds us that future-building schools must do more than train students to inhabit some pre-determined future. Schools should be community resources and laboratories that help students develop the competence and the experience to intervene in the making of a future that is more equitable, desirable, and sustainable". 
Adbusters' Kalle Lasn is largely credited for conceptualizing and starting the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park. Here, he talks about his vision for the future.
"It’s all about producing a different type of human being. Like the Occupiers who slept in the park. Their cynicism dissolved and they were engaged and they merged into this different kind of human being. They were alive and alert and energized and this is what it’s about. This movement will be a success if it can produce a new generation of young people who are fighting a good fight and can do what needs to be done. It’s going to take an eternity because the human project never ends. We are at a tipping point right now. This feels like one of the biggest tipping points. We have never faced the possibility of ecological and physical and political crises all swirling around each other and ready to swoop down on us and create a nightfall. Not just a 1929 scenario, but a 50- to 100- or 1,000-year blockade. It’s totally in the cards. I hope this Occupy movement will give impetus to young people and make them fight harder to avoid the pitfalls of humanity". 
"...It is not just the money system that is at stake here. Underlying our debt-based system is a certain view of human nature, human identity, and our relationship to nature that is, like the money system, in crisis. A system that engenders competition makes sense in a world of discrete, separate selves, striving first and foremost to survive and reproduce in a world of Other. But that sense-of-self is becoming obsolete; many of the religious speakers talked of the interconnected nature of being, of interbeingness, of the larger We. Even the economists acknowledged the importance of connections and community for happiness. But when we have a money system that fosters endemic disconnection, any efforts to promote happiness will be fighting an uphill battle..." Excerpt from an interview with Ian MacKenzie http://ianmack.com Filmed at Prana Yoga, Vancouver, on April 5, 2012. This is an excerpt from the forthcoming full interview. 
It's clear that there is a "new" brand of social entrepreneurship emerging—one that is more market-driven, measurement-oriented, and corporate-friendly than before. The question is: Will these trends lead to greater social impact?
Five main takeaways from the recent 2012 Skoll World Forum: 
TED Talks In this uplifting talk, Katherine Fulton sketches the new future of philanthropy -- one where collaboration and innovation allow regular people to do big things, even when money is scarce.
"Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don’t yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected, and, let us also hope — long.” 
A new study examines field-wide grantmaking attitudes and practices, and how philanthropy can effectively support nonprofits to thrive amid a changing environment.
From our research, gathered from both funders and nonprofits, we understand that the practices most associated with long-term nonprofit success are:
Against the context of rapid economic, social and environmental change, a collective reflection is taking place on how to build more sustainable routes to share prosperity. In the meantime, an increasing number and wide range of change-makers have already found ways to imagine and grow a different economy in our cities, towns, neighbourhoods and villages.
This publication presents 25 case studies of the civic economy - rooted in age-old traditions of the associational economy but using new organising tactics, ways of connecting with people and approaches to collaborative investment.
They show that the civic economy is already a real, vital and growing part of many places, which actively contributes to community resilience, everyday innovation and shared prosperity. They also reveal how local leaders - that is, all those working together to improve places and their economies, whether in the public, private or third sector - can create the fertile ground for the civic economy to flourish and grow. Most importantly, the remarkable achievements of these 25 trailblazers show why we need to get better at understanding and recognising the role of civic entrepreneurship and enable it to turn ideas into action and impact.
Published 
"We don’t often find people writing in such beautiful prose about arcane and often minuscule policies affecting charity and philanthropy in the U.S. But Roy’s essay should also lead readers to think deeply about the tradeoffs we are making via the nonprofit sector’s close and frequently uncritical relationship with corporate philanthropy. 
Rees joined SCARP in 1969. His four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics and the International Society for Ecological Economics.
Rees said he's always been motivated to help others understand his love of the planet's evolutionary processes. "I have always found ecology stunning and fascinating. How organisms adapt and change in their environments... it exceeds the best science fiction in terms of its sheer wonder," he says. |
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