Category: Council Profiles

How Do You Make Teachers Agents of Change?

Posted on by robbie

Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a coalition of 20,000 teachers in six American communities, got its start in a pizza joint in New York City’s East Village. There, a group of young teachers, including Sydney Morris and Evan Stone, who taught second and sixth grades, respectively, at P.S. 86 in the North Bronx, shared their frustration with the public school system. Of all the complaints, the one that stood out the most was that the educators felt like opportunities for growth and transformation weren’t available, but that they couldn’t do anything about it. In 2010, Morris and Stone founded E4E to empower teachers to be changemakers. NationSwell spoke with the pair about the challenges and rewards of working with an entrenched education system at the green-apple-filled E4E headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
Morris: We were coming to this work straight from the classroom, and I think one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever gotten was “People first, people second, people third.” It really is all about the people, the talent, the ideas they bring, the culture they help create.

Stone: Another piece of advice that we got early on was “Decide what your north star is, and keep your eye on it.” Because you’re going to get lots of ideas from lots of people that sound exciting and could pull you in lots of different directions. But stay true to why you launched this organization, why it’s important. That’s something we constantly check each other on.

Evan Stone joins New York City educators and E4E members in advocating for teacher-informed measures of performance in New York State’s teacher evaluation.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Morris: One thing that our teachers are incredibly excited about, all across the country, is around school climate and student discipline reform. Certainly in today’s times, our membership and our team is incredibly driven by a lens of equity, and we see hugely disproportionate rates of suspensions, expulsions and discipline — particularly for boys of color. Thinking about how we transform our schools into the kinds of safe spaces in which all kids can truly learn really is very closely intertwined with how we discipline students. Moving from a more punitive discipline model to one that is more restorative is something that we’re doing a lot of work on supporting teachers, districts and school systems, because we think it is so directly linked to better outcomes and opportunities for all students.

Stone: Another huge shift that’s happened in our landscape that’s opening the space up for a ton of innovation is we have, for the first time in 16 years, a new federal education law: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act. A lot of the systems under NCLB that were federally mandated have been loosened up to allow state and district flexibility. (This is distinct from Common Core; it’s much broader: how we hold districts accountable, how we fund schools, services that are provided for special populations of students — it’s the whole federal education code, essentially.) [Recently], we had a group of teachers in Albany, [N.Y.] meeting with state education officials, union leaders and others to try to think about what opportunities are available for innovation and how do we really make sure teachers are helping to drive those changes. This is going to be happening in every state, so it’s a real opportunity for our members to take ownership over the new structures that govern school and their profession can look like.

Through E4E, a group of teachers went to Albany, N.Y., to meet with state education officials to discuss the Every Student Succeed Act.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Stone: I’m glad that people didn’t tell us too much, because I think naïveté is sort of a blessing in a startup. As we launched this out of our classroom, I don’t think we had any idea about some of the challenges that we would face in building and running an organization. That allowed us to take each challenge as it came, one at a time, which was really necessary in the early days, when we were still working in school part-time, trying to run this organization part-time and figuring out the myriad things that you need to do to launch and run a nonprofit.

What inspires you?
Morris: The education space is incredibly complex. What helps me get up in the morning is that the positions that we take, the work we do and what our members stand for is a true, rational middle in an otherwise polarized space. One of the biggest myths that exists in the education space is that, if you are pro-reform or pro-change in education, then that must mean you are inherently anti-union. What our members are showing is that, in fact, they are pro-union and pro-change at the same time, calling for critical and significant shifts for the way our profession operates and the way we serve our students, while also believing in the power of teachers coming together to collectively create change.

What’s on your nightstand?
Morris: Do you want the honest answer? I am almost finished with “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Sometimes you go home, and you just need to clear your head. What could be better than wizards and magic and spells? I’ve never read it before, so I felt like I was missing out on a major cultural phenomenon here.

Stone: I am almost finished with “Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream,” Andy Stern’s new book. He’s a really inspirational labor leader that’s thinking about how do we ensure, as our world and our country continues to change, that the American Dream can still exist. It’s a pretty exciting book that pushes our thinking. Even if — when — we have a high-quality education serving all kids, what are the jobs of the future we’re preparing them for? How do make sure that our school system lines up with that and that our country supports opportunity for everyone?

What’s your favorite book of all-time?

Stone: My favorite book of all time is “The Brothers Karamazov,” and the reason is I read it my senior year in high school. It was probably year when I didn’t want to do much work, and my English teacher, with whom I spent three or four months on it because it was quite the tome, was just phenomenal. It made me want to see myself as an intellectual. That book and that teacher had a significant impact on me. One of the goals of the education system is to inspire learning, and that combination of those two did that for me.

Morris: The literature you read at defining moments in your life can be the books that stick out most vividly to you. One of those for me is a book that both played a role in my understanding and appreciation for spirituality and also for a woman’s journey: “The Red Tent.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of women, too, in our work, because teaching in many ways was one of the first careers open to women, and it is a profession where the majority are women, so I’ve been thinking about the role women have to play in leading that change.

What’s your perfect day?

Stone: Besides lying in bed all day eating a cheeseburger and french fries with a milkshake, which sounds pretty good to me sometimes, my perfect day is when I have the opportunity to see our work in action. That could be at a school with one of our outreach directors helping to facilitate a focus group of teachers, and seeing those teachers experience what it’s like to know that your voice matters and feel heard. Having that be a big piece of my day is really important.

Morris: One thing my mother always said to me was “Do good and do well.” A perfect day for me is when I feel like I’ve done something good, whether that’s a small act of kindness toward somebody else or a big win in our work, and also when I feel like I’ve brought my best self and best work towards that end.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: 3 Top Educators Share Their Secrets to Successful School Reform

Being a Great Leader Means Being in Service to Others

Posted on by robbie

It’s hard to decipher a through-line in Shaifali Puri’s 13-year career that spans the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the Empire State Development Corporation, the nonprofit Scientists Without Borders and the Nike Foundation. But look a little deeper and you’ll see that Puri has the spark of spontaneity that allows her to leap at opportunities and a core mission to improve people’s lives. Currently a visiting scholar at New York University’s journalism school, Puri is researching how technology can be harnessed to benefit the developing world. She spoke to NationSwell about the lessons she’s learned from her eclectic career.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
When I got hired at Fortune (a Time Inc. magazine), they only hired young people, and the only job you could get was to be a fact-checker. What was really great was that these kids came from [top] colleges and universities, and [the company started] them all at the bottom of the totem pole, in a job that required you to do what felt like menial work. Later, when I got a federal clerkship after law school, I was incredibly proud of myself. On day one, when the judge came into the chambers and said hello, she said she had a very important lesson to impart: the proper way to staple memos in her chambers, which was at a 45-degree angle in the top left-hand corner. Some people might say that’s crazy. But I’m grateful for having had those jobs — where you had to pay immense attention to detail — because so much of our focus today is on leadership. But it’s hard to be a great leader unless you also know how to be great at not being the leader, and how to be great in service to others in the organization.

What’s on your nightstand?
I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going at all times. My fiction book is called “The Flamethrowers,” by Rachel Kushner. The nonfiction book I just started is called “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” Tim Wu’s book on net neutrality.

[ph]

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Worry less about the title and much more about the skills map. What are you learning in each job? Sometimes in my career, it was learning how to be a deputy, how to manage big projects, how to be a boss. You’ll get a career in which you’re doing meaningful work. It’ll be eclectic enough to expose you to many different things, and you’ll get to learn a variety of skill sets so you can figure out which ones you truly want to run with. I wasn’t smart enough or didn’t have the foresight to plan out my career, but looking over my shoulder, I’m glad that without knowing what I was doing, I was jumping at opportunities that had something to teach me, more than I was worrying about a particular industry. Ultimately, by total chance, I think it served me better than had I tried to plan my way here.

What’s your perfect day?
One that has a lot of serendipity in it. Something that I love but don’t do enough is ramble around New York. [So I’d] get up when the mood strikes (I’m usually a pretty early riser), have that cup of coffee, read The New York Times totally unrushed and head out with my boyfriend in tow to leisurely see where the day takes us. It might involve museums, the park, just staring at the architecture through Chelsea or the West Village, checking out what endlessly new thing is happening in the Lower East Side or going through Chinatown (which is one of my favorite parts of New York). Just walking and taking it in without a plan, ending at one of my favorite, not-overrun, neighborhood West Village restaurants. Then, a perfect evening stroll back home. When I forget why I love this city, a good walk always reminds me.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I want to preface this by saying, I’ve been very lucky because I have been very privileged. I did not have to worry about financial circumstances when I came out of college. The thing I feel most proud of isn’t any individual accomplishment. I’ve really tried to build a career of purpose. When I went to Scientists Without Borders, I didn’t know the field. The New York Academy of Sciences took a chance on me, and I’m really proud of having built something. It was like being a tech startup CEO: taking a germ of an idea to a full organization. I made a lot of mistakes, and it wasn’t always clear we were going to have the funding. It felt really important to me, because the promise of what the organization could achieve: eradicating global poverty, trying to bring science and technology resources to solve the challenges of the world’s poorest people. So I’m really proud that, in the face of a tremendous amount of terror and self-doubt, I persevered. That’s been something I’ve tried to do in my career, which is take on things that have scared me and do it anyway.

What don’t most people know about you?
I was, at some point, a certified bartender. I got my certificate in college. I figured if you ever needed a fun back-up career, that was it.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?

Headlines Focus on Environmental Disasters. But the Real Story Is How Renewable Energy Is Effectively Reducing Emissions

Posted on by robbie

In the early 1970s, as part of an internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Frances Beinecke spent a summer developing land use policies in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. That experience jumpstarted a long career of environmental advocacy that culminated in Beinecke becoming NRDC’s executive director in 1998 and its president in 2006. During her tenure, she built the organization into a powerhouse of lawyers and scientists that vocally advocated for green policies and forged connections with global organizations in China and India. From her office in midtown Manhattan, Beinecke, now retired, reflected on her career and conservation with NationSwell.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given on leadership?
The most important thing that I have learned is that it’s not about you. It’s about the other people you’re working with and motivating them to reach the result. When I was at NRDC (and I was there for a very long time), being able to be on boards in other organizations and really watch other people operate, to see how other people provided leadership and how other organizations worked, was absolutely essential to doing the best job that I could do at NRDC.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Right now I’m reading Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac,” because I happen to be going out to give a talk in Wisconsin. In the early 80s, I had an opportunity to visit the shack that Leopold wrote about in the book, and I wanted to relive that experience in preparation for this talk. It’s interesting because Leopold was one of the early people to work on restoration of ecosystems. He had his old farm that had been exhausted by homesteaders, and he replanted the trees and restored the soil. A lot of what people are focusing on now is how do you restore these depleted ecosystems? How do you store carbon? So, it’s inspiring to read that.
This other book I’m reading is called “Braiding Sweetgrass,” also by an ecologist: Robin Wall Kimmerer. I recently went to Montana and visited this very exciting project called the American Prairie Reserve, where they’re trying to restore 3 million acres of prairie in eastern Montana right where Lewis and Clark took their Corps of Discovery through the Missouri River. One of the interesting things is all these lands were, of course, Native American lands. What our relationship is with that heritage is one that I felt I wasn’t thinking about enough. This is a book by a Native American ecologist about that relationship with the land.
What innovations in your field are you particularly excited about?
I’ve been working on climate for almost 30 years. In the early days — for the first 20 years, anyway — we talked about solutions, but it was hard to see how to put them in place. One of the things that has happened in the last three to five years is this very rapid deployment of renewable energy, particularly wind and, more recently, solar. Policies have been put in place to deploy it, and there’s been a drop in price. I get excited when I go around and I see wind farms or solar panels. If you go around the United States, you can see the difference in state policies by going across a border. Recently, I was in New York and we crossed over to western Massachusetts. There were a dozen wind turbines and every barn had solar panels — because they put these policies in place to make it very appealing for people to make the investment.
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career?
If you start in this line of work, you start very idealistically. You have hopes and you want to put solutions in place. One of the things that is very hard to understand is why doesn’t everybody think this way? If you’re very mission based, it’s so obvious. To be effective, it’s important to try to understand why people think differently. You can only be effective in advancing a solution if you understand why someone has a different perspective: their priorities are different. I didn’t understand that.

The NRDC celebrates the 8th Annual Forces for Nature on April 6, 2006.

What inspires you?
[I]f you look back year-to-year, it’s hard to see progress. But if you look back 10 years, the progress is really significant. We used to say green jobs; now we can see green jobs. We used to hope we would have a strategy that would drive down emissions, but emissions are being driven down. We wondered if China would ever get on board to be a player on climate change, because they were going to be the largest emitter. Well, they are the largest emitter, but they’ve also agreed to capping coal at a certain point and they’re unleashing clean energy. One thing in the environmental sector that’s very different than the private sector is that the time frames are much more long-term.
How do you inspire others?
In the beginning, in the 90s, when we talked about climate change, we talked about it as a global problem, and then over time, we realized we had to break it down into a local problem. There was a lot of discussion about climate change in terms of how many parts per million or degrees in the atmosphere…Most people respond to things that are personal to them. That’s the way most people behave — if they’re concerned about their family’s health, their community’s well-being or what they are experiencing in their own lives. Being able to document that, tell the story and engage people in how things are happening in their community, rather than in abstract that the whole planet is heating up, provides a level of engagement that we never had before.
What’s your idea of a perfect day?
To spend some of it outside. I’m fortunate enough to have a dog who requires that on a daily basis, because, for me, being inspired by and connected to nature is essential to doing my work. And then, I like to feel during the course of the day that somehow I’ve been successful in either opening a dialogue or advancing a solution.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I have two adorable grandchildren. They’re nearly a year old, twins. The thing about that’s wonderful [about them], it gives you a time reference. My father is 102 years old. He was born in 1914. They were born in 2015. If they live long as he has, it’ll be 2117. Can you imagine? The thing about that is, that gives you a frame of reference for what you’re trying to accomplish. When we’re talking about climate change and 50 or 100 year increments, we know people who will be there then. It personalizes it in a much more significant way. It gives you even more motivation.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: The Forecast for These Veterans’ Career Prospects Is Sunny

Forget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting

Posted on by robbie

Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for investigative video reportage like Sen. George Allen using the obscure racial insult “macaca” and a way to mobilize millions, such as President Obama and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video). Today, as head of Google’s News Lab, he’s enthused about virtual reality and big data becoming an integral part of storytelling. NationSwell spoke to Grove from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters about the future of newsrooms.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
[T]o make it something that you practice, not something that you are. I tell my team at Google all the time, “You’re all leaders.” What I mean by that (this comes from some books I’ve read, a few classes I’ve taken and also my own experience) is leadership is helping a group that is facing a challenge grapple with it in an honest and productive way. It’s really getting to the root of what a problem is, engaging in various interventions or techniques to really get to the core issue they’re trying to solve. Great leaders are able to exercise leadership, not just embody it.

What’s on your nightstand?
I just finished a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which is about the modern economy and how technology has actually, in some ways, made us more distant from the actual work-product. The guy who wrote it was a motorcycle mechanic, and he talks about the power of working with your hands and how the trades are actually a really active way to use your mind and develop yourself. It’s not just an argument for, hey, you need to go start your own mechanic shop, but that you should understand how the things you own work.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
There are all kinds of new storytelling devices that are making journalism and frontiers really hopeful. While getting traffic to your site is a challenge and thinking about catchy titles or even clickbait is part of a conversation, deeper, more immersive storytelling is even more exciting and differentiates your site or broadcast. Virtual reality’s a part of that. You’re not just clicking and leaving: you dive into it. But another really interesting development (we’re not quite there yet) is journalism via drones. It’s really powerful for things like crisis response… and climate journalism — looking at ways different ecosystems have changed and are changing from above. It’s just a totally new perspective. There’s lots of challenges to figure out there ethically and technologically, but that’s exciting.

Data journalism itself is probably one of the biggest frontiers for journalism right now. It takes a massive amount of computing power that we now have, the extraordinary access to data sets we didn’t have before and a shift of how newsrooms think about telling stories. We, of course, work on Google data in that space, but ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, The UpShot, Vox — they’re all really innovative data-driven journalism. That’s one of the things we’re betting big on: that data journalism has a huge potential for making readers around the world smarter about topics they’re discovering. Newsrooms are beginning to understand there’s never been a better time to be a storyteller, given the tools they have.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish somebody had told me to lead with passion and manage with consistency. A lot of leaders are very good at one, but not the other. They can crisply manage a spreadsheet, a meeting schedule, a document and metrics tracker, but they don’t have the vision or the passion to lead an organization. Other leaders give the inspiration and purpose. That’s great, but the management piece falls off a little bit, because it’s harder for them to operationally develop things. Most leaders need to have both. I wish someone had defined that for me. I came into my work with the former — the passion and excitement — and I don’t think I was incapable of the latter, but I didn’t know when to toggle between the two.

What inspires you?
What’s most inspiring to me about my time at Google is amplifying stories or voices that wouldn’t have otherwise been heard. You look at YouTube as a platform for that, or the Internet in general as a chance to discover stories that wouldn’t have otherwise made it into our conversations — that’s a really powerful additive element of technology in media. Whether that’s citizen-captured videos from streets of the Arab Spring or whether that’s someone “coming out” to their community on a blog or whether that’s a kid in his bedroom in Philly or a mom in her house in Montana getting to ask the President a question in a Google+ Hangout, there’s all kinds of elements that plays itself out.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing experiences at Google. But if I had to pick something I was most proud of, I might go back to before I was a journalist, in my early twenties, when I spent about half a year in India. I just sort of went; I didn’t know anybody there. I bought a plane ticket and landed in Bombay [now Mumbai]. I wanted to do something that went beyond being a tourist, but I didn’t know what. I ended up finding the opportunity to work for an organization that did interventions in small rural Indian towns to try to get 30,000 people above the poverty line. They would help these people grow mango forests or cross-breed cows to create their own dairies. I [wrote] profiles of the people who this group was helping. I got to spend two months in rural villages, finding my own translators, talking to different people who were in these situations. It wasn’t the best journalism or work I’d ever done, but early in my career, it was a really transformative experience.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

Home page photo courtesy of Steve Grove.

MORE: The Software That Could Enable Drones to Go Mainstream

In Order to Revitalize America, Our Concept of Leadership Needs to Change

Posted on by robbie

The son of an Air Force veteran and a history teacher, Jeff Eggers attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., with his heart set on learning to fly jets off of aircraft carriers. Once he learned about the SEAL program, however, his future headed in a different direction because, “I wanted to get in the business of leadership,” Eggers explains. After a “mostly straightforward SEAL career,” Eggers transitioned from operations to strategic policy, most recently serving as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
These days, Eggers has more work-life balance and the flexibility to invest in his family (which includes two small children) that his previous military service and government work largely prevented. Serving as a senior fellow at New America, his focus on leadership remains, researching how to revitalize American prosperity by changing how the business community thinks about workplace independence and how public policy must take into account behavioral science in order to be effective. NationSwell sat down with Eggers at the Washington, D.C., offices of New America to discuss the need to create a “self-driven, self-directed, more autonomous workforce.”
What is the best advice you’ve ever been given on leadership?
Someone once said to me, “don’t take yourself too seriously.”  We’re all the same species, and one of the greatest mistakes that occurs when people get promoted to increasing levels of seniority is that they start taking themselves too seriously. I think leaders can ground themselves in a sense of humility, empathy, awareness and a respect for others. Doing so is one of the cornerstones of effective leadership. It’s not about you; it’s about the team.

Jeff Eggers in the Oval Office with President Obama, Vice President Biden and National Security Advisor Susan Rice.

What’s on your nightstand?
It’s David Rothkopf’s “National Insecurity,” which is professional reading. I’m writing a longer piece on how our culture of fear is undercutting our national decision-making and that’s one of the books I keep for that research. Unfortunately, my nightstand is not well equipped with enjoyable, light reads.
What is your biggest need right now?
My greatest need was to rebalance work, life and family, which I did. That box is largely checked, and that was a big deal. One of my big needs right now is to create a network of experts and likeminded practitioners around this idea of behavioral policy and to develop a framework for how you could, with some scale, start to influence at a strategic level how you think about public policy, how we train people to do public policy. Bringing together this kind of core network will become the people who shape and build this program with me.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Too many people said it was going to be easy and not to overthink it. I think that I wish more people would’ve said the opposite — that it was going to be very difficult, steady yourself; it’s going to be harder than you think. Because for me personally, my desire was to test this hypothesis: To do the work-life balance and put family first you need to accept risk and you need to leap and hope that the net will appear. I came to advocate for that in such a way that I had to promote it by doing it. I had to live it. I did and that coupled with this mantra of “don’t overthink it; it’ll be easier than you think” — whoa! The leap has been a doozy at times, and some cautionary note of, “Absolutely, take the leap, but do a lot of thinking about all the various aspects of it,” [would’ve been nice.]
What inspires you?
Mostly, I’m always inspired by people that I respect and admire. My parents have been the longest, consistent source of inspiration. They put a lot of their energies in to their family — invested in their family, made sacrifices for their family. But also, they significantly advanced from one generation to another in life for more opportunities and that’s pretty inspiring, especially at a time when so few people have faith in the American Dream.
Today, I’m inspired by people who have a lot of moral conviction and intellectual courage to speak up against the mainstream conventional wisdom, especially when the mainstream conventional wisdom needs to be disrupted. That takes a significant amount of courage.
How do you inspire others?
By making people believe there is greatness in themselves. No one needs to look to anyone else for greatness or inspiration. There’s a tremendous amount of potential for greatness is each person. Too often we look to people that we ascribe greatness as having some sort of inherent advantage that made them great and that’s not the case. I would like everyone to understand that they are themselves a superhero, a genius. There’s no reason why everyone can’t tap into that. If everyone taps into a little bit of that, that small amount of incremental change is going to be extraordinary.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
It hasn’t happened yet. My proudest accomplishment will be raising my kids [ages 3 and 6]. That’s going to be my life’s work.
It’s more gratifying to see pride in accomplishments made by people that work for me. You don’t get any credit for them, but in my case, they’re more important [than what I’ve accomplished].
Eggers paragliding in the Canadian Rockies in 2009.

What should people know about you that they don’t?
I’m a pretty avid paraglider pilot. It’s the remnants of a formerly active and robust recreational lifestyle that had to be whittled down and made manageable with a family. The only real thing that I couldn’t ever let go of is my passion for paragliding. I had a bit of a scare back in September [2015] and kind of grounded myself and I’m now going through the soul-searching process of whether I can be both a responsible dad and an active paraglider pilot. That’s kind of a big deal. [Paragliding] is kind of scratching that aviation itch that I’ve had ever since I was a tiny kid and it’s how I’ve become a pilot. So it’s very, very fundamental and hard to let go of.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: How This Veteran Went from the Open Sea to Open Data

The Newest Way to Solve the Country’s Biggest Problems

Posted on by robbie

What if there was a way to invest in a nonprofit and earn a financial return based on impact? What if donors made performance-based donations that catalyzed investment capital and unlocked impact data? These are just some of the questions that San Francisco resident Lindsay Beck asks herself as she sets up NPX, a company that’s transforming the way impact is financed in the nonprofit sector, along with her cofounder Catarina Schwab. Similar to social impact bonds in that participating ventures would be able to expand much faster than usual, the infusion of private dollars would come from citizens making investments on the exchange. Beck, a Wharton business school grad who founded her own nonprofit for cancer patients, spoke with NationSwell about combining the private and nonprofit sectors.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
What I see in others that I aspire to be most like is presence in a moment. We’ve all been in meetings where someone runs in: they’re late, they’re scattered, they spend 15 minutes telling you how busy they are and then finish by telling you all the things they have to do next. By contrast, I have had meetings and personal experiences where people come in and don’t bring any of that with them. We sit down, conquer whatever the agenda is, and I feel like the center of their universe. To me, that is the most powerful and very hard. It requires behind-the-scenes systems, a mindset and help to get there.

What’s on your nightstand?
I am trying to read three books a month right now, so I currently have “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” by Bryan Stevenson, which I’ve been told is amazing and is teaching me more about recidivism in the U.S. justice system. I also have “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future,” by Steve Case, which is brand-new and everyone’s raving about. And then I have “How to Raise an Adult,” by Julie Lythcott-Haims.  She’s the former Stanford dean who wrote the book about how we’re all ruining our kids and how to fix it.

What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
The movie that had the biggest impact on my life was “You’ve Got Mail.” This might sound funny, but when I saw it, I was recovering from surgery. I was a cancer patient [Beck is a two-time cancer survivor], and I had just been told that chemotherapy would render me sterile. I didn’t know what to do about that. In the movie, one of the characters goes off to freeze her eggs. Literally because of that movie, I started calling every [in vitro fertilization] clinic in the country and found a way to freeze my eggs before I started chemotherapy. It was not necessarily my favorite, but it changed the trajectory of my life and many people’s lives after that.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I am excited about all of the blended finance — some people call it social finance, and it can be grouped with impact investing — that are linking capital with impact. We’re finding new, creative ways to fund and finance solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Up until recently, the nonprofit sector (or more largely, the impact sector) had been very opaque and inefficient. There’s been a lot of money flowing without knowing what works, what doesn’t and where something’s better. We haven’t applied some of the traditional free-market principles to that sector: there’s not robust information flow or sufficient capital flow tied to impact. That’s changing. With increased transparency and efficiency, I think we can better identify and fund what works and more quickly stop what doesn’t.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I feel like everyone told me it, I just didn’t hear it: it is going to take a long time. Relax, be patient, slow down. Don’t rush it. Being an entrepreneur there’s a sense of urgency, but it’s exhausting, and everything takes twice as long as you think it will. It’s okay to slow down and wait for the world to be ready.

What inspires you?
On a micro level, I want to see this change in the world. I’m really driven not to sit back and hope other people do it, but to play an active role in creating the change I want to see in the world. On the macro level, I am motivated by having a purpose larger than myself and my own little world. In my past job and past career at Fertile Hope, a nonprofit telling cancer patients of the risk to their eggs and providing them options, I had the perfect nexus of passion-driven career that left a positive legacy and I was able to get paid for it. In the Jim Collins Venn diagram, at the center, that is utopia. I had that, and I created that in the nonprofit. Now I’m in the place where I’m trying to re-create that.

What’s your biggest need right now?
Our biggest need at NPX is an innovative philanthropist who’s willing to try something new. Everyone says they are both innovative and willing to try something new, but the reticence to act is surprising sometimes. We need someone who is ready to try and experiment, in terms of how they give. Whether it’s a person or foundation, they need to feel, “I’m tired of the existing playbook, and I’m ready to jump in the ring to try something new. I’m ready to act.”

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
It’s a little bit of a mix between personal and professional: becoming a mother, having my first child, because everyone told me I couldn’t have everything and all I had to overcome to do it. I created the organization in that spirit — to live it and believe it and preach it — but it was another thing to actually realize that dream. It’s an extraordinary day-to-day impact on my life, being a mom, especially after being told that’s not going to happen for you.

What something most people don’t know about you?
Once upon a time, I was a taxi driver. (You’d never know by reading my LinkedIn profile.) On Martha’s Vineyard, I was there for a summer in college, and that was supposedly the most lucrative job on the island. A bunch of my guy friends decided they were going to be cab drivers, and I said, “If you can do it, I can do it.”

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

MORE: The New Way to Govern: Paying for Progress

To Find Success With Data-Driven Education Reform, You’ve Got to Make It Personal

Posted on by robbie

When Enoch Woodhouse III surveys the state of education reform today, he sees the same ineffective battles duplicated nationwide. Sure, there are more reformers than a decade ago, he notes, but most still don’t have the political skills to match union organizing. After leaving StudentsFirst, former Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s answer to teacher’s unions, two years ago, Woodhouse focused his attention on building data-driven tools to engage parents and teachers at the school board level. Woodhouse, who attended both public and private schools in Boston before matriculating to Harvard, spoke with NationSwell about the latest plan to change America’s public schools.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I think there’s a time for listening, and there’s a time for directing. Leadership is about finding the right balance of the two. When you find yourself out of balance, which I think many leaders often do, things become much more tricky.

What’s on your nightstand?
Right now, I am reading (because I attended a NationSwell event) Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy,” which I happen to be enjoying thoroughly. He is one of the most inspirational folks who I have ever seen and heard in person. I think the work he’s doing is incredibly noble, and it’s very related to my work in education, just at a different point in the pipeline.

What’s your favorite book of all-time?
My favorite book is “The Three Musketeers.” The book and movie got me started fencing actually, which I did from age 10 to 22ish.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I feel like the hottest innovation is the utilization of tech in the classroom to do a few different things. For me, it is less of iPads in the classroom; it is more figuring out ways to solve this problem of getting a great teacher in front of every student, which is very hard to achieve at scale. There are interesting ways, the most innovative of its time was Khan Academy and this idea of inverted or “flipped” classrooms, where students actually leverage technology at home to spend time learning the content, and they spend time in school with instructors actually working through tough problems, which instructors can do at scale much more effectively and efficiently than giving a lecture and having everybody get it. That’s probably the wave of the future and the biggest lever to actually reach the most kids without materially compromising some things.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Two things: it’s hard and it’s personal, and you can’t take it personally. Moving entrenched systems that have lots of interests tied to them is really hard. Results don’t always matter, which is the frustrating part for folks like me who feel like being rational, data-driven and logical are virtues. It’s personal because all of the policies, all of the reforms have very real implications for real people. The school that has been in the community for decades and has folks working at it for decades, it has significance for a community. Someone who’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother went there, it’s very personal to them. You’ve got to approach the problem with the complexity that it has, which is not only showing the data but approaching it from a more personal vantage point. You can’t take it personally because it’s a fight and it’s hard. If I took things personally, if I continued to take things personally, you get very discouraged with the work. It almost becomes untenable to do for any period of time.

What inspires you?
The kids, without a doubt. For me personally, it was very easy to stay connected to the kids when I was running schools and I could be in classrooms and could speak to parents every day. It’s a little harder now because what we’re doing is much more adult-centered. But having proximity to kids, great learning and adults doing great work for kids is very inspiring. It makes you want to do everything you can to support that teacher or that student who you know is working as hard as they possibly can in spite of a whole lot of things in their way.

What’s your perfect day?
I would say waking up, going to a school on a parent-teacher conference day, seeing lots of parents super-engaged in their students’ experience and students taking ownership over their own experience. Then, going out in the afternoon with the golf team at school and playing nine holes some place exotic. Then having dinner with my wife and coming home to watch some brand of reality TV.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
When I was working in the Washington, D.C., Public Schools, it was a significant priority for the district to deliver more information to parents about our schools and what an experience at our schools looked like than they had ever received before. So one of my main charges was to build a set of scorecards where you’d see some pretty crude metrics like performance on English and math, student safety and suspensions for every school in the district. But you’d also see highlights around particular programs that the school was proud of: an IB program, an arts program. In order to create these things, I did a listening tour across D.C.’s eight wards, meeting with parents, teachers, students and administrators to ask them all of the stuff that they would love to see on two pages that would give them as complete a picture about the school as possible. I learned lots of things from the community during that experience, and we created scorecards that were pretty well-received by folks. And those endure in D.C. today, which is kind of cool.

What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I like to cook a lot. Recently, I have done a pivot in my cooking from fancy things that look pretty and sound fanciful to much more practical, paleo-based cooking. Not a lot of people know that, except my wife who eats it — on occasion.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

Homepage photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

MORE: Where Is Education Reform Working? Michelle Rhee Answers

How Star Trek Is Inspiring Diversity in the Workplace

Posted on by robbie

The recent tech boom inaugurated an age of invention, but NationSwell Council member Greg Gunn, who founded his own education technology software startup, has been “frustrated” by the sector’s lack of diversity. For the last five years, he had an open-door policy of passing on advice to anyone who asked, but he recently formalized his informal professional coaching into Lingo Ventures, systematizing his advice, researching how programmers enter their chosen field and investing in platforms that connect diverse employees with tech companies.
Across a round dining room table on the first floor of his Brooklyn brownstone, NationSwell spoke to Gunn about how technology is changing our lives, where it falls short and how the future might be different.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
The power of the leader is to provide stability, or even just the feeling of it. When the boss comes in, things don’t go into freak-out [mode], but calm down. There’s the importance of the boss coming in every day with positivity. If you’re freaking out, everybody around you feels the freak-out 10 times as much. So, it’s being conscious, grounding yourself and coming in with positivity and stability every day, no matter how tough things are.
What’s on your nightstand?
I draw a lot of my inspiration from science fiction. I’ve been reading “The Three-Body Problem” series. It’s a science-fiction trilogy by the most award-winning science fiction author in China, Liu Cixin. Only two of the books have come out in English, so [I’m] waiting for the third one. It…starts in the Cultural Revolution in China and ends up in the future in space. It’s got these powerful ideas of how society responds to stability and chaos and how it survives those cycles. Some of the strengths you build during a period of great stability can become not-strengths or liabilities in a moment of chaos, and I’m really thinking of it right now in terms of economic change that our society is going through. Everybody’s worrying what’s happening to the American economy. Is it stable? How do we really know? And I think about it even more in terms of the impact of technology on the economy, which is already starting have profound changes, but people aren’t predicting how profound those changes are going to be. How does our way of thinking about work evolve in the face of that?
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
The most important educational technology today is YouTube, because any time you need to learn something — whether it’s a small thing or a big thing — there are resources out there. Not only can you learn whatever skill it is, but there are 100 different ways out there that people [acquired] it, and you can find the one that actually works for your brain. I don’t know if democratizing is the right word, but that literally makes the best personalized education experience out there and free for everybody.
People talk a lot about Khan Academy, which I think is just a subset of the bigger phenomenon of people sharing how they learn things. More and more learning content is coming out of the universities, so things like EdX, Coursera. The edge of innovation right now is we’ve gone through this great wave of getting a whole bunch of content out there, and now that it’s all out there, we’re figuring out: Where do I actually need human touch again to get the optimal learning experience? How do I bring human tutors, teaching, peer support and coaching back into that? Now we’re remembering what we’ve always known: the content itself motivates to a degree, but having a human really motivates you a lot more.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
One thing that I started to learn and I think I’m still learning now is to be more open about what you’re working on. I’ve always been a perfectionist and a bit afraid to share what I’m working on or what I’m thinking about until it’s a finished product, especially with what I’m trying to do with Lingo Ventures. I think it’s important that I’m talking to more people, so that I’m both sharing and learning at the same time. It’s taking that personal risk to put the half-baked idea out there so that I can bake it with others.
How do you try to inspire others?
For my coworkers, in the work we do, part of which is diversity related, it’s easy to look at what’s happening in Silicon Valley and be really frustrated. So a big part of the work is how to flip that script. If this thing is wrong, where can we get value to get past it? If I’m working with an entrepreneur of color who feels like they’re constantly at a disadvantage in fundraising, part of the work is figuring out how do we turn those things that you believe are being perceived as disadvantages into things that are competitive for you. It’s not easy work, but you’ve chosen the problem because it’s a hard problem.
What’s your perfect day?
Have breakfast with my son and take him to school. Go to the white board with two or three entrepreneurs. Write a piece on something I’ve been thinking about. Get my team unblocked on whatever the organization needs that day. Then spend the rest of the day doing art: drawing, sculpting, whatever.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
Star Trek is the vision that guides almost all of my work; it always has. My vision of what I want the future to look like and my companies to look like is really guided by the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in Next Generation: the way people interact, the diversity, the values, the goals, the technology. What would Captain Picard do? It sounds geeky but it really shapes what inspires me and what I want my workplace to look like.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: How Do You Overcome the Persistent Problem of Finding and Retaining Teachers? 

How Do You Overcome the Persistent Problem of Finding and Retaining Teachers?

Posted on by robbie

For much of the last decade, Jennifer Moses and her husband Ron Beller leapt across the pond, from America to Britain and back, picking up the best from each culture. Both former Goldman Sachs employees, the two transitioned into education — in London, Moses participated in the creation of a charter school equivalent (known there as academies), while Beller took a role advising New York City school chancellor Joel Klein in restructuring public education during the Bloomberg administration.
Back in the U.S. today, in Contra Costa and Solano counties in the Bay Area, Moses and Beller founded a growing charter school network, Caliber Schools, a growing network of “second-generation” charter schools. Instead of top-down administration, unrelenting intensity and constant cramming for tests to get into college, Caliber focuses on fostering curiosity, joy and the deeper learning skills to succeed in college. NationSwell spoke to Moses about the challenges and opportunities of the American public school system.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I’m still learning, but I would think the best advice is that people can only take feedback in bite-sized morsels. And that has to affect how you interact with anyone who works with you or for you. Honestly, it’s so profound it’s really changed me, because it’s not actionable if it’s not bite-sized.
What’s on your nightstand?
I’m reading “War and Peace.” I set myself that objective for the year. I’m about 300 pages in, and it’s gonna be a long one.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I am excited about technology, even though it’s very early days in a bunch of ways. I think that technology enables personalization and data-driven decision-making. And I think that those are really, really, really important to helping each and every student achieve his or her best. I can honestly tell you that there’s a ton of education software out there; none of it’s very good. There’s a ton of student information systems, but it’s super early days. It’s not like I can point to anything and say this is really great, but it is transforming education and what we can do and how we can target individuals. I just don’t see how you can have a top school without technology. I’m excited about it as a tool, but by the way, I don’t think we can replace teachers with technology, but we can leverage teachers with technology.
[ph]
What’s your biggest need right now?
I know this is going to sound sad, but we really need to raise some money. We have to build buildings because the district won’t provide us with facilities. They move us around every year; we have to fight them all the time, and it really holds back what we’re doing. There’s a law called Prop 39 in California, which says that districts have to offer charter schools equivalent facilities. They don’t really want to do that, and the law doesn’t have a lot of teeth. So you have to fight them, you have to drag parents up to school board meetings and negotiate. In Richmond, we have 600 kids in about 36 portables [temporary buildings], and we’re gonna be there again next year when we have 800 kids. When it rains, kids have to run outside in the rain. We don’t have a gym, there isn’t a library. Last year when we opened, we didn’t even have adequate bathrooms; we didn’t have water.
I think we [also] need human capital. Talent is the biggest issue: finding and retaining teachers. Part of that is economic: we basically have to operate on public financing, because that’s what sustainable and scaleable and frankly, a way to show districts that this can make them better. But I think trying to figure out ways to give teachers a sense of their value and importance beyond monetary would be really, really helpful…whether it’s providing them with a discounted ticket to a baseball game or some recognition. We’ve even been talking about telling teachers to board the airplane first, like veterans. We’re trying to think of ways we can honor the sacrifice people are making to do this job. It’s really hard and it doesn’t pay.
[ph]
What inspires you?
I have a really passionate belief that the current system is unfair, and that these kids deserve the same kinds of opportunities my own kids have. The fact that they’re a different color or their parents don’t make a lot of money is not a good reason for them not to have opportunity. I just think it’s an injustice, and it’s profound.
What’s your perfect day?
I like to spend time with my husband. I like to go for a run. I love a great meal, and I love going to a baseball game or maybe the theater — in the sunshine. Today’s a perfect day out here.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My family. I have a wonderful husband I adore and three fabulous kids. That’s the hardest stuff.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I used to be a dancer when I was young. I only dance very rarely now. I took a class recently. It’s been so long, it’s really hard at this stage. I really love it though, because I hate gyms.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: Meet the Self-Starting Millennial Who’s Mentoring the Next Generation of American Leaders

This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter

Posted on by robbie

As a resident of Weston, Conn., about two towns over from Newtown and the father of a first-grader, Don Kendall, Jr., was deeply affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But rather than signing petitions or making calls to legislators, he teamed up with more than 40 investors, including venture capitalist Ron Conway and serial entrepreneur Jim Pitkow to launch the Smart Tech Foundation, which funds smart gun technologies.
In advance of a NationSwell Council event on gun violence solutions, Kendall spoke about the need for readily available, safer guns.
What led you to look beyond changing laws as the best way to reduce gun violence?
Until [Newtown], my work was really focused on education and social entrepreneurship; gun violence is not an area that I was schooled in. But I took the time to get to know the space well and met all the organizations I could to understand their theories of change and the key issues. Pretty quickly, I became convinced that traditional political advocacy to change this issue was a dead end. The business model of Washington is to take money from people on either side of this issue: you might not like guns so I give money to the National Rifle Association (NRA) to stop people like you, and you give money to the Democratic Party to stop people like me. It was promoting an us versus them. It was gridlock, and I didn’t want to contribute to that.
I took my bedrock beliefs in technology, innovation, capitalism, the rule of free markets and the feeling that business can solve big social problems, and I went looking for other ways to get involved. I came at the issue from the standpoint of believing I could play a bridging role because I am a gun-owner and a lifelong hunter, but I also saw what was happening to 30,000 people dying every year in thousands of accidents and thousands of suicides. I thought that could be stopped, but it would take somebody saying, “I’m one of you, and we can make a difference on this.” That was the impetus, the genesis of Smart Tech.

Don Kendall is a serial entrepreneur who loves startups, frontier spaces and uncertainty.

How does Smart Tech identify a promising smart gun technologies to invest in?
This industry is in its infancy. These projects are literally two guys in a garage kind of stuff. The amount of money that is flowing right now is miniscule. We take the classic venture approach: You look for a mix of different approaches, whether it’s some folks working on actual firearms, other products like gun locks and safes, and then the technology that needed to be baked into everything like user-recognition, biometrics and RFID (radio-frequency identification). We wanted to have a mix of things that we were fostering. Again, as a nonprofit, the goal is to stimulate innovation and bring attention to the whole space and not focus on any one effort.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In the context of gun violence, you’re talking about building an entire ecosystem that didn’t exist and hopefully making people rich at the same time that they’re reducing the number of people that are killed every year, right? There’s an opportunity to do both. The analog that we researched for Smart Tech was the number of people killed and injured by automobiles. The story of automobile fatalities over the last four decades is one of constantly chipping away at the problem. It’s through government regulation mandating airbags, two-point safety belts and different rules for signage and how roads are constructed, but manufacturers also stepped in. Safer cars are ones you can charge a premium for. Thousands of different businesses have been started because of that, and a lot of wealth has been created. At the same time, the number of people killed or injured by cars has gone down and down and down. That, to me, is what’s exciting about doing the same thing in the gun space — if we can just get markets working the way that they should work and breaking some of these market failures that are blocking innovation right now.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I transitioned from being a for-profit entrepreneur to being a “philanthropist,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, at age 42. I had started a bunch of companies, a few had done very well, so suddenly I literally woke up with enough money in the bank for me and my family. It was sort of like, “Okay, well what am I gonna do now?” Looking back, it took me about six years to answer that question. The key insight for me (and this is maybe not everybody) was realizing that I could still be the person that I am, namely a serial entrepreneur who loves startups, frontier spaces and uncertainty, at the same time that I’m a philanthropist. When that lightbulb went off for me, it changed everything.
Hunting spans three generations in the Kendall family. Here, during his first quail hunting trip, Don’s father teaches him how to hold and fire a shotgun.

With so much gridlock stopping solutions to gun violence in Washington, D.C., and statehouses nationwide, what inspires you to tackle this problem?
It’s my first experience in a market where there’s a huge headwind, and that is extremely frustrating. I’m not going to say that it’s been fun, but I believe very strongly that I have some role to play in solving this social problem. If we can just get the markets working the way that they’re supposed to work, we can start making headway and saving lives. The stakes are pretty high. The stance of the NRA and the gun manufacturers lobby is wrong from a historical standpoint. They’ve chosen a stance on this issue that is against the arc of history, and I think they’ll ultimately be proven wrong. I believe that there’s white space in this industry for a successful company or a whole cluster of successful companies that can disrupt this industry, because the stance taken by the leaders is just wrong. It’s ripe for that disruption.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, I did grow up with a lot of privileges. Yes, I started a bunch of companies, and some are successful. But my dad was chairman and CEO of PepsiCo. He was a legendary business leader. I grew up in a wealthy setting, and it also meant that he wanted to help me. He was willing to pick up the phone. That was a huge advantage. I was acquainted with privilege, but I also had a real strong desire to stand on my own two feet and be a success on my own terms. That’s an aspect to my bio and my background, that if I’m being authentic and transparent like I’m trying to be, that needs to be factored in.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: Gun Violence Devastated This Man’s Family. He’s Determined to Not Let It Happen to Others