Social-Entrepreneurship

Improving the world, and one’s brain, at the same time

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My wife and I just came back from an inspir­ing Gold­man Prize Award cer­e­mo­ny, where sev­en grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal change­mak­ers were rec­og­nized for their work and resilien­cy, and shared their pas­sion and pur­pose with every­one attend­ing the event. We did hear too from Al Gore, Tra­cy Chap­man, Robert Red­ford, and the founder of the awards 20 years ago, Richard Goldman.

The BBC recent­ly pub­lished an Op-Ed by Mr. Gold­man on the sto­ry behind the Awards them­selves: arti­cle Here. He explains how…

  • - “One morn­ing in 1989, as I sat with my dai­ly break­fast and news­pa­per, I read about the most recent Nobel lau­re­ates and won­dered if there was a com­pa­ra­ble award for envi­ron­men­tal work.”
  • - “We asked a staff mem­ber at our foun­da­tion to do some research and he found that noth­ing yet exist­ed to recog­nise envi­ron­men­tal work on an inter­na­tion­al stage, thus the Gold­man Prize was born.”
  • - “Our choice to focus specif­i­cal­ly on grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers was unique at the time.”

Mr. Gold­man, and the sev­en win­ners, are clear­ly help­ing improve the state of the world.

Now, the “state of the world” does include their very own brains — you may have seen this recent paper on how Vol­un­teer Pro­gram Pro­vides Health Ben­e­fits To Old­er Women

  • - “She and her col­leagues found that EC vol­un­teers showed greater improve­ments in mem­o­ry and exec­u­tive func­tion than those who did not par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gram. In fact, the old­er adults with the low­est base­line per­for­mance in these areas — those most at risk for health dis­par­i­ties — demon­strat­ed the most sig­nif­i­cant gains.”
  • - “Both stud­ies high­light­ed above show that every­day activ­i­ty inter­ven­tions (e.g., EC) can appeal to old­er adults’ desires to remain social­ly engaged and pro­duc­tive in their post-retire­ment years. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, these activ­i­ties pro­vide mea­sur­able phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive health benefits.”

Of course, those ben­e­fits do not accrue only for old­er adults (or just for women), but may help all of us grad­u­al­ly build Cog­ni­tive Reserves through the added nov­el­ty, vari­ety and challenge.

Talk about win/ win!

Relat­ed arti­cles on social entrepreneurship:

“Every­one a Change­mak­er”, Ashoka and Google

Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture

Education @ New York Times

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If you are inter­est­ed in edu­ca­tion reform, social entre­pre­neur­ship and ven­ture phil­antropy, grab a nice cap of tea or cof­fee and enjoy today’s spec­tac­u­lar edi­tion of the New York Times Mag­a­zine.

Must read: insight­ful expert dis­cus­sion on How Many Bil­lion­aires Does It Take to Fix a School System?

Also: excel­lent pieces titled Self-Made Phil­an­thropists, on how ProP­ub­li­ca was con­veived and launched, and For Good, Mea­sure, on the impor­tance and challenges of mea­sur­ing the return on social investments.

Bonus: the news­pa­per’s Week in Review sec­tion brings a throught-pro­vok­ing arti­cle on Brain Enhance­ment Is Wrong, Right?, on the use of drugs for boost­ing brain per­for­mance. Am hap­py to report that no one in the Edu­ca­tion arti­cles sug­gest­ed giv­ing these drugs to mil­lions of kids…

“Everyone a Changemaker”, Ashoka and Google

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What an event yes­ter­day night. My wife and I were for­tu­nate to vis­it the Google Cam­pus and attend the Sixth Annu­al North Amer­i­can Fel­low­ship Induc­tion Pro­gram of Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, a social ven­ture fund where we have been involved for a num­ber of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entre­pre­neurs were elect­ed, and after a fun cock­tail recep­tion the cer­e­mo­ny began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sand­berg (who helped launch Google Foun­da­tion and google.org), Salar Kaman­gar (the mind behind AdWords) gave intro­duc­to­ry remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Born­stein) and how he saw tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ashoka and Google: both [Read more…] about “Every­one a Change­mak­er”, Ashoka and Google

Microfinance, and a very sharp brain

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We would like to join oth­er blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been award­ed the Nobel Peace Price.

The gen­e­sis of micro­fi­nance, in Pro­fes­sor Yunus’ own words.

Not often can we find per­son­i­fied exam­ples of what we write about. For 3 out of the last 4 entries in this blog, I can not think of a bet­ter exam­ple than Muham­mad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank-that launched the field of micro­fi­nance.

The entries:

- The Learn­ing Cycle, includ­ing Con­crete Expe­ri­ence and Active Test­ing: in 1976, when he was a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics, he gave a small loan to a num­ber of vil­lagers. He did­n’t preach. He acted.

- Reflec­tion, that led him to an Aha! moment : “If you can make so many peo­ple so hap­py with such a small amount of mon­ey, why should­n’t you do more of it”? (quot­ed in NY Times today). His direct expe­ri­ence, and this Reflec­tion, gave him the moti­va­tion to try and lit­er­al­ly change the way many poor peo­ple live world­wide. It led to the birth of microfinance.

- The joy of giv­ing: I am sure Muham­mad Yunus, and thou­sands of peo­ple involved in his work, has been amply reward­ed with free dopamine and oxy­tocin. To quote today’s Finan­cial Times, “With­out col­lat­er­al, the sys­tem has to rely on trust and social inter­ac­tion to secure repay­ments. It is these fun­da­men­tal aspects of human nature that can help for­ward not only devel­op­ment, but also peace”.

Plus, giv­en that he has announced he will donate the $1.4m prize mon­ey, we can pre­dict an even high­er dopamine and oxy­tocin release in his brain, cer­tain­ly high­er than in the brain of the writer of this sur­pris­ing arti­cle.

Good news: there is a sol­id pipeline of future Muham­mad Yunus­es, opti­mist and prag­mat­ic social entre­pre­neurs (“New Heroes”, accord­ing to PBS):
— A great book titled How To Change The World, that pro­files the field and some of its most inspir­ing participants
— The pio­neers in sup­port­ing social entre­pre­neurs world­wide: Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Public
— Anoth­er great foun­da­tion: The Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entrepreneurship
— The Change­mak­ers community
— And of course, Con­stant Learn­ing at Grameen

Final­ly, a post on resilien­cy. Enjoy the weekend.

Microfinance and a Very Sharp Brain

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We would like to join oth­er blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been award­ed the Nobel Peace Price.
[Read more…] about Micro­fi­nance and a Very Sharp Brain

Brain and Mind Fitness Programs: resiliency, on top of attention, memory…

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Today:

6.30pm: I leave the office, down­town San Fran­cis­co, and take the train.

6.44pm: just before arriv­ing in my sta­tion, I remem­ber I have an appoint­ment with my hair­dress­er, which means I have to walk in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion than usual.

6.48pm: I find myself walk­ing towards my house, oppo­site direc­tion from my hair­dress­er.

You may have had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. You walk towards where you parked your car. Except that the car is not there. Then you real­ize that, on that pre­cise day, you could­n’t park your car in the usu­al place. And now you have to walk to a dif­fer­ent cor­ner of the park­ing lot. What corner?

Now you may feel dis­ori­ent­ed, not only about where your car may be, but about why we are talk­ing about this…

Well, this sto­ry is a good exam­ple of how our brains work. When we do any­thing a num­ber of times, the rel­e­vant neu­ronal net­works get more and more strong­ly con­nect­ed. “Cells that fire togeth­er wire togeth­er”. We devel­op auto­mat­ic habits, from which it is not easy to escape. We get used to just get­ting out of the metro sta­tion and walk­ing home. We know where we always park our cars.

You may also try an enlight­en­ing exper­i­ment on our habits.

Let me now make a brief detour. Over the last few weeks, I have had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions where the same con­cept has appeared: resilien­cy. Resilien­cy can be defined as “the abil­i­ty to recov­er from a fail­ure”. Resilien­cy is a crit­i­cal Men­tal Mus­cle to train.

I  learned the word 6–7 years ago, at an Ashoka event in Buenos Aires, Argenti­na, orga­nized by social entre­pre­neur Alber­to Croce. Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP Foun­da­tion, used it last week when we were dis­cussing sev­er­al Brain Fit­ness pri­or­i­ties for teach­ers and stu­dents. My friends at the Insti­tute of Heart­Math pro­posed using “devel­op­ing resilien­cy”, instead of “beat­ing Stress”, when we were brain­storm­ing options to part­ner with pro­fes­sion­al asso­ci­a­tions and bring proven anx­i­ety reduc­tion pro­grams to edu­ca­tors and health care pro­fes­sion­als. Mark Katz, when we met with a num­ber of school super­in­ten­dents, empathized how impor­tant for all stu­dents to devel­op the exec­u­tive func­tion of resilien­cy, and how that would help them over­come obsta­cles such as ADD? ADHD and oth­er aca­d­e­m­ic problems.

In the Neu­ro­science of Lead­er­ship post, we saw too that resilien­cy is a crit­i­cal atti­tude, and skill. To not spend too much focus and men­tal ener­gy on try­ing to dou­ble-guess hid­den mean­ings, and the past. To focus, instead, on what we can do next. On what is on our scope of influ­ence. On, as we dis­cussed before, being pos­i­tive .

Let’s sum­ma­rize. First, we have seen that some behav­iors become habits and there­by mind­less habits. They become us. What we call our per­son­al­i­ties. Then, we have seen how impor­tant resilien­cy is.

So, what pre­vents us all from devel­op­ing the habit of resilien­cy and let­ting be part of our behav­ior, habits and personality?

Brain and Mind Fit­ness are impor­tant. We can improve mem­o­ry, atten­tion, stress man­age­ment, decision-making…Now, in a holis­tic way, Brain and Mind Fit­ness includes the exec­u­tive func­tion, or habit, or atti­tude, of resilien­cy. If you know of Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams that allow peo­ple to devel­op it, please let us know. We are work­ing on that too.

Maybe a first step is to re-read the clas­sic Vik­tor Fran­kl’s Man’s Search For Mean­ing.