This House Costs Just $20,000 — But It’s Nicer Than Yours, Fast Co.Exist
Is it possible to build a house that’s cost-effective to someone living below the poverty line? The answer is yes, according to students at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, who worked on the design and construction dilemma for more than 10 years. Last month, they revealed two tiny houses in a community outside of Atlanta that cost just $14,000 each.
How America Is Putting Itself Back Together Again, The Atlantic
As writer James Fallows says, “As a whole, the country may seem to be going to hell.” But as he’s discovered while visiting various towns across America in his single-engine prop plane, there’s actually a groundswell of renewal and innovation already happening — from impressive economic growth in an impoverished area of Mississippi known as the Golden Triangle, to an investment in the Michigan public education system and a creative movement in more than 10 cities where artistic ventures are being celebrated.
Here’s What Happened When This School Made SATs Optional on Applications, Mic
Along with prom and getting your driver’s license, taking the SAT or ACT is a teenage rite of passage. But that’s no longer the case for some college-bound students. In a bold move, George Washington University made standardized test results optional for undergraduate applicants. The positive outcome: A more diverse candidate pool, including a sharp uptick in applications from African-American, Latino and first-generation college students.
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Tag: social innovation
Meet the Entrepreneurs Tackling Neighborhood Problems
Entrepreneurs are everywhere and their impact on their respective neighborhoods resounds. The Business Alliance of Living Local Economies (BALLE) — a nonprofit that supports local economic projects to benefit communities — recently named their 17 BALLE Fellows. Here are five of them.
Jose Corona, Oakland, Calif.
Corona is the CEO and president of Inner City Advisors. Working with entrepreneurs in the local, health food movement, Corona’s company provides startups and small businesses with mentorship in how to recruit and train workers. Currently, he works with companies making natural nut butters, roast coffee and local meat.
His most recent addition is the Fund Good Jobs initiative which invests in small businesses offering living-wage jobs, benefits and advancement opportunities.
Aaron Tanaka, Boston
Since 2005, Tanaka has been working to improve the lives of workers in the Boston area. He began by helping start the Boston Workers’ Alliance, which represents unemployed and underemployed workers. In 2010, his “Ban the Box Campaign” to remove the question regarding prison history from job applications was included in Massachusetts’s criminal record reform bill.
Recently, he co-founded another organization: the Center for Economic Democracy. Youths were the focus of its last major project, which renovated a park and playground and supplied laptops to three public schools.
Jay Bad Heart Bull,Minneapolis
After moving from the Indian reservations in North and South Dakota, Bull settled in Minneapolis. While there, he noticed how the city’s wealth didn’t spread to the Native American population. So, as president and CEO of the Native American Community Development Initiative, he changed that. He brought a Native American-owned bank from Hinckley, Minn., to open a branch in Minneapolis. Further, he highlighted the unique Native American culture by opening an art gallery in the city.
Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Stone Mountain, Ga.
Rogers-Sipp left the south for college in London, but the draw of her hometown was too much, returning to form the Sustainable Rural Regenerative Enterprises for Families. The mission of the group is to revitalize the Deep South’s economy. Her first project started in Gees Bend, Wilcox County with quilting. The quilts were a symbol of the African-American culture, and with that Rogers-Sipp created a cottage industry to jumpstart a cultural tourism economy. She is now doing similar projects in other towns across the south.
Andrea Chen, New Orleans
A high school English teacher, Chen was dismayed to find that many of her 11th and 12th grade students could barely read above a fourth grade level. That’s why she started Propeller — a business incubator and co-working space — to support entrepreneurs and policymakers who want to fix societal problems, such as blighted land, poor schools and food scarcity.
To read about more of these entrepreneurs, click here.
MORE: Why More Cities Are Creating Innovation Labs
When These Maine Businesses Went Up for Sale, Their Employees Said ‘We’ll Buy’
In Deer Isle, Maine, more than 60 residents just became business owners, thanks to the formation of the Island Employee Cooperative.
More than a year ago, the employees of Burnt Cove Market, V & S Variety and The Galley learned that the couple who had owned the businesses for 43 years was retiring and selling them. Fearful that the change in ownership would result in loss of jobs and other negative changes, the employees took the only sensible option — they bought the businesses.
This is the largest merger of businesses in the history of cooperatives — collectively, it’s now called the Island Employee Cooperative — and it’s the largest co-op in Maine and the second largest in New England.
The process to establish this groundbreaking co-op wasn’t easy and took more than a year due to all of the legal work and the size of the businesses. Fortunately, the worker/owners had some help from Independent Retailers Shared Services Cooperative and the Cooperative Development Institute , which assisted with the organization of management, governance, legal and financial systems.
In addition, Coastal Enterprises and the Cooperative Fund of New England pitched in financially to help get the cooperative off the ground.
The Island Employee Cooperative’s feat was not an easy one, but it’s an important one. Not only did it preserve the jobs of its employee and the businesses vital to the residents of the town, it also serves as an example for other workers and cities. That’s because the events leading to its formation and its business model are easily adoptable and adaptable to other businesses across the country.
While the Island Employee Cooperative has shown that it’s possible, the road to the formation of cooperatives would be far easier if cities would invest in their development. Some cities are beginning to do so, such as New York, which just pledged $1 million to facilitate the start of worker cooperatives. Ohio has also been dappling in co-ops by giving small grants for research and technical assistance.
However, until more cities start participating, it’s up to the employees. Clearly, we should never underestimate the little guy.
MORE: These Organizations Are Empowering Female Workers
How Competition Breeds Innovation
Most of us have probably heard the old adage about how competition always brings out the worst in people. While it can cause tension to run high, competition can also be a great way to push people towards a new level of creativity.
And that’s why some cities are harnessing that positive attribute of competition and using government-sponsored contests to bring social good to their communities.
For the past 10 years, Philadelphia has hovered between being the fourth and seventh most dangerous big city in the U.S., according to Governing. This year, after clocking in at number five, the city realized that something needed to change.
So the City of Brotherly Love launched the $100,000 FastFWD challenge – a competition in which entrepreneurs find innovative solutions to crime. The winners received $10,000 each and the opportunity to run a pilot program of their idea. The competition also encouraged the winning programs to collaborate with each other through complementary skill sets. Additionally, it united problems with problem-solvers and was a cost-effective alternative to the usual government procurement process, reports Governing.
This year, one of the winners was Jail Education Solutions. Created by a young entrepreneur whose father was incarcerated in California’s Folsom Prison, the program offers educational opportunities for inmates through tablet-based learning.
With all of the benefits, Philadelphia isn’t the only city hosting competitions.
Last year, New York City rain BigApps – a competition to create innovative apps that would make every New Yorker’s life a little easier. Among the winners: apps that find healthy food at nearby restaurants, locate good child care, calculate savings of installing different home solar-power options and teach software coding to kids.
While it may seem like a daunting task to launch these competitions, it’s actually quite simple. For the past five years, hundreds of these competitions have been held. By following these three principles, according to Governing, you can avoid the early struggles.
1. Identify the problem you want to solve before you create the prize, which should reflect your goals.
2. Prize competitions are best used when the problem has multiple solutions. This will inspire creativity and innovative answers.
3. Every participant needs to get something out of the contest not just the winners, so include mentorship or networking opportunities.
If there’s a problem that your city needs help solving, perhaps you should suggest to your local officials that they hold a contest. Chances are, the answers are right in your community.
MORE: What’s the Best to Spark Creativity Among City Workers?
Want to Spread Positivity? There’s an App for That
Like any great invention, social media platforms have had various effects: We saw them help citizens share messages of freedom and democracy during 2011’s Arab Spring. But we’ve also witnessed teenagers abuse them to bully their peers — sometimes with devastating, fatal consequences.
But two Canadian grads are hoping to usher more positivity through social media with the launch of an app called Posi. With it, users can share positive images and messages with friends and peers; there’s no ability to leave comments, though, which prevents people from leaving snarky comments.
In the short month the app has been available, Posi has been downloaded 3,500 times in 35 countries.
Co-founder Jason Berard came up with the idea for Posi while backpacking. Traveling always left him feeling inspired and enlightened — feelings that were often washed away as soon as he logged into Facebook or other social media platforms. Berard and fellow co-founder Braden Pyper wanted to halt the negativity and instead create, in their words, a “positive sanctuary on our phones” with the app.
“Social media is not about self-promotion and negativity, even though that’s what it’s perceived as,” Berard told the Winnipeg Sun, while referencing the “meanness after meanness after meanness and selfie after selfie after selfie” on existing social media sites. “People are starting to perceive social media as a negative thing, when it’s a really important tool for connection now.”
Forget Washington: These Innovators Are Solving Our Nation’s Problems—Together
Constant gridlock, short-term budget deals and nasty political debates have shown us that politicians are seemingly allergic to compromise — even within their own parties. We know that Congress has trouble working together. But thankfully, as authors William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan have detailed in their book, “The Solution Revolution,” a number of business, nonprofit and innovative individuals are working together to solve the problems once reserved for government. From traffic decongestion to waste management, “The Solution Revolution” examines how government outsiders are teaming up to bring creativity and innovation to problem- solving and offers ways for organizations and individuals alike to get involved. Here, Eggers talks to NationSwell about what inspired this revolution, how it’s changed the way we confront challenges and why anyone can participate.
Why the title “The Solution Revolution” — what exactly does that mean?
We wanted to look beyond the impact of this new way of problem-solving and focus on the solution ecosystems that were emerging, where you had players from business, government, philanthropy all converging around problems to create value. This is really the antithesis of how society has traditionally solved problems. Now you see people volunteering time toward these efforts, crowd-funding capabilities, the rise of socio-entrepreneurial capital, all aligned around common objectives: from providing safe drinking water to promoting healthy living.
What was the impetus for this change?
First of all, you have technology that’s enabled organizations to scale much more rapidly than ever before and to connect with other organizations and individuals. We’ve radically reduced the cost of getting involved. Secondly, you have a talented millennial generation that has put purpose over simply making money, whether as consumers in terms of what they purchase, or what companies they go to work for.
Millennials are driving changes in business ethos. And No. 3, you have this huge transfer of wealth, which has gone into these giant foundations, like the Gates Foundation, which have professionalized philanthropy in terms of applying business principles to it and creating markets around solving problems.
Are there examples where this kind of problem-solving doesn’t work? Would health-care reform have benefited from a more collaborative process?
You’d be hard pressed to find an issue today that government or the nonprofit sector is fixing all alone. There will be failures — and you want there to be failures because innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation ends up in failure — but unlike the dot-com bust, this isn’t a business-to-business market. This is more of an approach that’s going to be refined over time.
How can someone who doesn’t have an entrepreneurial or activist background participate in the revolution?
They can raise money for causes on sites like Network for Good or Crowdrise. They can match volunteer requests to their skills on a site like Spark. And there are all sorts of opportunities to do micro-volunteerism, to visit social innovation incubators and get to know some of these models.
What does the Solution Revolution look like 20 years from now?
I think you’ll have an even better capability to distribute problem-solving and get millions of individuals all contributing a little bit, which in aggregate helps to solve a problem much faster. We’re taking massive projects and modulizing them into tiny, tiny components that either humans will do, or computers will do, or a combination of the two. Crowdsourcing policy, distributed problem-solving, the mechanisms of engaging lots of people simultaneously — all of that is going to become more efficient.
You survey a number of innovative approaches to problem-solving in this book, such as Citizen’s Connect, a mobile app that lets Boston residents send in photos of problems like graffiti or potholes, which are then used to generate a work order. Is there a particular area of innovation that impresses you most?
I’ve spoken at over a dozen business schools and startup incubators, and I’m absolutely fascinated by the business models that students and young entrepreneurs are creating around solving problems. They’re so creative, so ingenious. Just 20 years ago, they would have been inconceivable.
Everything from Waste Ventures, which is using carbon credits and other models to give a better life to waste pickers and change how waste is picked up, to Recyclebank, which is using gamification to incentivize recycling. I’m also impressed by the various startups working on food recovery — 20 years ago you would have had public service announcements telling us to stop wasting food. Now you have entrepreneurs saying we can create markets around this. And that’s incredibly exciting.
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?
Hope Jahren runs the geobiology lab at the University of Hawaii Manoa that bears her name, The Jahren Lab, where scientists study things like the carbon isotope composition of terrestrial land plants. But just because Jahren is brainy, it doesn’t mean she can’t also enjoy showing off her manicure. Jahren noticed that Seventeen magazine regularly invites its readers to share a photo of their nails on Twitter with the hashtag #ManicureMonday. Jahren thought, why not invite female scientists to contribute to this Twitter hashtag in the hopes of changing girls’ perceptions of what it means to be a scientist?
She tweeted her idea and it took off, attracting such manicure photos as that of Sarah Hörst, working on a post-doctorate in Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, who posed her glossy planet-themed nail next to a tiny model of the Mars Rover. Jahren recently tweeted a photo of herself holding a dish of algal infections, which she described as “the bane of our existence here in @JahrenLab.” Other scientists posted photos of their nails gripping beakers or ferns or measuring fossils or accessorizing with leaf insect nymphs.
Young women checking out the Seventeen hashtag responded by tweeting questions to the scientists, and just may have had their minds changed about what a typical scientist looks like. Jahren told Laura Vanderkam of USA Today, “I like to have pretty nails and cute shoes and makeup and dresses, and I do care about the way I look. But I am also very serious about my science, and these two things are not incompatible.” The scientist manicure photos, which continue to appear, sound like a fun Twitter game that just might get girls to consider the important academic field.
MORE: This Woman is Inspiring the Next Generation of Female Engineers
How Can We Beat Homelessness? Predict It Before It Happens
Is it possible for a computer model to predict with more accuracy than a human caseworker which people are likely to become homeless? Marybeth Shinn, the chair of the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University, wanted to find out. So, she and fellow researchers followed 11,000 low-income families in New York City, who were seeking services designed to target at-risk people and keep them from becoming homelessness. They tracked which of the families caseworkers decided to assist and which they passed over — based on the caseworkers’ own judgment — and the eventual outcomes for everyone. The Vanderbilt team also devised a computer model to predict the risk of homelessness, based on variables like childhood trauma, past evictions, previous need for public shelter and low education.
MORE: San Francisco’s homeless take free showers on a bus retrofitted with bathrooms
When the researchers pitted man versus machine, they found that their computer model would have selected the correct families to help 26% more often and reduced the number of families turned away, who later become homeless, by two-thirds. Shinn and her team aren’t suggesting that their model could, or should, replace caseworkers, but they propose that having the right data could help them more effectively identify those who need help the most. The New York Department of Homeless Services agreed, and will now use the model in its HomeBase homelessness prevention program for families.
These 13 Business Ideas Could Change the World
The Social Innovation Lab of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland has announced 13 winning projects for 2013-2014. The lab aims to support promising business projects that pioneer solutions to widespread social problems. Check out these budding entrepreneurs’ brilliant ideas, including a portable patient profile app for children and adults with neurodevelopmental disabilities, and a website that supports American manufacturing by collecting pledges from citizens to buy a certain amount of made-in-the-USA good each month.
Did Someone Die So You Could Make That Call?
You might not know that some of our cell phones include raw materials that come from mines that use child labor and involve violent militia groups. But it shouldn’t have to be this way. That’s why social tech company FairPhone is making cell phones “that put social values first” with more ethically sourced materials. FairPhone’s initial 25,000 production run sold out, but you can place an order for the next batches. FairPhone’s big picture is about proving that all kinds of tech and products can be kind as well as cool. For something like our phones that are practically glued to our bodies, I think this is a great place to start.