I am trying to find time to get back to this blog and updated my Facebook page to create away of keeping track of some of the resources, especially those at Change.Org. I found two interesting posts over the weekend from Social Entrepreneurship on Facebook. Nathaniel Whittemore on an interview with America Forward on the Social Innovation Fund.
I know that is usually the interviewee one pays the most attention to, but I really liked what the interviewer said about a set of principles being distinct from orthodoxy.
Change.org: Makes sense, and is definitely an evolving expression of progressive sentiment. It seems to me that part of the increasing political pragmatism is a sense that a set of principles can be distinct from an orthodoxy about how to achieve them. No compromising on closing the achievement gap in schools, for example, and an absolute fervor that it is government's job to lead that fight, but an openness to how to get there.
Below is from another Change.org post at Social Entrepreneurship. This time Nathaniel writes about Andrew Wolk and his recent attendance at the Future Trends Forum in Madrid, Spain. This is the type of thinking that is going to be necessary to get thousands, maybe millions of different groups working for the Millennium Development Goals to come together to make a change from the bottom up. While I support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and pushing the developed world to keep their promise I remain skeptical of their resolve. If postive change can be seen by regular people in the developed world so that they start to believe that real change is possible, then we have a far better chance of leveraging political policy.
I left Madrid with two takeaways I thought were worth sharing. The first was a general agreement that we have been too focused on scale by replication, and have not thought enough about scaling ideas. While this is not new for this blog, I heard a new angle on what should be an increased emphasis on collaboration. As one attendee put it, we do not need another water filtration system to solve the world’s clean water access problem; rather, we need to bring everyone working on the issue of clean water together to collaborate and work on a distribution system of the best solutions.
