In his book Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes the complicated role street gang plays in the everyday life and economics of an impoverished Chicago neighborhood. Venkatesh explains that the gang at its core is a money making operation, and that violence is a negative externally, rather than an end in itself, [...]
The pressures on all of us to filter stories and visual media shouldn’t mean that we’re filtering it out. At my firm, See Change, Inc., we believe the social sector has as much to gain from becoming expert consumers of stories and visual media as it does from refining impact metrics and establishing performance management systems. Metrics [...]
Visual storytelling is a practice that is at once old and new in our sector. Telling stories and creating images are deeply rooted cultural traditions in human society – some of the oldest manifestations of our values and beliefs. We tell stories because historically – ancestrally – this is how we learned. Stories were passed [...]
The collapse of the U.S. economy, and subsequent bailout of the financial sector has brought the phrase “too big to fail” into the collective social conscience. The argument goes that the economy should not be so dependent on any one company that without it, everything falls apart. It seems fairly clear in hindsight why making [...]
I have long believed in the power of market forces and the need for social sector participants to adopt proven practices from the business community for the purpose of achieving impact at an exponentially greater scale. Dan Pallotta’s Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential was a revelation for me. My head bobbed nonstop in [...]
Few topics in the social sector are as ludicrous as the allegedly excessive compensation of non-profit executives. Not only is it a comical thought that anyone truly wanting to enrich themselves would go into the poverty business, it is painfully beside the point. The debate over nonprofit executive compensation has little to do with increasing social [...]
Over three billion people—almost half the world’s population—live on less than $2.50 per day. Nearly one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. Even in the United States, more than three million people experience the indignity and desperation of homelessness each year and nineteen percent of children are living in households below [...]
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