In his victory speech, Donald J. Trump vowed to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” The investment is long overdue: The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent national assessment, rated the country’s infrastructure as a D-plus, just above failing. The group estimates that, by 2025, the nation will need a $1.44 trillion boost over current funding levels to meet growing needs.
Since 2009, when Barack Obama doled out roughly $800 billion in a stimulus package, that money’s been hard to come by, largelyblocked by partisanship. But advocates hope the election of Trump, who made his fortune in real estate, could launch a building boom. The Republican president, so used to seeing his name on gilded skyscrapers, hotels, casinos and golf courses, could cut a deal with congressional Democrats, who view public-works projects as an engine for job growth.
Assuming Trump can indeed pass a bill, we at NationSwell have a few ideas for him to consider. A big, beautiful wall’s not one of them; instead, here’s the top 10 shovel-worthy alternatives we’d like the new administration to undertake.
It’s late one night when two teenagers — one an aloof perfectionist; the other, a troubled target of bullying — find themselves inhabiting the same strange dream. Though they’ve never met, the strangers share a heartbreaking connection: the recent death of a mutual friend. In their shared lucid dream, they walk under an indigo sky, trying to figure out where to go next while simultaneously coping with feelings of anger, sadness and fear after the loss of their friend. Soon, the teens encounter a giant lantern. It surges toward them, chasing them down a hallway and through a door.
It’s a nocturnal sequence that seems straight out of a mind-bending Charlie Kaufman movie. But the creator of this inventive world isn’t an established filmmaker; she’s Rebecca Taylor, herself a teenager living in the Bay Area. And the premise isn’t the plot of a blockbuster; it’s the basis for a video game about the stages of grief, called “Lucid,” that she’s helping develop. A high school senior, Taylor spends most weekends writing code with other young designers, storytellers and programmers at Gameheads, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to training underserved youth the foundations of video-game design.
The yearlong curriculum, targeted to those between the ages of 15 and 24, seeks to open Silicon Valley’s enormous possibilities to low-income communities just across the San Francisco Bay, says Damon Packwood, the executive director of Gameheads. “The ubiquity of computing is akin to the printing press — it changes us culturally and permanently,” he says. “But if you have just one group of people that is part of that change, it doesn’t benefit us all.”
Packwood stumbled upon the model for Gameheads while he was teaching a web design class at another organization. To get his students interested in the subject matter, he suggested designing a website around gaming. But the students wanted to cut to the chase and learn how to build games themselves. “It’s a language they already understand,” Packwood says of the young people he mentors. Interactive storytelling, he adds, “is the medium of the 21st century.” By switching the focus of his class to video-game design, he found it was much easier to get kids excited about technology.
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That unique focus makes Gameheads, which currently serves about 60 students, the only tech boot camp of its kind in the Bay Area. While most other programs prioritize software development, an in-demand skill set to be sure, Packwood believes putting all the emphasis on what’s job-worthy is misplaced. Gameheads, on the other hand, is open to a wider range of roles, welcoming animators and sound engineers alongside programmers.
Since most of the Gameheads attendees are still in high school, Packwood says his main goal is seeing his students go to college. He has helped Taylor and the other students apply for financial aid, draft college essays and figure out where to enroll. (For her part, Taylor is readying applications to several schools in the University of California system and plans to study computer science once there.) And after they obtain their degree, about half of the grads consider joining the industry — a possibility many hadn’t considered before their time in Gameheads.
Taylor once suspected that because she didn’t have an “in,” she wouldn’t ever be considered as a serious job candidate by game studios. (One look at classic cult movies like “WarGames,” “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter” reveals why: White men predominate in the popular imagery of who creates electronic entertainment.) “I didn’t think it was possible,” says Taylor. But after working with Packwood and other mentors, who come from Sledgehammer, Ubisoft and other studios, her views changed. “I don’t really see it as much of a daunting task, only because a lot of my mentors are actually people of color who work in the game industry,” she says. “It seems very possible now.”
Just as Packwood had hoped — and predicted — the games being crafted by such a diverse population of young people defy genre. Teens like Taylor, whose gaming interests aren’t necessarily represented on Best Buy’s shelves, are more interested in playing “Life Is Strange,” an adventure about a high school girl who can rewind time, than first-person shooter games. “I think the industry has had enough of ‘Halo’ and ‘Call of Duty.’ They need something fresh and original, something that’s meaningful,” she says.
Taylor hopes “Lucid” is that type of game. By design, it necessitates two characters, so that one person can’t play it alone. The two players have to work through the grieving process together, like an interactive therapy. (When Packwood first heard the premise, he asked who gave the group the idea; it came from their own experiences, they told him.) “When I see friends of mine that are going through grief, they shut themselves out of the world. So why not have people try to get over it together?” Taylor asks. “I want people to know that games are more than just something you do when you’re bored. Games actually have the potential to save a life, maybe.”
Like Packwood and his cohort know, most successful game developers are the ones who can build new worlds. At Gameheads, he’s helping his students do just that: They’re carving out a space, both on their computers and in Silicon Valley.
Homepage photo of Gameheads participants courtesy of TJ Ransom
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
In the early ’90s, amid worries about dependence on foreign oil and global warming, the Japanese automaker Toyota mapped out initial plans for two revolutionary vehicles. One was the Prius, the car that arrived on American shores in 2000 and is largely responsible for popularizing hybrids here. (There are now more than 9 million hybrids on the road, globally.) A decade and a half later, the second vehicle is finally making its debut: the Mirai, which launched in California last year, is one of the first hydrogen fuel-cell cars available on the market. The zero-emissions vehicle has long been a goal for Geri Yoza, a 30-year Toyota employee who’s now the national manager of fuel-cell vehicles for the company’s American division. NationSwell spoke to her about the Mirai’s possibilities and Toyota’s next ambitious goal: to green the company by 2050. First, can you walk me through how the Mirai works? The vehicle is creating electricity through a chemical reaction in the fuel-cell stack. You fill up with hydrogen at a fueling station, and that combines with oxygen from the air to create electricity on-demand. Basically, you’re stripping off the electrons, and those provide power to the motor. Zero emissions come out of the tailpipe; the only byproduct is water vapor. Why is this preferable to plugging in for a charge, as the Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Bolt all do? All-battery electric vehicles typically have a shorter range than fuel-cell vehicles, and they often take several hours to recharge the battery. Batteries can be fairly heavy as well. Whereas, with a hydrogen fuel cell, vehicles have a range of 300 miles or more, and they only take about three to five minutes to fuel up. The Mirai is currently priced at $57,500, a figure out of reach for most car-buyers. Over the short and long terms, how do you plan to make the car affordable? Even when a vehicle has a high MSRP, there are incentives out there from both the federal government as well as states. For example, there’s an $8,000 federal tax credit if you purchase a fuel-cell vehicle like the Mirai. In California, there’s a $5,000 rebate that you receive if you’re a resident and you keep the vehicle in service for three years. They’re doing this because they understand that new technology is expensive — after your house, a vehicle is probably your second largest expense. In order to get the market going, sometimes you need these incentives.
Over the long term, if you look at the Prius as an example, we initially had a demographic of early adopters who were very highly educated and earning higher incomes. But as the vehicle was adopted by the mass market, you started to see broader appeal, with a greater range in education and income levels. As advanced-tech vehicles become more widespread, the production costs go down. What do you tell skeptics who say there are too many obstacles, like a lack of fuel stations, for wide-scale use of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles? There’s a challenge there, I will admit, in the infrastructure of fueling. We’re still at the beginning stages for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle adoption, but we’re making progress. We have 25 retail stations up in California, with more on the way, and Toyota’s working with Air Liquide in bringing a dozen stations to the Northeast next year. Building the fuel-station network will take time. We saw that with all-battery electric cars, it took a while to get the standards and codes together to educate municipalities on the permitting processes for plug-in charging stations. There’s room for both types of zero-emission vehicles, and consumers should be allowed to choose based on their needs and lifestyles.
[ph] Where do we get all this hydrogen from? Hydrogen fuel can be produced from almost anything, including raw materials like natural gas, water and biomass. For example, right now, the most common way is steam-reformed methane. You take natural gas and apply heat and steam to it. The methane in the natural gas reacts with the water in a chemical process that releases hydrogen. Another way is taking waste from water-treatment plants or landfills and creating hydrogen from biomass. And hydrogen can also be made from water via electrolysis. Under the Zero Emissions Vehicle program, California requires automakers to sell a certain number of electric cars. How is that regulation affecting the way Toyota does business? The way it works is that manufacturers get credit for selling all-battery electric cars, plug-in electric hybrids or fuel-cell vehicles. If some manufacturers generate more credits than they need, they can actually sell those to other manufacturers who might not be on the exact same trajectory of zero-emission vehicle product development, if necessary, in order to balance out their portfolio.
In terms of being at the forefront, the regulation has really helped move California toward its zero-emissions goals, but we’re not there yet. We have so many conventional vehicles on the road in the state’s metro areas that it’s really been important to continue reducing our tailpipe carbon-dioxide emissions and other tailpipe pollutants, since they have a negative impact from a public health and quality-of-life standpoint. Now, other states have adopted some of California’s zero-emissions-vehicle standards, and that’s important because it helps promote adoption of these vehicles nationwide. One of the other big regulations came in 2012, when the Obama administration set a standard that all cars and light trucks must reach 55 miles per gallon by 2025. How do those fuel-economy rules affect whether more consumers go electric? Across the company, Toyota has a portfolio approach. We don’t have just zero-emission vehicles or efficient hybrids like the Prius, which already has an EPA rating of over 50 mpg. We also have very fuel-efficient internal-combustion vehicles, and we continue to develop new technologies to reduce our emissions, as well as increase fuel economy. Sometimes, it can be a challenge with gasoline costs being as low as they are right now. The market is about 60 percent trucks and SUVs, and one of the reasons is because of the low cost of fuel. We hear the word “sustainability” batted around, much more than in the past. What does that term mean to you, and why should it be a priority? Sustainability, to me, goes beyond the vehicle, even beyond manufacturing. How can we benefit society as a good corporate citizen? Within the company, one of the challenges that Toyota has for 2050 is creating vehicles that are zero carbon emissions in manufacturing, putting in systems that promote recycling and optimizing the resources that we have. One example is reusing the hybrid vehicles’ batteries at the end of their life in other ways, like energy storage for solar. There’s a second life. So, we’re looking at those types of solutions.
Sustainability also goes beyond the corporate into the personal. Everybody has a role to play in the decisions that they make, including the cars they choose to drive. It’s important from the next generation’s standpoint. I really do want to leave the world in a better place, environmentally, than when I came into it.
Building a Prison-to-School Pipeline, The New Yorker Former prisoners studying at the University of California-Berkeley have a complicated relationship with their classmates: In many ways, the previously incarcerated are more worldly, yet less scholarly, than younger students who enroll straight out of high school. That’s why ex-cons formed the Underground Scholars Initiative, a group of former inmates who help each other navigate Cal and recruit those still in the penitentiary to apply to college.
In Life After Coal, Appalachia Attempts to Reinvent Itself, Governing In all of Eastern Kentucky, there are barely 4,000 coal mining jobs left, down from 30,000 positions just 15 years ago. Undercut by natural gas prices and tough environmental regulations, those in Appalachia are echoing one solution: diversification. This fall, Harlan County hired its first full-time economic development manager to drum up business — a major step on the way to rebuilding a functioning economy.
The Urban Playground That Builds Kids’ Brains, CityLab On average, a wealthy child hears 30 million more words than a low-income peer. To reduce the gap, why not put words wherever kids are? Even at playgrounds. That’s the theory behind the illustrated sentences adorning the jungle gym at Officer Willie Wilkins Park in Oakland, Calif. “Let’s talk about sunshine,” “Let’s talk about food,” one can read on the playground, a helpful reminder nudging parents to talk with their children more.
At her first hackathon, Grace Hu, now a senior at Wellesley College, scanned the room and noticed she was on the event’s only all-female team. She shrugged it off and returned to playing around with virtual reality headsets. But as the computer science and math double major signed up for more hackathons, the persistent gender divide she saw every weekend irked her. “It can be a really isolating experience when you’re the only girl on a team,” Hu says. “It can get to you at a certain point: ‘Why am I the only person doing this that looks like me?’”
To right that imbalance, Hu and a classmate put on a woman-centric hackathon in October, where two-thirds of the participants were female. “We made this our kind of hackathon,” says Hu. Hosted over 48 long hours at Wellesley in Massachusetts, WHACK (for Wellesley Hacks) brought together 80 undergrads, largely from Boston-area colleges, to build projects for three nonprofits: UpLift, which combats sexual harassment; Partners in Health, which ships medical supplies to developing countries; and Wellesley’s Office of Disability, which makes the campus more accessible to those with a physical handicap. Faced with real problems that technology might solve, the participants got right to work. Since the event, their projects have been integrated into the nonprofits’ operations, extending the weekend’s impact, adds co-organizer Amanda Foun.
Conferences like WHACK are possible because of the support they receive from Major League Hacking (MLH), the official collegiate association that sponsors the 30-hour programming sprees. Think of them as the NCAA of computer coding. Every year, MLH sponsors 220 events across the globe. (During the first weekend of October, while the girls at WHACK tapped at their keyboards in Massachusetts, MLH hosted five other hackathons simultaneously in cities from San Diego to Baltimore.) Unlike professional hackathons, where attendees show up with a broad skill set, the league places mentors at each of the college meetups to offer instruction. In total, MLH teaches computer science skills to 65,000 students annually. The goal is to broaden tech’s availability, opening participation to amateur developers and minority groups underrepresented in tech.
“We help create events where student programmers, designers and makers can develop their technical skills and passions,” says MLH’s CEO Mike Swift, who co-founded the association in 2013. “Whether that’s making websites and mobile apps or self-driving cars, we offer the venue and the community to learn how to do those things and reach those goals.”
Hackathons usually begin with a pitch session, where a handful of attendees float their ideas, attracting others to work on their teams. The events adopt a freeform, build-what-you-wish structure, a far cry from how most computer science classes are taught. And for many participants, that’s liberating. In university classrooms, students “get a lecture from a professor or a grad student. The curriculum is mostly out of books,” says Swift. Walking into an MLH event, on the other hand, you might see someone building an Android app to design carpool routes, while someone else is making a device to translate sign language.
MLH goes to extra lengths to welcome first-time hackers, making a special effort to reach out to female engineering societies, women-in-tech conferences and other minority groups. The organization also offers scholarships for people who can’t afford the travel costs on their own. Once there, attendees can dive into hour-long workshops about, say, Javascript or the principles of user design. As they’re laboring over their projects, mentors circle the room to help troubleshoot error messages or offer lessons in connecting to the hardware.
Without the league’s support, it would be a challenge to put on a hackathon alone, says Hu. To get ready for WHACK, for instance, MLH blasted the event details to their contacts, supplied technical hardware, lined up a squad of mentors and judges and handled logistics like food delivery. The MLH liaison on-site was like “having 10 extra hands,” she says.
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For women in the room at WHACK, the diversity was a welcome change, says Hu. “When you hear about ‘brogrammer’ culture, caffeine shots and not sleeping for a day, there’s a lot to be intimidated by. That can often scare away minorities in tech, which includes females,” she says. By targeting the conference to girls, WHACK sent a message that women belong at hackathons. “It puts more focus on the project itself, rather than the kind of environment that I’m working in,” she adds.
At this year’s WHACK, as twinkling Christmas lights dangled from a “W” at the front of the student center, teams of four and five hammered away, sometimes doing so as late as 4 a.m., to come up with tech-driven solutions for the nonprofits. One group built a social media plug-in, using IBM’s Sentiment Analysis, to detect whether a message would be considered online harassment. Another group linked vaccine delivery with texting, so an SMS would trigger a shipment. One team, all first-time rookies, used a Pebble Smartwatch to build a hack that would warn students with disabilities about any nearby hazards, such as a steep slope. They took home the top prize.
For Hu, that’s indicative of just how open MLH-sponsored hackathons truly are. “You don’t have to have advanced skills to attend and build really cool things in a few days,” she says. “As long believe in yourself, there’s always something cool that you can get out of one weekend.”
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
It’s one of the most glaring indicators of inequity in the nation’s education system: Students from low-income families tested 166 points below the average on last year’s SAT and 396 points behind than their wealthiest peers. Put another way, the poorest students (whose parents earned less than $20,000) could barely meet the baseline for applying to California State University, Northridge, while most rich kids (whose parents rake in over $200,000) would have the same shot of getting into the higher ranked University of California, Los Angeles.
CollegeSpring, an eight-year-old San Francisco–based nonprofit with offices in L.A. and New York, is trying to upend those inequalities by helping low-income high school students boost their SAT scores, navigate the college admission process and complete four-year degrees. While the organization can’t make up all the differences that exist between the rich and the poor, CollegeSpring’s 80-hour prep program has helped 15,000 high schoolers in California and New York improve their SAT scores by an average of 183 points, effectively erasing the statistical disadvantage usually seen among poorer students.
“The SAT isn’t a test that’s trying to trick or trap you. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate what you know how to do,” says Julie Bachur Gopalan, CollegeSpring’s senior vice president of strategy and impact. “You can put up a number that you can improve pretty quickly over a short period of time. You can’t do that with a GPA by the time you get to junior year.”
Garrett Neiman, CollegeSpring’s co-founder and CEO, agrees. Upping SAT scores, he says, is a “point of leverage in the system” that has been overlooked by other educational nonprofits. Meanwhile, for-profit test-prep companies, like the one Neiman once worked for, have cashed in.
The need for CollegeSpring, which is free for qualified students, became apparent during Neiman’s sophomore year at Stanford (the school accepted him after he nailed a perfect 2400 on his own SAT), when he befriended several classmates on full scholarship. “They all credited some catalyst: a teacher, parent, mentor or a specific college-access program,” he says. “On one hand, it was disheartening. From a meritocratic lens, if they came from an inner-city background, [their acceptance to Stanford] wasn’t possible without that help. But at the same time, it felt like if there were more or better programs, the gap could be closed.”
Neiman decided to quit his lucrative job as an SAT coach. Tutoring had been “a great way to pay for school,” he says, but only a rarified group had the money to sit in on his lessons. In other words, he’d been exacerbating an economic disparity. During a social entrepreneurship course at Stanford, Neiman and his co-founder, Jessica Perez, crafted a new test-prep curriculum. After three pilot programs that summer, CollegeSpring emerged.
Recognizing that the simple tricks taught by for-profit SAT companies (like knowing how many choices to eliminate before randomly guessing) wouldn’t sufficiently boost scores to erase the gap, Neiman devised a curriculum that would help students sharpen the academic skills they already possess: High school juniors and seniors would take 40 hours of SAT prep, tailored to the needs of those with low-income backgrounds; follow that up with four full-length practice tests; and then receive another 20 hours of instruction about the college application and financial aid processes.
“We meet our students wherever they are when they enter the program, which is often at a lower baseline score, with a lot less knowledge of the test and the way it’s scored and not much information about the college application process in general,” says Bachur Gopalan. “That means that our curriculum itself has a lot of scaffolding; it doesn’t assume they know certain concepts. What we do is remediation, then apply the core academic concepts in an SAT setting.”
Unlike Kaplan and other for-profit tutors, CollegeSpring’s curriculum is taught by classroom teachers. That personnel choice is important because students need a foundation of trust before they dive into the forbidding world of college admissions, says Bachur Gopalan, a former high school teacher. “They don’t want to learn from people who make them feel they are not smart,” she says. “They don’t want to feel like charity cases.” Students who completed the 2014-15 CollegeSpring program at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School.
Besides arming teachers with the curricular resources to coach low-income students, the nonprofit employs top undergraduates from area colleges to reinforce the teacher’s lessons in a small-group setting. In what’s known as “near-peer mentoring,” these students, who’ve successfully enrolled in college, instill confidence in the younger students who are just embarking on their post–high school journey.
That’s exactly how it went for Karimah Omer, a Yemeni immigrant who came to the US in 2000 to live with 17 relatives in a one-bedroom apartment in East Oakland. “Coming from a family of nine siblings, it was hard to think about my parents being able to afford college,” says Omer, who thought, if anything, her parents could save up for her younger sister’s education. But her CollegeSpring mentor, a junior enrolled at UC Berkeley, entranced Omer with her description of the university as another world unto itself — a message that resonated because the mentor was from Oakland too. “We’re so underestimated. We’re expected to get local restaurant jobs and live off that. The whole group was happy we had someone from our city, doing really great things, who went to Cal. She showed us what it means to be a leader for the community.”
With CollegeSpring’s help, Omer devoted her energies to improving her SAT score in the hopes a school would notice her determination. She watched the tallies on her practice test rise, “little by little,” until her final score on the real exam rose 325 points. With that score, Omer matriculated to Mills College, an all-female liberal arts school in Oakland. She’s now a sophomore with an eye toward earning a master’s to work with autistic children. She’s also paying it forward, having become a CollegeSpring mentor herself.
Since 2008, about half of CollegeSpring’s students have gone on to four-year colleges, which generally have higher graduation rates than community colleges. (Nationally, 52 percent of low-income students who finish high school enroll in either community college or four-year programs.) About 80 percent of those alumni, Neiman adds, are on track to finish their degree. With each additional correct answer on the SAT, thousands of first-generation college-bound students are springing out of their disadvantaged circumstances.
In East Palo Alto, a short drive from the headquarters of Google, Sun Microsystems and Facebook, a high school student without housing was contemplating where she’d sleep that night. The girl asked Rey Faustino, then an employee at the nonprofit BUILD, an incubator for low-income entrepreneurs, to help her find a shelter. Faustino located a dusty binder whose plastic sleeves held flyers about social services. But most of the information proved outdated or incorrect, he recalls. “It took us all night to find one shelter for a student and her family, and it took us weeks to get them into stable, affordable housing.” The support net, it became clear at that moment, had holes.
Social services, provided by charities and government, largely haven’t kept pace in today’s hyper-connected world. Most nonprofits have websites, but that doesn’t mean they’re SEO-friendly or that they’ve been updated recently. The absence of quality information online forces struggling families to rely on what they hear through word of mouth. That leaves the most disconnected individuals in the most vulnerable position.
“How do you find the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco? By using Yelp or Google,” Faustino says. “We’re doing all these amazing things to advance life for the middle class, but we weren’t using any of these technologies and assets for the most vulnerable families. I thought that was ridiculous, and I wanted to do something about it.”
Five years ago, Faustino founded One Degree. A comprehensive directory of the 20,000 social service resources in the Bay Area, the online database is searchable by location and proximity to public transit, language and entry requirements, like age, household size and income. The platform works on both computers and smartphones, making it easy for most people to connect. (Surveys by Pew Research Center have found that nearly two-thirds of Americans own smartphones, and the number is expected to keep rising; for 13 percent of low-income earners, the devices are their primary way to access the internet.) Once a user has identified a match, One Degree helps with the intake process, such as scheduling an appointment or filling out an online application. That extra info might save someone a bus trip to the charity’s doors, only to find they’re not accepting applications.
So far, One Degree has connected more than 140,000 people in the Bay Area to the right agency. After a national competition, Faustino’s work was recognized by Inherent Group in November, when they presented the organization with the $50,000 grand prize at NationSwell’s Summit on Solutions. (Jukay Hsu, the founder and executive director of Coalition for Queens, which trains a diverse and underserved population of NYC residents to be app and web developers, snagged the second-place $25,000 prize.)
Read more about the Inherent Prize and the 2016 finalists
Faustino knows firsthand about the necessity of social services — and the difficulty of finding the right ones. As new immigrants from the Philippines, his parents worked multiple jobs to afford the rent in Los Angeles: his mother as a hospital administrator and, later, a nurse; his father, a salesman at Home Depot and a handyman on the weekends. They got the extra support they needed with naturalization papers, healthcare and summer school from local charities. Faustino became his family’s connector, finding out about programs from his teachers and translating for his parents. One Degree, he says, is the program he wishes he had as a kid.
Like Yelp, Faustino envisions that One Degree’s users will rate nonprofits and write about their experience. While that feature sounds simple enough to people who are used to streaming movies on Netflix and reading books on their tablets, it would upend the way nonprofits work. Forced to reckon with users’ commentary, a nonprofit might be more responsive to community needs, Faustino believes.
And, in a further boon to efficiency, collecting search data might give a more accurate picture of how disparate parts of the sector should fit together, he adds. Currently, many cities and counties focus only on the constituents who live within a district’s limits. But One Degree might register a fuller scope, picking up on the need for services where people work or where they hope to move. In the Bay Area, for example, you might see San Francisco residents looking for cheaper housing in nearby Contra Costa or childcare in San Mateo where their kids go to school. That could allow government agencies to better allocate services where they’re actually needed.
“In the past, nonprofit social services were transactional. You go to a place, receive a service and then go home,” explains Faustino. “Now we have the opportunity to make it more relationship-based, to see it not as a one-time change to a person’s life, but as a whole constellation or web of services” that a person has at their disposal.
In fact, these groups find that interconnectedness so valuable that one-fifth of One Degree’s revenue comes from social-service organizations that pay Faustino’s team for sophisticated referral tools. Some of these assessment tools direct users to other resources, like to a hospital for a screening of diabetes risk; other tools track where else clients go for help, enabling a caseworker to see, for instance, that her client visited a food bank, shelter and workforce development program. “No one agency can do everything for every client, so they’re always relying on other resources to help,” Faustino says. “One Degree makes it easy for them to access those other resources and stay organized.”
One Degree’s model could change the way we think about impact. Because social-service recipients get help from multiple organizations — a dozen, on average, Faustino says — the reviews could establish which programs actually helped, as described from the user’s perspective. “A lot of impact reports and messaging says that so-and-so went to a shelter, and we changed her life. Part of that is true — the shelter did help — but it wasn’t the only thing,” he says. “We take away a person’s agency when we say it’s just the organization that helped. She’s the one who made the choice, the one who went and found the shelter and other services. Funding streams are very competitive, and organizations have to paint themselves as the savior. But I fundamentally believe that holds back the nonprofit sector from seeing huge impact in our communities.”
Traditionally, social-service nonprofits have lagged behind in these high-tech times, but with One Degree, they’re finally starting to catch up.
The seed for HandUp, a crowdfunding site that solicits donations to help the homeless, was planted in early 2012 when Rose Broome passed a shivering woman huddling in the doorway of a real estate office in San Francisco. “On a cold night, I was walking down the street and saw a woman sleeping on the sidewalk,” recalls Broome. “She didn’t have a jacket, she didn’t have a sweater — just a thin blanket protecting her from the cold ground.” That night, Broome says, “I made a commitment to myself to do one thing to make a difference, and that one thing turned into HandUp.”
The platform for HandUp allows those battling homelessness to appeal directly to donors to fund their particular needs. Since 2013, more than 2,000 people have raised nearly $1.6 million. By sharing their stories on the site, those in need are able to fundraise for housing assistance — security deposits, moving costs, help paying back rent, and so on — as well as for food, education, medical care and technological access. “Having a phone, the Internet, the ability to text is extremely important for everyone, especially for the most vulnerable people,” says Broome, who, besides cofounding HandUp, acts as its CEO.
The need for funding is enormous. Nationwide, 3.5 million people struggle with homelessness every year, and 50 million people live below the poverty line. But there’s a misconception about what being homeless looks like, says Broome, pointing out that the image of a person sleeping on the street, wrestling with mental health issues or drug addictions (or both), tends to capture the public’s imagination. In reality, however, 30 percent of those who are homeless are part of families. As Broome puts it, “You could walk right past 80 percent of people experiencing homelessness and not know any different.”
HandUp works by partnering with organizations that serve homeless populations. These organizations help their clients sign up and create profiles on the site (to date, they’ve launched more than 5,800 campaigns in 29 cities). When donors give, the money goes to the organization, which will pay for the items requested. Donors get an email update when their money has been put to use. HandUp also helps homeless people create donation request cards, which they can hand out to people they meet on the street, and donors in San Francisco can buy HandUp gift cards in $25 increments and distribute them when they meet someone in need (the cards can be used for groceries, clothes and other goods at HandUp’s nonprofit partners).
Join the cause! Help those experiencing poverty or homelessness. Read their stories, then post a message or make a donation here.
Broome and her cofounder, Sammie Rayner, are passionate about using technology to solve problems and create change. “It’s surprising, but right now, only 8 percent of charitable giving happens online,” Broome says. And unfortunately, the nonprofit sector tends to lag far behind the private sector in adopting new technologies. “So often, nonprofits are the last to get some of the best technology to do their work,” adds Rayner.
For the nonprofits that work with HandUp, the platform allows them to fund needs that wouldn’t otherwise be met, filling in the gaps left by restrictive government and foundation grant funding. SF Cares, a collaborative project of several Lutheran churches working to serve low-income and homeless individuals in San Francisco, has used HandUp to raise $18,000 for the needy they work with, plus another $20,000 toward their general operating costs. “They’re funds our organization never would have gotten before,” says the Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer, the executive director of SF Cares and pastor at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church. And the people doing the giving through HandUp are new donors that SF Cares might not have reached on its own, she adds.
Rohrer says she loves the way HandUp lets people combatting homelessness “speak in their own voice.” And she likes that the site lets people decide for themselves what they need to improve their lives. “Plus,” she says, “any time that I don’t have to spend fundraising means I get to eat with the homeless, and I get to sing songs with them too.”
Creating human connections is as much a part of HandUp’s purpose as developing innovative technological solutions. “On HandUp, you can read the stories of thousands of people who need help with very specific goals,” Rayner says. “As soon as people read the human story and have that connection through our platform, it’s harder to have the same stereotypes, and it’s harder to judge.” When donors give on HandUp, they can also post words of encouragement. The people who receive money through the site often say those kind words mean more than the donation, adds Broome. “A lot of people who are homeless feel invisible,” she says. HandUp helps them feel seen.
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The 2016 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from November 1 to 15 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
For Zakiya Harris, growing up in East Oakland, Calif., meant navigating between two acutely different worlds every day. “I grew up in the hood, but I went to a very affluent school,” she says. “So I spent my days being one of few black people, and I spent my nights being in a predominantly black neighborhood. I believe that really shapes the work that I do, because I’ve always been a bridge-builder.”
Today, Harris is building bridges in the Bay Area as the co-founder of Hack the Hood, an Oakland-based nonprofit that introduces young people of color to careers in technology by training them to design and build free websites for small businesses. The participants, who range in age from 16 to 25, learn crucial skills for the 21st-century economy, and the local businesses establish an online presence that they otherwise might not have had the time, resources or know-how to build themselves. “Hack the Hood is able to level-up the skills of young people and also provide a huge economic development boost for small businesses in their community,” Harris says.
Since 2014, Hack the Hood has sponsored 16 boot camps in eight cities across Northern California. The six-week programs have attracted a total of 234 young minorities from low-income neighborhoods, 92 percent of whom have completed the course. Boot camps begin with an intensive two-week focus on technical skills like website design, coding and social media promotion. “After that, the program transitions into an office,” says Harris, when the young participants are paired with small-business clients and are responsible for self-managing their Web projects. “We want them to feel like freelancers and like a design firm,” she says. The goal is to broaden their relationship to technology. “They start to see their place in tech,” adds Harris. “They don’t just have to be consumers, they can be creatives.”
The local businesses that sign on also reap enormous benefits. Hack the Hood typically works with mom-and-pop shops whose owners aren’t necessarily comfortable online or on social media. “A lot of these folks are small, and they don’t want to be thinking about their website,” Harris says. And because of the rapidly shifting demographics of Bay Area neighborhoods, businesses that lack an online presence aren’t reaching the new residents moving in. “We want our local owners to be more visible,” she says. “When people are Googling the new coffee shop or the closest tax preparer, we want those people who’ve been the backbone of our city to show up in the search results.”
Join the cause! Use your talents to help open doors for low-income, high-potential youth. Volunteer your time as a mentor in the Bay Area or elsewhere in the US.
Hack the Hood participants don’t just gain valuable experience working in tech, they also develop soft skills, like project management, public speaking, networking, perseverance and more. And besides learning to write CSS and HTML code, they’re given a chance to explore the more creative aspects of maintaining a Web presence through site design, photography and videography. Realizing their true passions and talents helps them find their niche in technology, says Max Gibson, a lead instructor and creative strategist at Hack the Hood. “At first, they might not have an idea of what they want to do with their lives, or what their real strengths and skills are,” Gibson says. “So for me, it’s really about allowing them to discover what those things are, and then pointing them in the right direction.”
For her part, Harris sees Hack the Hood as addressing a new kind of gulf between the technological haves and have-nots. “People typically think of the digital divide as those who have Internet access versus those who don’t,” she says. But that idea is quickly becoming outdated. “The issue now is the knowledge divide. Do you know how to pull up the hood and understand the code beneath it? Do you understand what your digital footprint is going to look like?”
Closing that knowledge gap has the potential to impact communities far beyond the Bay Area. “Young people of color are going to create platforms and opportunities in tech that no one else has,” Harris says, pointing to the apps — such as those tackling police brutality, immigrant rights and other issues affecting communities of color — produced at recent hackathons attended by minorities. “My generation is passing on a planet that has many, many problems. Having a diversity of voices in the decision-making process is going to allow a diversity of solutions to come through.” Technology provides important tools for solving today’s problems, Harris says. “It’s imperative that we make sure every young person has access to these tools so they can address the problems of our future.”
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The 2016 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from November 1 to 15 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
Can the Arts Help Save Rural America? Stateline In nearly half of America’s rural counties, more people have moved out than in during every single decade since 1950: Young people, seeking a vibrant culture and job opportunities, have fled to big cities in droves. To avoid becoming ghost towns, small communities across the country have begun investing in music festivals, remodeling old opera houses and opening art galleries to bring young families back to their hometowns.
The White Flight of Derek Black, Washington Post His father created Stormfront, the infamous racist web forum; his godfather was once Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. By high school, Derek Black was primed to lead America’s white nationalist movement. Yet after enrolling at New College of Florida, a Jewish classmate (who’d read Black’s neo-Nazi posts) invited him to a Shabbat dinner. As this story of redemption shows, there’s a way to defeat right-wing, racist extremism: not to attack its hate, but to overcome it with conversation and understanding.
California Restaurants Launch Nation’s First Transgender Jobs Program, NPR Transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the nation’s workers. To change those figures, Michaela Mendelsohn, a transgender businesswoman, hired 150 trans workers at her six El Pollo Loco restaurants, and she recently persuaded the 22,000-member California Restaurant Association to join the effort to overcome discrimination in the workplace.
