April 2009 Archives
A bit behind schedule due to the ongoing blah interruption, but am finally finalizing my venture class final exam.
Wish we didn't have to give 'em--students would benefit much more from putting their energy into more public projects--but rules is rules.
The innovative creator of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School has designed the poster for this year's MoCCA fundraiser.
Above: Flickr user Chupacabras is posting photos of Mexico City museums closed due to swine flu.
By coincidence, I have a student in Mexico right now who has to live in quarantine due to the scare, and I've spent the better part of the past week waylaid by some #$!?! bug that's going around up here.*
This got me thinking about the organizational structures of illness in times past, a question that fascinated me as a tyke thanks to educational childrens books my grandparents had kept from the 1940s. In those books quarantine was a social norm--I still remember illustrations of houses in quarantine and other areas that savvy kids should avoid. These books also put me on the lookout for old quarantine signs at flea markets, a cool relic of lost time.
That Mexico has so readily issued quarantine notices and closures while the U.S. has, for all the scare talk, relatively held back speaks to a seismic cultural shift in the years since the polio, mumps and measles vaccines have become standard. Worth noting in this context is the interplay of quarantine with discrimination, a factor in the response to AIDS and what some outside the U.S. are calling the Mexican flu. Equally relevant: our shifting scale of what constitutes a noteworthy pandemic--compared to the last great Western flu epidemic, this is barely a blip.
At what point the norm would switch back to that of the 1940s is unclear. If we scale up from 1 death to 100? 1,000? More? And at what point is there an ethical obligation to avoid public interaction or to shut down your real-world social medium?
Worthwhile questions to consider, but not now--gotta take my Benedryl.
*I'm not joining in the NYC swine flu hysteria, obvs, which at times has been rather amusing in the way every sniffle can be taken to be fatal. Soooo, not wanting to join in the mass panic & out of a misguided sense of duty last night I dragged myself to class, where my students aptly teased me for consigning them to their deaths. As they pointed out, while their imminent demise could be seen as a bad thing, at least it would give them a valid excuse for not completing their final projects.
The other interesting thing about this bug, at least for me, is that it has been wreaking havoc with my memory & communication. I'm normally weak with names--I tend to recall personality markers, not labels--but this past week has been an absolute nominal jumble. I'll look at people I know and address them by names of people not there, and I'll write words with no relation to what I'm speaking or thinking. A real Oliver Saks experience.
Evoking the Costume Institute's recent superheroes & fashion, a Met Museum satellite store at the JFK airport looks to comics merch for profits. And it's far from alone. A hemophilia charity organizes an X-Men-themed event; a joint venture raises money for creators in need through digital comics on iTunes; Fundraisers.com touts comics as a moneymaking obesity cure.
What are the broader ramifications of this trend? More soon . . .
I was taking a break from end of semester class prep--just another Saturday night in April--so I decided to catch up on the latest "social enterprise" tags in Flickr. A series of the recent pictures came from the account of Shivani Mair, a broadcaster, producer and "bright young star" of social enterprise in the UK.
For more on her work in the essential area of youth and broadcast media, check out Creative Careers Surgery, which features the apt slogan, "Life isn't about finding yourself . . . it's about creating yourself!"
I mentioned this over at JustMeans, but it bears repeating here:
Social enterprise experts have argued for remaking charity in the image of business by establishing discrete goals and quantifiable metrics.
But what if that's exactly where business went wrong?
Goals Gone Wild is a must-read for anyone concerned with effective strategies for social benefit.
(On a somewhat related note, also check out The Desert of the Real Good.)
I've been looking at career resources for my social enterprise class. From the Vault guide to government and nonprofit employers, an interesting Zagat-y assessment of working at the Rockefeller Foundation:
Insiders have noticed a culture shift since Judith Rodin took over as CEO in 2004 and several vice presidents have left the company. By one account, the foundation used to be a great place to work, but "management tries to behave like big company gurus" at the "new and dysfunctional" Rockefeller Foundation. As a result, the staff suffers from "low morale."
A sign at a construction site across from St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Apparently the alphabet of virtue stops at C.
My research trip has left me focusing primarily on class prep and review over the past week + for the next couple days--interesting stuff, though, from the debate over metrics to social enterprise landmines. I'm also pulling together a list of websites on various issues pertaining to do-goodery--perhaps I'll post it the links in the sidebar when I'm done.
For some reflections on the side, check out my latest Justmeans post, tweets and comments at Tactical Philanthropy.
I've been away on a research trip & need to plunge into prep for class tonight, but expect some fun (and informative, I hope) stuff here & at JustMeans soon!
Above: a sign of the times, as a new jeans company ad campaign pokes fun at business lingo in a recession.
(Cross-posted from JustMeans)
Sean Stannard-Stockton has provided an excellent overview of The Center for Effective Philanthropy's three basic principles of, well, effective philanthropy:
1. Clear goals;
2. Coherent, well-implemented strategies;
3. Relevant performance indicators.
If you come to charity by way of the business world, this formula no doubt sounds familiar. In fact, it's the staple of many an intro entrepreneurship class--including my own--as well as the foundation of leading how-to books for start-ups.
Which isn't to say it's bad advice--quite the contrary. Whether you're running a charitable foundation or a social business funded by earned income, these three basic principles are essential for success.
However, that doesn't mean they're in themselves sufficient to succeed. As important as these principles are, the fact remains that a charitable venture can be faithful to all three and still end up a failure--not in spite of its goals, strategies and performance indicators, but because of them.
The problem isn't that these are business principles inapplicable to charity--that's a false dichotomy, as unhelpful as saying that the mundane rules of meter and rhythm are irrelevant for creating sublime poetry. Rather, the danger lies in reducing any corporate environment--whether charitable or commercial--to a set of tasks and rules.
Formulae such as this fall short of addressing the relation between part and whole. On one level, they tend to frame a social issue in such a way as to isolate it from its broader social context. In so doing they create micro-solutions that can actually exacerbate macro-problems, if not fail to reach the target goal itself.
Marshall McLuhan was wont to say that the specialist is someone who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy, and we tend to see a similar phenomenon in charity. As I've said elsewhere, it's like telling ourselves that we'll be happy if we reach our target weight--we can reduce philanthropy to a clear goal with coherent strategies and relevant metrics, and yet at the end of our diet find ourselves twice as unhappy as when we began.
This brings me to a deeper problem with such principles--namely, their insufficiency for creating an environment that relates to us as human beings. We consist of an array of transactional rules, from blood flow to heartbeat to language norms to systems of exchange. At the same time we are all more than that, from the collectives we inhabit to our inner sense of self. A business with a sterile mechanistic culture breeds dissatisfaction and in so doing generates systemic inefficiencies; a charity even more so, given its stronger transformative valence.
This, in short, is the irony of our present models of effective charity: the more we reduce charity to efficient transaction-based problem-solving, the less efficient charity is likely to become. For such principles to function as we'd like, we need to understand how they work together to create something more.
A brilliant study in the link between networks and identity: a map that portrays West Superior, Wisconsin as the heart of the nation's transportation system. New York City is the belly button.
An explanatory note proclaims:
"It is an interesting fact that in no other portion of the known world can any such analogy be found between the natural and artificial channels of commerce and circulatory and digestive apparatus of man."
A social enterprise coffee company riffs off the Chock Full o' Nuts design and gets sued. My take here.
The HBO series In Treatment reminds me of the 1950s comic Psychoanalysis, which used the comic book format to make Freudianism accessible.
The book is one of several noble failures in socially responsible publishing after the comic book inquisition of the 1950s; do-gooders interested in a more compelling example would do well to track down reprints of EC's earlier Shock SuspenStories, which took on racism, sexual exploitation, mob justice and host of other hot-button issues.
Another must-read from the same company: Judgment Day, in Weird Fantasy 18 (online here). This story & issues of Shock made a huge impression on me when I was a tyke scoring copies of ECs for a dollar a pop at flea markets & private homes.
A UK charity has sparked a religious war with a comic strip aimed at promoting tolerance. The latest issue of Who Cares? Trust magazine Klic! features Standing Up For What You Believe In, in which a cross-wearing Christian bullies a Muslim girl for wearing a hijab. The key scene (image above):
In a cartoon strip, a boy wearing a large cross around his neck is shown telling a friend that a smiling Muslim girl in a veil looks like a terrorist.
He later confronts her and shouts: "Hey, whatever your name is, what are you hiding under your turban?"
She replies that the garment is called a hijab and that it is part of her religion "like the cross you wear".
The girl is then shown standing up for another boy, who is being bullied, and her behaviour is contrasted with that of the boy wearing the cross.
Some Christians are in an uproar over being stereotyped as bigots, and the fact that the charity receives a substantial amount of funding from the government is only stoking the fire.
The charity's intriguing response: the cross is not a reference to Christians.
Who Cares? Trust chief executive Natasha Finlayson described the cross as "bling" rather than a religious symbol.
Via Robot 6
My thoughts on the hyped SSIR article here.
A 1938 Listerine ad in Home Needlecraft magazine positions that brand as a defense against life's dangerous moments.
Notice the intriguing gender dynamics. There's more going on here than a way to avoid a cold--Listerine gives women than strength to move past repulsive men and an attack of cold feet so they can live--and love--free from fear. She sleeps like a baby now!
Related rhetorical elements--the ad begins with a fresh breeze blowing, and the scene with the woman turning away from the man is conspicuously set on "Lex Ave." Not "Lexington Ave" as on real street signs, but Lex--with lex, of course, being the Latin word for "law." I really wish I could meet the person who designed this--it's brilliant counterculture.
In this video, Southwest shows employees receiving unexpected $10K bonuses. The promo promotes the image of a caring corporation, something that can be a powerful draw both for employee retention and consumer purchases.
One other thing that catches my eye--the added blurb that Southwest cares so much that it paid the employees' taxes on the bonus. Which is cool and all, but the tax paid theoretically counts as income to the employee, which in turn is taxed. So let's assume Southwest paid that tax--this, in turn, would be taxable income, which in turn . . . .
The real reason the U.S. did not torture during World War II--the Red Cross would have smacked us upside the face!
Check out the adventures of Golden Age superhero The Red Cross, Master of Modern Medical Arts at David Z's blog, here and here. As Journalista notes, chances are the use of mark probably wasn't approved by the rights holder!
The words we use for corporate identity--not just corporation, but terms such as social enterprise and civil society--are from one perspective sophisticated forms of data mapping, akin to the cutting-edge 3D visualizations of choreography at Synchronous Objects.
This article on the fractal root of quantum physics resonates with my article on the nature of social enterprise.
Really!
As I type this, I'm listening to an environmental law lecture by Maryland law prof Robert Percival. One thing he covers: Chernobyl, including a visit to its infamous abandoned amusement park.
Today on Just Means, I offer my thoughts on the new social enterprise "swoosh" certification mark. Today's my birthday, so I'm grumpy--beware my wrath!