Category: Uncategorized

Kicking Off #BuildItBackBetter

Posted on by NationSwell Team

During last Friday’s NationSwell Conversation, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns put this current moment in historical context. He suggested that 2020 — and the confluence of COVID-19, global recession, racial injustice and political turmoil — constitutes one of the four greatest periods of crisis in American history, alongside the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II.

The toll of each past crisis strikes a raw, familiar chord: loss of human life, anxiety and misery at scale, and immense economic displacement and insecurity. But there is another side to them: each period also gave birth to paradigmatic social and economic transformation and progress, from Emancipation to the New Deal to the domestic and international programs and policies that ushered in the most sustained period of economic growth in global history.

They serve as testimony — rich in precedent, insight and inspiration — that out of rupture and suffering, we can emerge better than we were before.

Before COVID-19, all of the ills and inequities were there in plain sight: our nation’s painfully unfinished work to redress systemic racism and injustice; intense polarization and division; gaping inequality in access to education, health, housing and economic opportunity; a fraying of our most important democratic institutions and norms; and behind all of it, a sense that the forces of selfishness and tribalism were faring too well against the countervailing ethos of  interdependence and a shared commitment to the common good.

And now a pandemic has struck — shaking us from drift  and shining a floodlight on the injustices, the corrosion and on the fragility of what’s holding us together.

That’s our opening.

And that is why we are kicking off #BuilditBackBetter: an initiative that will invite the NationSwell community to come together to surface the solutions and ideas that can help us to emerge from this period of crisis with a more equitable, inclusive, resilient society and planet.

#BuilditBackBetter will kick-off with important, wide-reaching conversations, like our July 22 event on anti-racism with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Carmen Rojas, PhD. Those conversations will launch a series of tracks focused on vital issues, including: Economic Opportunity, Sustainability, Data for Good, Education, The Future of Work, Building a Culture of Connection and Belonging — and several more to be announced in the weeks ahead. Within each track, working groups of diverse leaders will reflect, explore, ideate, pressure test and surface powerful (often, cross-sector) solutions. We’ll place gender and racial equity and justice at the very core of this undertaking.

As we go, we’ll publish solutions and ideas for this community and a broader national audience of tens of millions online to bring them into the journey —  and invite them to take action alongside us. We’ll capture some of the most powerful solutions and insights generated by each track and share those findings with all of you, to inform and inspire your leadership, work and citizenship. And, of course, we’ll find areas of collaboration, where together, we can take action and drive change and energy behind the solutions that surface.

Now is our time — as a community of pragmatic problem-solvers, innovators, builders and clear-eyed idealists — to work for the paradigmatic change and progress that the current moment offers and that future generations call on us to deliver.

We are so grateful to our extraordinary partners: AARP, AARP Foundation, Camelback Ventures, Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, Lumina Foundation, The Patrick J McGovern Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Schultz Family Foundation, Starbucks, Workday — and several to be named later — whose support and expertise is so essential to this initiative.

We are thankful to you all for your leadership and for the opportunity to serve and support you. NationSwell exists for you, and we hope that #BuilditBackBetter will provide you a vehicle to seize this moment of crisis as an opportunity to build the nation we’ve never been, the society we seek and the world that must be.

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Greg Behrman is CEO and Founder of NationSwell.

NationSwell Live: How ‘Curbside Chronicle’ Is Helping People Experiencing Homelessness

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Curbside Chronicle is an Oklahoma magazine sold entirely by people experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness. By the organization’s estimates, they’ve been able to help half of their vendors attain housing. And though helping people experiencing homelessness get money is a huge part of why they operate, they also pride themselves on building their vendors’s confidence through creating a reason for face-to-face interaction with customers.
All that changed in the COVID-19 era, and now they’re taking action to serve their community in different ways. As part of NationSwell Live, we’re amplifying their efforts — and showing you how you can get involved.
Here’s what they had to say about how we can all take action to help people experiencing homelessness through this crisis.
NationSwell: Can you please introduce yourself?
Curbside Chronicle’s Whitley O’Connor: My name is Whitley O’Connor, I am the Social Enterprise Strategist for the Homeless Alliance. The Homeless Alliance is the parent organization of the Curbside Chronicle, which is the street paper that my wife and I founded seven years ago. A street paper is a publication that is partially created and completely sold by individuals who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. There are about 115 around the world, about 35 in the U.S. It’s something that kind of started in New York and spread all over the world, all independently run. So it’s not like one big group, but we all have an association. We work through, um, in addition to curbside, we have started pursuing, um, other additional ventures to provide employment. Whether it’s on the preventative side for folks who haven’t experienced homelessness yet or for transitioning our vendors who sell the magazine into next steps.
We focus primarily on individuals who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. 70% of our clients at the Homeless Alliance are what we call “street homeless” — they’re currently in a space that’s not habitable for human beings. The other 30% or so are folks that we have gotten into housing and they’re not quite to the point that we’d call self sufficiency. For the paper itself, a large group of our workforce are folks that are interested in employment and they want to make money, but they feel as though they’ve been excluded from the workforce due to various barriers — whether it’s mental illness, incarceration records, lack of transportation or education, various barriers that we’ve worked through.
Now, I want to say maybe about 50% of those individuals are in housing through our program. And so have this like sort of revolving door where we have folks that, because of their barriers, they’ll always be selling the magazine. And we have others that were able to transition to other employment. But we do have a pretty good success rate of getting people into housing if they’re willing to stick with the program and work with us. But we don’t have a cap or requirement to entering our program. Anyone who needs our program is welcome to utilize it. So just because you’re getting the housing doesn’t mean you can’t sell anymore.
NS: How has COVID-19 impacted that community?
CC: I describe our vendors as modern day newsies. And so just like you would have seen boys and girls, men, women on street corners yelling, “Extra, extra!” — That’s kind of where vendors do. That’s kind of the model that street papers utilize. Door-to-door sales aren’t really legal or profitable U.S. anymore, and so our folks are in business districts, are on the side of the road on busy intersections selling the magazine.
So obviously the money component is a big part of it, but another big part of our mission is breaking down barriers between individuals, between our vendor and our customer. I’m giving people a reason to interact with someone that they normally wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s not really a typical reason to interact with the person staying on the street corner holding a sign. This gives you a reason to interact with them, to roll down your window, to engage.
Breaking down that stigma is a really big deal. It also boosts our vendors’ confidence. They start to build these salesmanship skills. So when COVID-19 hit, it shut us down. You go from like this face to face interactions that’s key to what we do — but we don’t publish online — that face to face interaction is a giant part of the mission. Right? And so you go nearly overnight to not wanting to interact with people anymore. So we were one of the first street papers to shut down because we wanted to take an overabundance of precaution. People experiencing homelessness tend to have higher health barriers and preexisting conditions than the general public. And so we wanted to protect them.
So we started selling the magazine online for the first time in an effort to raise money for vendor fund. That vendor fund works in many ways like the restaurant funds and health care fund and whatnot that you’ve seen pop up. It’s an emergency fund that our vendors could apply to for things like rent assistance, food assistance, to pay their phone bills — all those things that they were using the money from the magazines they sold for. The idea was that they could apply for these funds to tap into.
NS: How can our audience take action to help? 
CC: If we do this really well, if we respond to this pandemic and its economic crisis really well, we’ll all come out a little bit poorer. It sounds weird, but it’s kind of what needs to happen. Obviously economically, most people have been hit by this. Not everyone, but most people. But in general, this is a time where everyone’s really going to have to — if we want to not see even further increased economic disparity — we’re going to have to see some pretty drastic redistribution of wealth here. It’s going to have to be on an individual and voluntary manner, but hopefully that’s what we’ll see.
But also, we’d love people to go online and read the magazine. Obviously, we’re pretty proud of the product we put out. One thing from a social enterprise stand point that we really hold dear is that we want our product to be of value. We don’t want folks to buy it because of the social mission, right? Obviously, that is why most people start engaging, but we want them to pick up our magazine and say, “Oh, man, that’s a really valuable product!” We’ve won Best Magazine in Oklahoma for the past two years. We just won a number of regional journalism awards, and so we’re really proud of what we’re putting out.
NationSwell Live is a one-hour event on June 26, 2020 that will convene organizations like Curbside Chronicle that have been at the frontlines of COVID-19 response for communities with some of the most urgent need. Together, we’ll take meaningful steps towards offering help at a time when so many need it. Find out more here.

NationSwell Live: How ‘Women in Hospitality United’ Is Meeting Need in the COVID-19 Era

Posted on by NationSwell Team

In their own words, Women in Hospitality United was “born of the #MeToo movement and the belief that there is an urgent need for evolution” in the hospitality industry. Their mission? To make the workplace safer and more equitable for women and other marginalized people at all parts of the workforce in the hospitality space.
As part of NationSwell Live, we’re amplifying their efforts to assess and meet urgent need amid the COVID-19 crisis. We recently spoke to Kutina Ruhumbika, a member of their board, about how they’ve stepped up to meet the moment and help women in the space. Here’s what they had to say.  
NationSwell: Could you please introduce yourself?
Women in Hospitality United’s Kutina Ruhumbika: My name is Kutina Ruhumbika, I’m currently the Vice President of Human Resources with Major Food Group based here in New York City, and I’m on the board of Women in Hospitality United. 
Women in Hospitality United was founded during the #MeToo era movement. The founders saw a need for the dialogue around equity in the restaurant industry for women and those that are underrepresented. They saw the need for that dialogue to evolve considerably. And so initially the focus was on equality and equity for women, but it has since evolved to looking at a broader landscape for those that are underrepresented. 
NS: How has the COVID-19 crisis impacted the communities you serve?
WiHU: We’re still gathering and fact-finding data to understand, but a lot of the businesses affected are small businesses. Most of them are owned by women, they’re owned by minorities. For so many of them, this is their livelihood. And for so many of them, this is their sole revenue stream. They have employees that are depending on theml. When restaurants are closing, when hotels are closing, and you can’t no support your employees and your community and your families — it’s certainly been devastating. So we’re all looking at ways to support and uplift those communities.
NS: What are some of the ways you’ve taken action?
WiHU: We circulated a survey to better understand the needs of all who are impacted in the populations that we represent. We have a strong Facebook following that’s consistently sharing with us feedback around what’s happening with their peers and with each other. And we’re currently now in the process of work on action steps towards what will be the most impactful. I think now that we’re settling into understanding what this is, it’s clear that this is going to be around for a while. Let’s think of long-term solutions that could have long-term impact.  
NS: What have you learned from the survey so far that’s helped you hone how you’ll take action?
WiHU: Not just the survey — the conversations. We are women. We talk to each other, we talk to like-minded individuals and we’re hearing some common things. Some of it is the fear of what’s next. Fears around how their business will thrive, or how they’ll bring it back to life. And then I think some of the other things that we’re hearing, like concern from undocumented workers. They are struggling, underrepresented, and because of circumstances, their voices may not be as loud and as bold as others. And so we’re starting to see a common theme there too as well, just in regular day-to-day dialogue.
NS: How can we help?
WiHU: Definitely follow us. We are about to relaunch our Instagram page and all of our social media channels within the next few weeks. We’re about to embark on an incredible journey to raise funds to help support our community team, so look out for that in the next few weeks. 
And the dialogue we have with our followers on social media is super important. You know, we just don’t want to just shoot out information; we want to receive. Just listening to the needs of the people that we talk to on a regular basis and understanding what’s happened, the community, what’s happening to our friends across the industry. The more we do, the better we’re able to come up with solutions are impactful for our industry. 
NationSwell Live is a one-hour event on June 26, 2020 that will convene organizations like Women in Hospitality United that have been at the frontlines of COVID-19 response for communities with some of the most urgent need. Together, we’ll take meaningful steps towards offering help at a time when so many need it. Find out more here.

May 2020: NationSwell in the News

Posted on by NationSwell Team

We’re proud that the work we’re doing to build a more resilient future is reaching audiences far and wide through some of our nation’s most prestigious newsrooms and magazines. As a valued member of our audience, we wanted to share with you three instances from our recent coverage.
1. “From Military Service to Civilian Leadership” — The Atlantic
In the Atlantic, reporter James Fallows profiles the work NationSwell has done since our founding, praising our team and our ecosystem of partners and Council members for “trying to be part of an answer for America, and of the resilient capacity of citizens in the absence of national leadership.” Read our profile here.
2. “How NationSwell Is Mobilizing Business and Philanthropy to Help Build It Back Better” — Forbes
In Forbes, columnist Afdhel Aziz caught up with NationSwell CEO and founder Greg Behrman for a deep dive on our #BuildItBackBetter initiative, which is convening purpose-driven leaders across sectors to build a society that’s more diverse, equitable, inclusive and resilient than the one COVID-19 disrupted. “We know that it’s challenging to lift our gaze and to think and plan beyond the immediate moment,” Behrman notes in his interview. “But, history shows us that our biggest crises also open up the aperture for paradigmatic change. So, the time is now. ” Read more about our #BuildItBackBetter initiative in Forbes here, and sign up for more information on how you can get involved here.
3. “Paint and a Paintbrush Are Rebuilding Community for Austin’s Homeless” — The Webbys
NationSwell’s original video, “Paint and a Paintbrush…” , received an honor from the Webbys, an annual award celebrating the best of the internet, in the category of Documentary: Longform. “The work represents the very best of what we’ve done so far in our editorial storytelling efforts,” Anthony Smith, NationSwell V.P. of Published Content + Growth, told the team. “I couldn’t be more proud of how producers Sean Ryon and Hallie Steiner told this story, and how it exemplifies our approach of finding human narratives to tell stories of systemic problems and the people getting to work trying to solve them.” Watch the video here.
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We’re looking forward to sharing more with you on a regular basis.

De-Stressing From Social Media Is Easier Than You Think

Posted on by NationSwell Team

If you can feel your stress and anxiety levels rising while you use social media, you’re not alone. And even though your feed is completely digital, those negative feelings can actually have an impact on our physical health. Clenched jaws, tightened fists and elevated heart rates are just a few ways that bad experiences with other people on social media can manifest in our bodies.
But a simple mindfulness exercise like inhaling deeply, listening to music or taking a walk while paying attention to your surroundings can help combat that. At a time when social media use is surging due to the COVID-19 lockdown, it has never been more important to take care of yourself IRL while you spend more time online — and that means learning ways to find your center while you scroll.
Watch three social media users put mindfulness exercises to the test in this video.

This was produced in partnership with the Greater Good Science Center and the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust. Learn more about how you can bridge differences in your life here.

Overheard at Council: Supporting Young People Through COVID-19

Posted on by NationSwell Team

As adults struggle to understand the impact COVID-19 will have on us and our communities, we have an important opportunity for connection with the young people in our lives. We held an inter-generational conversation designed for adults and teens, ages 13 to 18, with David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR, Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, and Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan, the founder of Youth Mentoring Action Network. Together, we explored the intersectionality of this crisis and how we can best support our young people through it.
In the hope that these might serve you on your mission to make this world a better place, we’re sharing out some of the key moments from our discussion.
Insights:

  • You need routine, but you need a different routine right now–start with physical routines, family meal routines, give yourself reflective time (and fill in school and other obligations from there).

  • Open conversions with youth are important. They are often underestimated. Honesty, straight facts and education can help.

  • The single unifying factor that predicts resilience and the ability to heal from past trauma is connectedness–someone or the people who value you.

Practices:

  • Employ youth. Ask them to facilitate webinars as paid work to replace other work that once supported their family.

  • Parse experiences into smaller, manageable moments. Having more predictable moments of stress can build resilience.

  • When in doubt, reach out. Relational moments will get us through this. Listen to others’ reality.

Recommendations and Resources: 

 

The Opportunity Network’s AiLun Ku on the Importance of ‘Unstoppable Learning’

Posted on by NationSwell Team

As President and CEO of The Opportunity Network, AiLun Ku has devoted her professional life to harnessing the inherent talent of every young person of color from historically underrepresented backgrounds, matching their talent with access to resources and helping them thrive in both college and career.
NationSwell spoke to Ku about the road she’s walked along her professional and personal journey, what she and The Opportunity Network have been able to accomplish, and what the future looks like for her and her organization.
This is what she had to say.
NationSwell: Thanks for taking the time, AiLun. When did you first know you wanted to devote your life to purpose-driven work?
The Opportunity Network’s AiLun Ku: We moved to the United States from Taiwan when I was 10, and we moved to a predominately white town in New Jersey. The culture shock was real. It was a hard transition for my family to leave our communities and our families back in Taiwan and to move to a town that seemed… really different. Yes, we had our aunt and uncle there, and my cousin. We didn’t really have a full community like what we had in Taiwan.
When we moved to the United States, we attended your typical small, suburban public school. They hadn’t had to welcome an immigrant family for probably decades before we arrived, and so the teachers weren’t prepared to support us to learn English or to just become a part of the learning community. The teachers would say things like, “Why are you talking to her? She doesn’t speak English.” One time I used the word “yeah” instead of “yes,” and the teacher reminded me, “That’s an American word.” It made me feel like, “Oh, that word is not for me,” essentially.
It was a hard thing to come from a public school in Taiwan where everybody pitched in as a community of learners, and to come into the American public education system being singled out as an outsider who was made to feel like, “You’re not worthy of the learning resources.”
That was a tough thing for us to reckon with. Then, we just persisted because that’s what you do. That’s what you do when you move to a different country. And having experienced both that overt and underlying racism growing up and as an immigrant, I quickly realized I didn’t want anybody else to have to feel that way again, and that I wanted to prevent others from feeling it.
NationSwell: Part of the work that you do is so that people who come from other countries, who speak English as their second language, it’s so that they can move towards sort of thriving from an earlier age, rather than persisting, I imagine.
Ku: Thriving should be the absolute norm of the education system; but it’s often an exception to the rule when somebody thrives in the American education system. Especially if you look at really segregated communities in urban areas, and if you look at historically under-resourced, underserved communities — that continues to be the case. I think it’s the fact that only few people thrive in the American education system from preschool, from early childhood, all the way through post-secondary, is all the evidence we need to see that the system is designed to leave many of us behind.
NationSwell: That’s a perfect segue into my next question, which is, what is the opportunity gap, and how is The Opportunity Network working to close it?
AiLun Ku:I define the opportunity gap as something that was systematically, historically produced in our social context. That means between systematic oppression, systematic racism that has created generations of resource hoarding and gatekeeping that prevents young people of color and first generation students to access the resources that match their ambitions and talents, to thrive. That is the opportunity gap. The opportunity gap exists both in resources as well as in relationships, and in social capital as well as financial capital. That’s what we’re working to address.
The Opportunity Network works to close it from a few different entry points. From a direct service entry point, which is meeting students’ immediate needs. How do we serve young people of color in high school all the way through college graduation, open up access that provides them with awareness of all the college and career opportunities that are available to them, and then secure those resources and support them on their self-directed journeys toward college and career success?
We also change the way people think about what opportunity and access look like from an institutional level as well as the systems level, which is why we also have a capacity building program. We work with other non-profit organizations and schools to reimagine what college and career look like when your young people are the center of decision-making. The Opportunity Network is doing that work across 18 cities in the United States. This year, we’re slated to serve 5,000 students. Those are the ways that we’re working to address the opportunity gap.
NationSwell: What’s a touchstone that shows you that you’re on the right track here, even if there’s still so much to be done?
Ku: One of the things I’m really proud of is building an asset oriented and asset-based space for all of our young people, all of our staff, all of our stakeholder groups. I think it is important that we continue to underscore that every person inherently has something to offer, and every community inherently has something to offer. It’s a belief and a core value that we continue to nourish within the organization and with our partners, and also in the broader social change conversation and narrative. We know that it matters because our students, our young people and our partners enter spaces knowing their value, and are unapologetic for activating their agency because they know that they have value in every space that they enter.
NationSwell: What is the Purpose Library? Why are you launching it?
Ku: I think “purpose” is an evolving thing. It almost feels like a privilege when you have time and resources and the access to live your purpose. That should be a right for every person on the face of this planet to live fully into your purpose, and to lean fully into your purpose. One of the things we believe really firmly at The Opportunity Network is the more you can hear about stories of purpose, the more you can self-reflect, and self-direct, and shape what that purpose means for you, and it doesn’t have to be a privilege.
The idea of purpose, it’s embedded in stories, it’s embedded in storytelling. I think the only way we learn about how people have arrived at their purpose is through storytelling, and so what a better way than to create an entire library of people telling the stories of their journeys from their roots to their purpose, so that young people, as they’re on the road to discovery, their own purpose, they can learn from everybody else’s experience and activate the power of storytelling, and be authors of their own futures.
The Purpose Library will live on OppNet’s brand new open-access platform, UninterruptED: Unstoppable Learning, which we launched in response to COVID-19. The platform will help first-generation college-bound students and young people of color from historically underserved communities to stay the course in their postsecondary and career goals.
About The Opportunity Network 
The Opportunity Network (OppNet) ignites the drive, curiosity, and agency of students from historically and systematically underrepresented communities to connect them to college access and success, internships, career opportunities, and personal and professional networks. We work with 950 students in our direct service OppNet Fellows program for six years—from the summer after 10th grade through to college graduation, and into careers—with remarkable results: 92% of OppNet Fellows graduate college in six years; 93% will be the first in their families to graduate from college; and 89% secure meaningful employment or graduate school admission within six months of college graduation. Additionally, OppNet drives national student impact through Career Fluency® Partnerships, our capacity-building program for schools and youth-serving organizations across the country looking to boost college and career readiness in their young people. To date, OppNet has worked with over 60 Partners to support thousands of young people in 20 cities across the country reimagine college and career success.

How Adrian Haro Is Fighting to Bolster the Power of Workers Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Posted on by NationSwell Team

There’s never been a more urgent time to talk about the workers of America. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the structural inequities of our society, where workers in essential services — like grocers, delivery people and laundry attendants — risk their lives to work the frontlines of this crisis, despite the fact that they’ve been largely excluded from the economic growth of the late 20th and early 21st century.
As interim CEO of the Workers Lab, NationSwell Council member Adrian Haro fights the good fight for the workers of America. This is what he had to say about the novel ways he and his organization are innovating to not only consolidate and bolster worker power, but to provide immediate relief to those who need it most.
NationSwell’s Anthony Smith: Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing, and a little about how that work has pivoted amid this pandemic?
The Workers Lab’s Adrian Haro: Our purpose as an organization is to give new ideas about increasing worker power a chance to succeed and flourish by taking highly flexible, bold dollars and shooting those out to innovators all over the country — and on the ground — who are really enabling experimentation around new ideas about workers and worker power, and learning from those experiments.
Last year, we partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation and with Google.org to stand up an experiment about something that is now very much on the minds of the American people, certainly public sector and public sector leaders alike, which was to try to get $1000 in emergency cash to gig workers. Through that experiment, we were able to get $1000 in emergency cash to over 400 workers — and we learned that $1000 isn’t enough.
Emergency cash, I suspect now, is being thought of as like a necessity. But it was a necessity before this. Emergency cash, like emergency savings, like easy emergency loans should all be a part of a renewed or re-imagined social safety net. And we are now seeing why.

“What does it mean that workers are being deemed essential, but are not given essential safety gear or equipment?” — Adrian Haro, Interim CEO, Workers Lab

What we’ve been thinking a lot about since this pandemic began is what work looks like now, and how the supports workers need are perhaps important now more than ever before.
Particularly I hear things like how in some states, the process and infrastructure for claiming unemployment insurance is breaking down; when we’re having to rethink what childcare looks like; or trying to rethink what it looks like to go to the grocery store. I know there are innovators all over the country who right now are being forced to be super creative about how to solve problems that are rapidly revealing themselves, and the need to be able to respond quickly with new ideas that reflect responses to new challenges that have been exposed because of this crisis.
So the innovation and experimentation we do as a lab is more important than ever.
NS: What are some of the new ideas out there that you’re supporting?
AH: We are actually currently in the middle of the Innovation Fund, a grant competition we host two times a year. It’s our signature program. It is the main way that we put out a big open call and source innovative ideas from all over the country.
Once the pandemic really took hold, we were smack dab in the middle of that open call. What we’re doing now is doubling down on that program and asking for folks to think about the solutions that they’re submitting to us not necessarily as tools to respond directly to what’s going on, but certainly to be grounded in this moment, but also tied to a broader vision that extends beyond this moment, and where they sit in relation to the kinds of tools that need to be included in our social safety net once all of this blows over.
NS: How do you define a worker?
Workers for us are arguably one of the most powerful constituencies in this country, and I don’t know that they’re talked about in that way enough. Think about what workers need in our communities as citizens. When you think about the potential they have in our democracy as a powerful voting block in policy and advocacy, when you think about given the right conditions and access the role that workers can play in exerting corporate control — and we forget that workers are also moms and dads in our communities that need time, and space, and motivation to do things like the PTA, to run for office.
Workers are all of these things, and indeed because of all of that, because we think about workers as a massive constituency in this country within which myriad issues intersect in their lives, and what we’re working toward in our vision is that workers play an outsized role in determining how our society works more broadly.
NS: What does worker power mean at a time like this, when there are so many different types of jobs that have been classified as essential services, but the workers that work those jobs don’t get the essential support that they might need from their companies or from our governments to work those jobs and live their lives?
AH: We think about power for workers as what are we building in service of all of the outcomes that workers envision for themselves in their lives?
And so you can talk about safety as one of those outcomes. You can talk about recourse in the form of rights. You can talk about pay and benefits as outcomes that folks envision for themselves, mobility and control in the workplace; how much power do they have to participate in their democracy?
Workers need all of those things to be active and able members of our society. We are seeing now not just how unprepared our society writ large is, but how unprepared workers are in this moment to respond at work, or to respond personally on the family side — and how does that inform how we’re thinking about solutions? Where do workers sit in the conversation about the solutions like paid sick leave, the expansion of paid sick leave and the accessibility of unemployment insurance?
These are not new ideas. These are things that advocates have been asking for, demanding for decades. And what we’re looking for are, what is the solution to the problem of an overloaded unemployment insurance claim infrastructure? Who on the ground is thinking about how to fix that problem to achieve impact now and beyond? What does it mean that workers are being deemed essential, but are not given essential safety gear or equipment? When you look at an industry like care — my heart breaks for care workers for whom the notion of social distancing is really, in many cases, not an option. It’s just not an option to maintain distance when it’s your job to help somebody get out of bed or to give somebody a bath. And so in many cases the problems that are being surfaced now, the crux of them is as old as time.
There’s like this misconception that innovation and experimentation is only about solving or addressing challenges for a worker is unique to the 21st century, in gig, in tech, in digital.
Innovation is very, very much also a tool to make sure that all the workers that didn’t benefit from the policy gains of the 20th century can do so now, that they are included in those laws and in that progress. I mean I could go down the list of queer people, people with disabilities, immigrants, farm workers, domestic workers — all groups of workers that in some way, shape or form have been excluded from the progress of the 20th century. And we should be using innovation and experimentation to solve those problems as well.
NS: You mentioned that we’re at the crux of a moment right now with respect to workers and their future in this country. Is there anything that you’re seeing right now that heartens you, that says this is sort of the reckoning that needed to happen to make sure that workers get the support, the recourse that they deserve — that they’re the beneficiaries of past and present policies? Or are you more disheartened? 
AH: In many ways, this is both a heartening and a heartbreaking moment. We are seeing workers be the heroes of this crisis, on the front lines of this crisis in many ways, right? As nurses, as domestic workers, as caregivers, as the folks who check us out at the grocery store, as the folks who feed us via whatever platform. That heartens me because I feel like there is a national resonance and recognition — that in normal times largely often doesn’t exist — that workers are in fact critical and integral to the lives that we live and benefit from every single day.
At the same time, you are seeing in a matter of weeks the rapid construction and revision of the social safety net that we would argue should have been in place decades ago. And so, for me, when I see how workers are finally being given their due, so to speak, are being seen for the value and the critical nature that they play in society in normal times, and you talk about what I imagine is going to be a tremendous opportunity through legislation, through organizing, creating a new social safety net that recognizes that value of workers — that heartens me, and we are doing everything we can in the way of funding experimentation and innovation to prioritize workers in the conversation about what happens now, but also what happens in the future after this.
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Adrian Haro and his team encourage NationSwell readers to subscribe to receive updates on their experiments, learnings, as well as opportunities to get resourced for their ideas on their website. If you’re able, they also encourage you to make a donation to help support workers amid the COVID-19 epidemic.
Haro is a member of the NationSwell Council. For more information on the Council, visit our hub.

Overheard at Council: Leadership During a Moment of Great Uncertainty

Posted on by NationSwell Team

In early April, Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, and Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of YearUp, stopped by the NationSwell Council’s digital table for a conversation about how the social impact leaders we convened can navigate this uncertain and challenging time, leveraging the disruption and chaos as a potential opportunity to learn and scale our reach and impact.
In the hope that these might serve you on your mission to make this world a better place, we’re sharing out some of the key moments from our discussion. These insights and practices and recommendations all come straight to you from Wendy, Gerald and some of the other inspiring Council members in attendance.
Insights:
“People have such various entry points, like grappling with personal struggles, deep concerns or having lost loved ones to really being fixated on the questions of how we evolve the way we work right now and what we’re called upon to do right now, to being open to what world is going to emerge from this, and what our role coming out of that will be. I’ve just found that holding open spaces has helped us meet people’s personal needs, become clear very quickly in a shared way about what our immediate priorities are and also, continue with the open space around medium term to long term questions about what we need to evolve into as the world around us is evolving.” — Wendy Kopp
“I know there’s light at the end of this tunnel. I know we’ll emerge from it and feel confident about that. But I also know, man, it’s a heck of a long time. And the more folks I talk to who are out in the private sector space who have really good visibility onto this tell me this isn’t one or two quarters, it’s not it’s not six months. This is a couple of years for us to figure out how to get back on our feet. How do you help your team realize it’s not a firefight?” — Gerald Chertavian
“The thing that we turned to almost immediately is just holding space for our global team, and the teams within those teams. Not a day goes by when I don’t have big, open space — probably more than one — where we’ll break down into small groups and really just check in. And we’ve found that that has been helpful.” — Wendy Kopp
“Some of us will come out stronger, but in some parts of the world, this [pandemic is] going to be just extraordinarily devastating. I just hope that our development response recognizes what we’re seeing in the world right now, which is that local leadership matters and the degree to which we can figure out how to help local folks build the volition, the capabilities, and the networks to become globally informed rather than trying to, as we generally do in development, rain down solutions around the world.” — Wendy Kopp
Practices:
“Set up principles very early on. We will have to make very hard choices, so what are the principles that guide those decisions? Principles like: whatever we do, it’s got to be top down. Also, we want to use an equity lens as we make decisions. If we look at whatever decisions we make, do they pass those principles as best we can, and are we also thinking about the bias that can creep into those decisions and trying to eliminate it.” — Gerald Chertavian
“Whatever we decide now, we want to look back in a couple years’ time and feel like we made the very best decisions we could. And so as we make decisions, let’s also look out and ask, ‘Would we be happy, or not, with these decisions? Do we feel we’ve lived our values well?’” — Gerald Chertavian
“With every stakeholder group, we just need constant, constant, constant communication, probably a lot more than we — at least I — would naturally gravitate towards. But I’m really trying to embrace it because I know it’s just crucial right now.” — Wendy Kopp
“There is a new world coming if we’re ready to listen for it. One of the most important things right now is to actually hold the uncertainty and not jump to solutions. Really consider whether we’re asking the right questions so that we can see the real possibilities as we look out beyond the immediate and see what emerges, and really lean into this chance to actually be part of shaping what really could be a better world.” — Wendy Kopp
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Welcome to Overheard at Council, a series capturing insights, practices, recommendations and other powerful moments from some of our NationSwell Council events. If you have any feedback on this series, or if you attended and you’d like to add something you think we might have missed, please reach out via email. To find out more about the NationSwell Council, visit our digital hub.