Robyn Stegman, Author at ChangingMedia

Jun 03

The Failure of Hipster Trickle Down Theory

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 4 Comments

Let me start with a disclaimer. I shop local and I believe more people should ditch the big box retailers to support the independent local businesses in their community. I believe in buying local not only because it has a greater positive impact on the economy but because it’s a better experience. I love the used book owner who saves books on the circus for me because he knows I love to find rare books on that topic for gifts for my father. I love one business owner who grabbed me out of the street to sample the latest beer he got in. I adore the quirk, the experiences, the people that you will never find without small, locally owned, independent businesses.

With that off my chest I begin part two of my examination of the Keep Austin Weird campaign and the way Baltimore has led me to examine it with three guiding questions:

Who gets to define weird?
Who benefits from weird?
How can we celebrate a weird economy?

In my last post I looked at the narrow definition of weird celebrated in the “Keep Weird” campaigns. This post will pick up on that thread to look at the effect of that definition.

“Keep Weird” campaigns generally focus on main streets full of small boutique businesses teaming with the young eccentrics. They promote the idea that by keeping these weird places alive the city will thrive. To me, this idea sounds similar to Richard Florida’s failed promise of the creative class. Florida promoted what I’ll call the “Hipster Trickle Down Theory.” Basically in order to save a dying city, you should make it look cool so that you can attract young, college-educated, professionals to your city.

The idea that the hipsters flocking to Detroit, Philadelphia, and even our fair city of Baltimore will bring a new economic renewal has two serious flaws. The first is that like most immigrants, these new residents often form pockets of people just like them, impacting those of their kind more than the city’s natives. This influx generally results in a new suburb, only this time it is in the city limits.

Again, it is this narrow definition of weird that is the downfall of this campaign. “Keep Weird” campaigns often do not recognize wide array of restaurants, stores, and other local businesses found in non-white areas. This specific variety of weird excludes a large part of the urban population. I think it is not a coincidence that the two largest “Weird” campaigns reside in cities with smaller African American populations than the national average. Austin comes in at 8.8 percent and Portland at 6 percent compared to a national average of 12.8%. Instead of being the symbol of inclusivity they claim to be, these campaigns generally celebrate an exclusive vision of what it means to be “Weird.” It is no surprise then that their economic benefits often fail to “trickle down” to the rest of the city.

The second flaw is the economic potential of the creative class and the small businesses they adore currently are not able to replace the powerhouses of industry that came before. While these small local businesses are important (see disclaimer above) they generally represent a small portion of the overall economic ecosystem. Currently what are really keeping those places weird are the businesses that pay people enough to patronize local businesses. Look at any rust belt town and you’ll see that when your industry dies, your local businesses tend to die with it.

Just because a business is local doesn’t mean it has what it takes to succeed. I think we need to stop encouraging people to pay a premium to patronize poor business models. What we should really focus on is how we can provide training, advice, and resources for business owners so that they can compete. One of the reported successes of the Keep Austin Weird campaign was that it stopped a Borders from opening by a local record and book store. I’m about to say what could be interpreted as a terrible capitalist-pig Scroogian statement here (see disclaimer above): if Keep Austin Weird was so wildly successful wouldn’t the local record and bookstore be able to compete against Borders since loyal Austin residents would obviously chose the local store over the corporate entity? If we want local businesses to succeed, I think we need to start talking about why local stores can’t compete and how we can help them beat out the competition.

The businesses on Main Street will not replace the jobs at the steel mill anytime soon. We need a grander vision of the new economy and I think we need to expand from simply “buy local” to growing sustainable and people-friendly local businesses. There are some local markets that businesses can take advantage of. Take Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland which puts people back to work laundering for the city’s remaining economic powerhouses: the hospitals and universities. However, if we are seeking to beat the corporate behemoths, Austin, Portland, or Baltimore can’t do it alone. We need local businesses that are going to employ more than mom and pop and oftentimes that means selling beyond our city borders. To avoid being hypocritical (although I know hipsters love that state of being), that also means we also need to buy beyond our borders. There’s nothing wrong with this. Given the quality of Maryland wine, I want things produced outside of my community and my guess is you do too.

So I return to the beginning. How do we keep the weird shopkeepers I love in business, celebrate weird beyond Main Street, and strengthen our weird economy? Well folks, tune in next time for my third and final installment that offers a vision for a better way to celebrate weird in our cities.

May 20

Weird Before It Was Cool

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, ChangeEngine challenged us to come up with a tagline for Baltimore. The one I chose was a spin on the Keep Austin Weird campaign:

Keep Austin Weird is a slogan created by Red Wassenich and adopted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance to promote local business in Austin, Texas. It has been seen as a huge success in celebrating the city’s tolerance, innovation, and local flavor. The campaign has spawned hundreds of knock-offs including Keep Portland Weird, Keep Ashville Weird, and even the small town in Virginia where I am currently writing this has a Keep Staunton Weird campaign.

While I love the celebration of quirk, seeing the campaign through the lens of Baltimore brings some interesting questions to light that I am going to explore in a three part series. Over the next weeks I will look at the Keep Austin Weird campaign and ask three key questions:

Who gets to define weird?
Who benefits from weird?
How can we celebrate a weird economy?

The first question hit me when I was reading Lindsey Davis’ blog this week on “Embracing the Noise.” Often times the “Keep Weird” campaigns focus on businesses or festivals that define the city but in reality some of our favorite things about our locale is the people you find on the streets. The “Oh Baltimore” moments people have shared this past week with ChangeEngine show a side of Baltimore often not embraced by people who try to brand our city, but nevertheless are one of the reasons we stay.

This brings me to my first question: who gets to define weird? One of the criticism of the Keep Portland Weird campaign is that it only celebrates the young Portlandia generation and not the original residents of the Oregon town. Most campaigns generally only celebrate brick and mortar local businesses, excluding hustlers like the amazing makeshift market that appears daily on the corner of 25th and North. Keep Weird campaigns tend to focus on gentrified areas where local businesses thrive and problems are kept at bay.

We often deny that weird can sometimes be uncomfortable. The man who shouts at you for no apparent reason, the group of loiterers who mingle at the bus stop on the corner, the person who asks you for money every time you leave the grocery store are all part of the city too but rarely are they symbols of any Keep Weird campaign. This is why I love guest blogger Devan Southerland’s love note to Lexington Market. When you watch the lost tourist souls, bravely venturing from the Inner Harbor, their wide eyes desperately trying to get a Findley’s crab cake, you realize like tourists in every city they fail to see what truly makes this city incredible. It is not the crab cake that defines Baltimore, it is the people you have to weave through to get there.

In Baltimore everyone defines our city. It reminds me of a line from “Good Morning Baltimore” in John Waters’ Hairspray:

There’s the flasher who lives next door
There’s the bum on his bar room stool
They wish me luck as I go to school.”

It seems like Baltimore has always been defined by its more seedy elements. After all, our most famous resident died in a gutter. The most popular TV show about the city is The Wire putting the city’s problems and complexities in full view. This is why most people outside of the city give me a skeptical look when I describe the city as magical. On the surface Baltimore doesn’t seems like the king of weird. We have nothing to compare to South by Southwest, we’re not the live music capital of the world, we don’t have a robust local business scene, and while growing everyday our population of hipsters has not yet sufficiently taken over the city to turn it into the next weird colony.

What we do have is a redefinition of weird that is more than a celebration of gentrified funkiness. Our “Oh Baltimore” can be simultaneously uncomfortable and endearing. It is a city where “the sketchy” part of town is only two blocks away from “the nice” part of town and no one can hide from our city’s problems. As with most major cities we have our divisions and deep rooted problems, yet unlike most cities our grit is what makes us iconic. Our weird is what unites us. It doesn’t solely reside in AVAM or MICA or Hampden, it is on every corner, it relaxes on stoops, it dies in gutters, it lives in bustling markets. That’s because Baltimore was weird before it was cool and we’ll be weird long after.

May 06

The Business End of Social Change

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

Perhaps by now you have noticed the spiffy new banner to accompany my post (thanks to blog-master-extraordinaire Hasdai Westbrook). Yet perhaps now you are wondering, “What exactly is a thagomizer and what does it have to do with your blog?”

As a dino-phile it is only fitting that I find inspiration for the title of my blog from my favorite “terrible lizard,” the Stegosaurus. The spiky end of a Stegosaurus tail is called a “thagomizer” and it is the business end of Stegosaurus: it is what packs the punch, delivers the painful blow, and shows predators who’s boss. Similarly how we create, define, and share wealth is, in this blogger’s opinion, the business end of social change. It pays our salary, funds our programs, and defines success. The economy is both a constructive and destructive driver and plays a central role in everyone’s life and pursuit of happiness. If we are looking to radically change our world to maximize the happiness and wellness of everyone then I think we need to start with what we value.

The traditional nonprofit model separates the way we raise money from the way we use it for social good. Donors make money doing everything from finding oil to running big box stores and then give it to nonprofits who use it for various projects for social change. The donor side then is free to consider the best ways to make money without regard to social impact and the nonprofit can focus on doing good with no consideration of economic impact. In this way we separate organizations and actions that create money from those that create social good.

I believe this results in many of the problems Scott Burkholder has commented on in his series on Dan Pollata’s Ted Talk on the way we think about charity. He points out five challenges social change makers face:

Below average compensation
Small or no budget for advertising and marketing
No tolerance for taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue
Expectation to make change in short time frames
No profit to attract risk capital

When we create a split between organizational and personal contributions to the economy and contributions to social good we do not expect the way we make money will make us happier or more well and we are mistrustful of any model of social good that also seeks to make money. It is for that reason we create different standards for nonprofits than businesses. Nonprofits must use the bare minimum amount of money in order to run their program (i.e. no overhead), give no economic incentive to their employees (i.e. minimum compensation), and must always be able to produce results from economic inputs (i.e. no risk, no innovation, just results) because it is the only way they can prove their value.

Nonprofits are marginalized as takers rather than contributors to our society since money is the thing most valued and nonprofits by definition take money without offering any economic return. This makes them subject to their donors who do have money, and thus power to dictate how a nonprofit operates. Innovation in social change in this system then requires nonprofits to find donors to take a risk. Without willing funders a nonprofit cannot succeed.

Take for example Artprize, an innovative art initiative in Grand Rapids featured on the ChangeEngine blog this week. Founder Rick DeVos is grandson of the co-founder of Amway, Richard DeVos and much of the funding for Artprize comes from various DeVos or Van Andel (the other Amway co-founder) family foundations. While the method of giving out Artprize is democratic, participatory, and a brilliant model, the funding model hasn’t shifted much since ancient systems of patronage. To create change we often have to rely on finding the Rick Devoses of the world, the people with the access to money but the vision to invest in something new.

What first interested me in the economy, social enterprise, and alternative ways of exchanging was this conundrum. How do we merge the economic creation with the creation of social good? How do we take the ability to influence and control social change out of the hands of a few wealthy individuals and businesses? The Thagomizer is a way to explore those questions and consider how to:

Change what we value and find ways to measure and compensate those who make our lives, society and world better
Blur the line between business and nonprofit by creating businesses that measure social impact and nonprofits that are funded through their own economic activities
Give everyone the economic opportunity to have the ability to improve their lives and give to others

By tearing down the walls between making money and doing good, we can begin to start a conversation about how we can do both at the same time.

Apr 22

Educating for a Chaotic World

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 3 Comments

With unemployment remaining a serious issue in the United States, many students are returning to school in hope that it will give them a leg up in the workforce. Formalized education is supposed to confer upon students a higher status that allows for greater opportunities, yet sadly this is not always the case.

Growing up in Michigan, you would always hear people lament of the days when you could graduate high school and go over and get a decent job at the auto plant with a wage large enough to support your family and a decent pension. In fact my high school was strategically located just across the street from a GM plant so young students could graduate and get their union card on the same day. Unfortunately as G. Asenath Andrews, the principal of Catherine Fergueson Academy points out now, “If you don’t finish high school, you can get a job at McDonalds, and if you finish high school, you can get a job at McDonalds.” What’s the incentive for education then, if after twelve years you still find yourself with the same options?

So the question, then, is how do you create an education system that expands a student’s economic options? Perhaps the most direct solution to this problem is job training. For example Youth Build employs low-income youth to build affordable housing in their communities while getting their GED or high school diploma. The youth in the program get on-the-job training and leadership development in the program that prepares them to enter the workforce. At my own high school, General Motors offered full scholarships for students in engineering as long as they promised to work for the company for two years after they finished their schooling. Colleges around the country are also working with industries to create professional programs that help train students for available jobs.

But what happens when the economy shifts again, and the skills you have are no longer applicable? How do you train students not only for the jobs available now but the jobs in the future? That’s where 21st Century Learning comes in, a framework for teaching students the skills they need to succeed in our new economy. Instead of focusing solely on knowledge (i.e. reading and math test scores), they focus on giving students the tools they need to find out and apply information to real world problems.The 21st Century Framework focuses on the 4Cs – Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity and innovation. It shifts the role of a teacher from being a sage on the stage, imparting knowledge to students, to being a guide on the side who helps students find the information for themselves. In this way they are preparing students for the lifetime of learning necessary to succeed in this economy.

One example of 21st Century Learning in action is the Dewitt Creativity Group, which re-imagines a school as a center of creativity for the community. As founders Jason LaFay and Jeff Croley state, “This is an economy that requires people to develop and exercise skills and forms of knowledge such as: critical thinking, technological proficiency, willingness to accept the differences of others, networking, constant reinvention of the self, and the ability to design and implement innovative concepts/practices. Without these skills and forms of knowledge individuals, communities, and countries will fail to prosper.”

To train students for the new economy they’ve turned their classroom into a center of creativity where students work on initiatives such as the Adopt-A-Business program, where students gain real work world experiences by providing creative services to businesses. In this program, students are presented with real-life problems. They have to research, propose, and implement solutions, teaching them how to apply their education to business needs.

While I was working in Detroit, I got to work with Catherine Fergueson Academy, a school for young pregnant women and mothers committed to providing a relevant education that prepares them to succeed. Their school puts their students in real-world work places and engages in discourse and dialogue on setting and reaching their educational goals. One of the first things you’ll notice about the school is they have a working farm in the back where students are trained in how to grow their own food and agribusinesses, how to make a profit selling the products of their harvest. Students take care of bees, an orchard of fruit trees, vegetables, and even goats and rabbits. The farm teaches them a new way of thinking about the planet and consumption, how to take care of themselves and their family, and how to make money.

In order to become successful in this chaotic economy we need to train our students to become part of what Fast Company calls Generation Flux. “What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions.” From the earliest age, young people are asked to identify what “they want to be when they grow up” but what happens if the world no longer needs automobile workers or firefighters? Members of Generation Flux need to be able to pick up new skills quickly, solve problems, and make connections to constantly create new opportunities. In order to train this new generation we need schools to become hacker spaces, labs, and incubators where students can experiment, collaborate, research, and apply what they’ve learned.

Today much of my career has been built on working with social media. But when I graduated high school, Facebook was still exclusive to college students and Twitter hadn’t been invented yet. There were no classes on social media in college but I was able to build the knowledge of the new technology on my own and apply what I had learned about best practices in communications to this new medium. To succeed in today’s economy a student needs to be a detective to figure out how to learn whatever skill is relevant to the day’s realites and connect the dots between what is already known. We need new systems of education that are focused on building skills for the modern workplace and once again providing an education that opens doors for new economic opportunities.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Bill Owen

Apr 08

An End to Cash?

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | No Comments

In my last post I discussed why giving cash to people in poverty might be the best option. However according to Bill Gates there may be an even better way. The Gates Foundation along with several other partners have formed the Better Than Cash Alliance to promote electronic payments over cash. Gates believes replacing electronic benefits with cash can more effectively lift people out of poverty while being cheaper and more transparent for governments.

One of the pros to electronic payments is that it makes it easier for people to see where the money is going and get financial services. Apps similar to Mint.com could be created to easily show people where they are spending their money and provide suggestions for spending it in a more sustainable way. Research has shown switching to digital payments increases access to savings accounts and encourages people to save, making it easier for them to lift themselves out of poverty. Mobile technology combined with online banking and education could put financial literacy and management training in the palms of every person in poverty throughout the world.

Electronic payments could also help woman gain more control over their financial futures in male-dominated societies. With cash, it is easier for a husband to take money from a woman but with electronic money in her name it is easier for her to keep and choose where money is spent. Electronic payment can also make it easier to prevent all kinds of theft and fraud and ensure that any money given goes to the intended recipient.

But one of the major problems I have with this, indeed really the only reason I still carry cash, is the cost to small businesses. One of the valuable qualities of cash is that it can be exchanged anywhere. You can use it to pay for a hot dog on the street, for admission at the door of a concert, or for your baby sitter when you return home that night. Most of these vendors aren’t going to carry around a credit card machine anytime soon. At least in America, accepting credit and debit cards means paying fees on every transaction and buying technology to process it. If your income is limited to electronic payments it can cut out microentreprenuers like my beloved hustlers.

Innovations such as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest project Square might change that. He has created a small device that can plug into an iPad or cell phone and take credit cards anywhere. However it still comes with a 2.75 percent fee for every transaction, meaning less money is going to your community and more money is going to credit card companies.

Could electronic payments revolutionize the way we handle money? Certainly I would love to have a financial planner in the palm of my hands, monitoring my decisions, and providing tips for ensuring my personal financial sustainability. It could help more people in poverty have control over their financial futures. However it could also further restrict our freedom to exchange and hurt some of the creativity and ingenuity that happens on a small scale in our economy. I’d be the first to agree we need something ‘better than cash’ but I think the jury is still out on whether electronic payments are it.

IMAGE CREDIT. CC Photo by Flickr user epSos.

Mar 25

Let Them Eat Subway

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 2 Comments

I was walking down the street this weekend when two homeless men stopped me to ask for a couple of dollars to buy a sandwich. I told them I didn’t have cash on me but one of the men suggested that I could just go to Subway and buy them the sandwich on my credit card. I agreed and while we were waiting for the sub, he says to me “It’s a shame you didn’t have cash, we would have been able to get cheaper food.” Now my first thought was something akin to “You ungrateful SOB,” but then I realized he was right and in fact being a good steward of my charity. If I had given him the seven dollars I spent at Subway he might have been able to go to the corner store where he could have gotten a decent meal for $4 and still had $3 to put toward his next meal. If I wanted more bang for my buck in terms of impact on his empty stomach I should have just given him cash.

This is a problem with our welfare system as well. There are programs to pay for heating, food, medical expenses, etc. but they are all in separate pots and restricted for a limited purpose. Not only does that mean people are forced to go to dozens of different places with different application processes to meet their needs, they are also not able to budget in a way that works for them. This has led to a black market where people sell or trade their food stamps to pay for rent, shoes, heat, diapers and other necessities. While some people are appalled by the business of buying and selling welfare benefits, the practice allows people to make ends meet.

So why don’t we just give out money? One argument you hear frequently is that by giving a sandwich I at least know my money is spent on food. If I just gave the man $7 he could have used it to fuel the addiction which caused him to be on streets in the first place or for some other nefarious action which would have left him off worse than before and still hungry. The giving of sandwiches is intended to ensure that the money doesn’t go toward actions that would hurt the recipient but it also prevents them from doing anything with the money that might help them, so that, possibly, they would not need me to give them a sandwich. You can’t build financial stability by saving food stamps in a bank account and then using them to pay your heating bill in the winter. In that way it undermines the financial health of the recipient. The system of earmarking donations assumes that the recipient has become poor because they don’t know how to manage their money. So we take control of their financial future.

Malcolm Gladwell points out that any cost that helps a person out of homelessness is far more cost-effective then just meeting their presumed needs in this fascinating piece. He gives the example of a program in Denver that gives chronic homeless people free apartments because the cost of providing an apartment and a case worker is far cheaper than the housing, medical, and other expenses that come as a result of having them out on the streets. Fellow ChangeEngine author Jasmine Arnold offers another example in her blog about asking versus assuming the needs of homeless people. She cites an article from The Economist profiling a charity called Broadway, which moved 84 percent of their clients off the streets simply by asking individuals what they needed to improve their lives. To quote The Economist piece: “The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

I’d like to challenge the assumption that the way the givers of welfare earmark funds does a better job in lifting people out of poverty than the way the recipients would spend it. As economist Uwe E. Reinhardt argues, it is in ineffective. If we are looking to maximize the impact on the recipient per dollar we give then we should give money not benefits. Why? We aren’t experts in other people’s needs. What we think people need might be different than their reality but the walls we’ve built around their benefits prevents them from accessing those funds for anything beyond our understanding of what should lift them up from poverty.

Let’s stop defining people’s needs for them. If we’re going to maximize our impact on someone per dollar spent, we’ve got to stop assuming we have the answer and start asking some questions. Let’s stop giving sandwiches and start helping people get the reigns back on their financial futures.

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of cobalt

Mar 12

Reaching for the American Dream

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

Last week a video on wealth inequality in the US went viral. It shows the stark differences between the way Americans think wealth is distributed now, the way they think it should be, and the way it really is. It raises a compelling point: many Americans are unaware of the serious extremes of wealth in the U.S.

The realities of wealth in America are incredibly different from our common narrative. In a country that puts a spoonful of the American Dream in every child’s bottle, we are raised to believe that wealth is acquired through hard work, an entrepreneurial spirit, determination and perhaps a little luck. A 2012 Pew Research Center report found that 68 percent of Americans agreed that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.” The wealth gap then is perhaps not such a problem because anyone in America could wake up every morning and dive in for a swim in their massive wealth of gold coins if they put in enough time, energy, and creativity to make it happen.

Yet some research reveals major holes in this view of our great country. America is not the dream of economic mobility that we promote in the brochures. Intergenerational earnings elasticity shows how well a father’s earnings is a predictor to the earnings of his son. In other words how does the economic status of your birth affect how much money you can make when you grow up. The higher the number the lower the economic mobility. As you can see in the chart below the United States is pretty low on the economic mobility pole when compared with other developed countries.

State of Working America

Furthermore a report by Miles Corak from the Center for American Progress suggests that the increase in wealth inequality actually leads to a decrease in opportunity. Contrary to the point of view that the increasing gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of America is incentivizing people to increase their personal wealth, this report shows that there is a correlation between income inequality and a decrease in economic mobility called the “Great Gatsby Curve.”

The report looks at three contributors to economic mobility:

Your family‘s ability to invest in your future
The resources and incentives available to you in the market
The investments provided by the state to promote economic mobility

Let’s just look at the first of these three factors. If more and more wealth is held by fewer and fewer people then there are fewer and fewer families with the resources to invest in their child’s future and fewer and fewer children with the education, support, and resources they need to move up the ladder. While we like to promote the idea that the world’s billionaires made their fortune with their own sweat, many of them got a huge head start with privileges they received by the sheer lottery of their birth. One of the biggest is access to credit and access to capital, which often comes from their parents. It’s a lot easier to build wealth when you have a little to begin with. Again, as less and less wealth is held in the hands of the many, that means there are fewer resources for more people to build wealth, and thus less economic mobility.

Less wealth also means less economic stability. This chart, tweeted by Amir Sufi at the University of Chicago, shows how the recession affected people at different income levels. Those with a lot of wealth depend less and less on their incomes and have a lot more to fall back in times of economic hardship. An economic recession can serve to widen economic inequalities.

The only thing more troubling then the lack of upward mobility in the US, is the number of families experiencing downward mobility. Now more people are struggling just to maintain their economic existence. They are not moving up the ladder but preventing themselves from falling into the chute of poverty. Pew Research data shows that the medium income and net worth is falling and 85 percent of the middle class in America report it is harder to maintain their lifestyle. As part of the first generation to be worse off then the one before, I was making substantially less then my parents made in their first jobs out of college. Daniel Luzer quotes David Frum’s brilliant description of the American worker in his article on The Social Mobility Fairytale:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year.

As incomes fall, the ability to build something for yourself diminishes because you are now struggling just to meet basic needs. The part of the narrative of the American Dream I love is the idea that we all possess the talent, creativity, resources, and ability to make it big. I love that I live in a country where invention and entrepreneurship is celebrated above all else. I also love the idea that we are a country where everyone can create a good life if they work hard enough. We’re not talking about being the next Bill Gates, but just having that white picket fence or whatever success looks like to you. Yet the growing wealth gap in the United States is stealing that dream from most of us. It is becoming harder and harder for the average person to build wealth no matter how hard or smart they work.

The question then is how do we go about closing the gap and ensuring everyone has the resources they need for economic mobility? From the very beginning I’ve looked at how to forge an economy that allows us all to meet our needs while building a healthy community. In my next post I’ll explore a diversity of solutions that specifically tackle this problem of wealth inequality in America. Until then I’d appreciate your thoughts below on how you think we should tackle this growing problem.

To be continued…

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of Vasenka.

Feb 25

Toward a Better World

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | No Comments

Recently I was at a breakfast with social entrepreneurs where we were asked “what do we mean by a ‘better Baltimore?'” It is something we all talk about, it’s embedded in the mission statements of our companies and nonprofits, but what does a better Baltimore actually look like? Happier people? Economic opportunity for all? Healthier physical, emotional, and social well being?

For that matter what do we mean by a “better world?” What are the metrics for determining whether or not we are effectively improving lives or if we are changing anything at all? This question was first voiced by Angelique and it resonates with all of the work we discuss on ChangeEngine. How can we tell whether anything we promote, propose, point out, or implement actually has an effect on the community?

The social change field has gotten better at determining organizational impact. Every nonprofit nowadays seems to be working on a logic model or theory of change. However I think in order to truly measure impact effectively we need a universal measure that:

is a relatively objective system of measurement that allows us to effectively compare models of social change and determine failure as well as success.
examines the whole person and allows for collaboration. People don’t live in silos. Food effects education which effects economic opportunity, etc. In the end what makes a person or a community better and how do we measure that end result?
allows us to track social change trends for communities, cities, countries, and the world.

In the economic sphere of social change the universal measure is profit. I think profit has become the bottom line for most of our work because we believed in the American dream, a theory of change that suggested by increasing profit we could increase our purchasing power which would allow us to access the innovations that would make our lives easier and thus make us happier people. If you’ve read my other blogs here, you’ll know that I don’t think that’s true. I think there are ways to meet our needs without money and I think happiness isn’t measured purely by one’s bank account.

Yet the question of what we should measure is as difficult as trying to determine the meaning of life. Then you have the Herculean task of trying to figure out how to measure it.

There have been some attempts. Many people are familiar with the Bhutanese system to combine measures of spiritual and material development into a measure called Gross National Happiness (GNH). in 2006, Med Jones of the International Institute of Management proposed a second-generation GNH measure that used the following metrics to determine happiness:

Economic wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio and income distribution.
Environmental wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic.
Physical wellness: Indicated via statistical measurement of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses.
Mental wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline of psychotherapy patients.
Workplace wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints and lawsuits.
Social wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates.
Political wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.

Another measure is called National Accounts of Well Being, developed by the New Economy Foundation. They use the scientific definition of “subjective well-being” which suggests in addition to experiencing good feelings people need:

a sense of individual vitality
to undertake activities which are meaningful, engaging, and which make them feel competent and autonomous
a stock of inner resources to help them cope when things go wrong and be resilient to changes beyond their immediate control.

They also believe that it is crucial that people feel a sense of relatedness to other people so in addition to measuring the individual aspects of well-being they also look at the degree of which people have supportive relationships and a sense of connection with others. They have identified seven main components of well being which they measure using national Well-Being profiles.

These measures are just two examples of systems that have the potential to help us define the end result of social change and measure our effect on people and communities.

And now a word from our sponsors…If you have been waiting for a chance to meet me in person your time has come. I will be the Mesh Baltimore Skillshare on March 2 waxing poetic on “How to Bring Your Quirk to Social Media.” After you pump me for information on creating a wacky, bizarre, and totally awesome social media presence, you can attend sessions on writing about food, organizing your life, and homebrewing. Check out Mesh Baltimore and sign up for the Skillshare here.

But wait there’s more! I’m teaming up with UGive.org for a Tweet Chat on “Marketing Your Social Enterprise” on March 6th at 3pm EST. If you share my passion for social enterprise you will not want to miss this discussion! Sign up using EventBrite or just join us using the hashtag #HowDoUGive.

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of mlcastle.

Feb 13

A Rising Tide of Social Change

By Robyn Stegman | ChangeEngine, Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | No Comments

What are you doing on Valentine’s Day this year? Are you crafting for good? Are you celebrating the birth of Anna Howard Shaw? Or are your rising up to end violence against women?

In yesterday’s inspiring post Shannon McGarry highlighted one of the many troubles women face as a result of widespread violence. One line particularly stuck with me, “Being able to go to the toilet without the fear of rape, sexual assault, physical abuse or humiliation is a human right.”

Yep, women have to fight for the right to shit.

Around the world women are denied basic human rights through violence. They are made weapons of war, exploited for economic opportunity, denied access to healthcare, and stripped of legal and economic power.

Lest we believe America is free of concern, let me remind you that one in five young women have been sexually assaulted. Factoring in unreported rapes, about 6 percent of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. Somewhere in America a woman becomes a victim of violence, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. As the proud owner of a vagina myself I’d like to be able to walk down my street, take a hike, or go to a party without fear of sexual harassment or violation.

So I’m here to reissue Shannon’s invitation to join One Billion Rising. In response to the one billion women who have suffered from violence, we are joining the movement and inviting one billion women and those who love them to come out, dance, rise up, and demand an end to this violence.

If you are in Baltimore join us this Thursday, February 14, also known as Valentine’s Day at 5:30pm at the Washington Monument. We’ll have signs, music, and plenty of energy to draw attention to this important issue. This is a time for Baltimore women and those that love them to stand up and support one another! You can find further event details here and in the flyer below. If you are not in Baltimore never fear! There are women rising everywhere! You can find an event in your area using this map.

Sure we’re not going to stop violence against women with one day of dancing and jubilation but we can call attention to this issue. We can come together and turn a statistic into a revolution. We can stand with the one billion women violated and become over a billion for change, for equality, for an end to violence.

Will you rise with us?

Feb 11

You Are the Next Steve Jobs

By Robyn Stegman | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

What do you think of when you hear the word “innovation”? What comes to mind when you hear that buzz word of all buzz words? Do you reminisce about Steve Jobs in his turtle neck? Do you conjure images of Thomas Edison slaving over the light bulb? Do you imagine the Wright Brothers doing the unthinkable at Kitty Hawk? Or do you think of yourself and a community of people like you working together to change the world?

Innovation is usually described as the product of geniuses. It is something that is created for us, not by us. When we tell the story of invention we often ignore the important contributions of others and focus on “eureka” moments by solo inventors. Our patent system is built on this concept. So when we come face to face with some of the world’s most intractable problems we often look to visionaries to come up with the solution that we buy or replicate.

Yet, what if we all became inventors? Collaborative open innovation takes development out of the hands of one inventor playing with filaments in his laboratory and harnesses a worldwide community of inventors, testers, and tweakers. A perfect example is the mountain bike. Mountain bikes were not created by a company but a group of users who were frustrated by the limitations of road bikes and the lack of options for off-road biking. Users modified heavy cruiser bikes with better brakes, racing gears, and fat tires to create a new type of bike called a klunker. Eventually companies picked up on the trend and began producing models of their own.

Charles Leadbeater uses this example to describe how users can create new products that companies would never have thought of. He points out that we often think of innovation as special people in special places creating the ideas that are transported down the pipeline to passive consumers. However more and more we are seeing innovations go in reverse, where users create and define products.

Britta Riley of Windowfarms.org refers to open innovation as R&DIY, Research and Develop it Yourself. She has created an online community that is working on a system of hanging gardens that would allow apartment dwellers to grow their own food with just a little bit of window space. Using her website over 39,000 urban micro-farmers develop and test improvements for an indoor vertical hydroponic food growing system. Windowfarms is an exceptional example of the power of open collaborative innovation for social change. Instead of waiting for “experts” to fix our food system or plugging away at the problem herself, Riley invited a whole score of co-developers to work with her to create innovations that could allow apartment dwellers to grow their own salads right at home. Imagine what other problems we could solve together.

In order to form a new economy, we need radical ideas and companies aren’t going to create them for us. We need a new pool of collaborative open source innovators who share, create, and improve each others work to create new and better ways of meeting our community needs.

Innovation is collaborative and cumulative. Ideas need places to meet, mingle, and mate into something great. Luckily for Charm City residents, there is an event coming up that will give you the opportunity to do just that. Next week community change agents from all walks of life will come together for the third edition of Create Baltimore, an unconference for new ideas and actions to improve the city. Instead of waiting for Apple’s next big announcement or a Nobel laureate to come up with a cure for everything, let’s come together and collaboratively create our own products and models to improve our community.

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of hackNY