As a Counter-Terrorism Officer in the U.S. Navy, Ian Kalin says that he fired expensive cannons at imaginary targets in the sea.
“Not a lot of terrorists floating in the middle of the ocean back then,” he jokes, pointing out how the service he was being asked to deliver was “completely disconnected from the actual needs of our nation.”
That experience helped shape Kalin’s path to becoming director of open data at Socrata, which helps public sector organizations improve transparency and service.
Kalin asks the audience at his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk where they would prefer to spend an hour: at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Apple Store?
“The truth is that there is a big disconnect that we feel in our consumer lives compared to the services we’re receiving from our governments,” he says, addressing the widening gap between our expectations and what our government is able to deliver. “We have higher expectations because innovative products and services are making our lives better everyday.”
He also tells a story about a salmonella outbreak in jars of peanut butter. While he never would have checked the Food and Drug Administration website for the voluntary product recall, Google Shopping Express sent the grateful young dad a note saying the product he bought was at risk and even offered to reimburse him the $5.84 he spent.
Governments cannot empower people by themselves,” Kalin says, emphasizing the importance of public private partnerships to help governments improve their customer service.
Watch the video to learn how Kalin thinks open data can help us “improve the quality of our collective democracy.”
Tag: Calls to Action
3 Ideas That Will Give Every Citizen Access to the American Dream
During last month’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared an end to the nation’s economic downturn. “The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the union is strong,” he said. But for many, the president’s announcement felt premature.
Currently, 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. Income inequality, stagnating wages and job market volatility make the prospects of upward mobility bleak. According to research by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Americans raised at the bottom of the income ladder are likely to remain there as adults. Two-thirds will never make it to the middle class, and 96 percent will be barred from the top bracket, where household income exceeds $81,700.
Erin Currier, director of Pew’s projects on financial security and mobility, studies the factors that limit economic opportunity. Recently named one of the most influential women in Washington under 35, she has utilized the research to establish nonpartisan agreement on the facts that guide policy decisions. (It’s already helped establish a bipartisan caucus.) “We hold this up to be the national ethos of being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” she says, “but it doesn’t happen that often.”
During a conversation with NationSwell, she identified three areas lawmakers from both sides of the aisle need to address if they hope to restore every American’s chance at success.
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Watch: How Military Skills Translate to the Tech World
When Don Faul, head of operations of Pinterest, first went from serving as an Infantry and Reconnaissance leader in the U.S. Marine Corps to seeking opportunities in Silicon Valley, he nearly gave up.
“I didn’t get too many calls back. I didn’t get too many interviews. I didn’t get great feedback from the companies that I was interviewing with,” he says.
The self-described gadget geek nearly came to the conclusion that the tech world might not be for him, but one opportunity led to another, eventually putting Faul in a position to lead. He points to several charts in his talk, speaking about what it takes to go from a flat line to an upward curve. Having joined Facebook in early 2008 before going on to help Pinterest become of the leading social networking companies, Faul knows a thing or two about growth.
“It took me a long time to realize that those skills and experiences that I learned in the Marine Corps were just as relevant at Facebook and Google and Pinterest as they were on the battlefield,” he says.
Watch his talk to learn why leadership is so central is to building a successful company around a culture of sustained innovation.
Republicans and Democrats Rarely Agree On Anything. Except This
Republicans and Democrats indicated at the start of last week’s legislative term that 2015 is the year for criminal justice reform.
With an ideological split dividing President Obama and congressional leadership, you can probably expect more bickering than legislation to come from Washington over the next two years. But one of the few issues lawmakers seem to agree on is the need to reduce our prison population, now surpassing 2.3 million inmates. High-profile Republicans are lining up behind sentencing reform at the same time that Democratic leaders, including Rep. G.K. Butterfield, the new chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), announced that the overhauling of the criminal justice system is the top priority.
“We believe Congress has a critical role to play in helping to restore trust in the criminal justice system, ensuring that every American is treated equally before the law,” write Reps. Elijah Cummings, John Conyers, Jr., and Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democratic members on three powerful House committees. “This is a transformative moment for our country.”
Statistics about our country’s prison system are disturbing, to say the least. There are now more black men in prison, jail or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, The New Yorker calculates. The entire populations of Philadelphia and Detroit could fit in the bunks of our jails, Pacific Standard adds. And the costs of all these cells are staggering: Detaining inmates now eats up almost one-third of the Justice Department’s annual budget.
This growing federal bureaucracy has caused many Republicans to pivot away from the party’s traditional tough-on-crime stance. Why? It just makes economic sense. Add the nationwide anger over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the rallying cry for change is louder than ever — from both sides of the aisle.
“There is a well-founded mistrust between the African-American community and law enforcement officers. The statistics are clear. Video clips are clear,” says Rep. Butterfield. “You will see the Congressional Black Caucus make criminal justice reform a centerpiece of our work.”
As solutions, black legislators have promised to push for updates to “outdated” mandatory sentencing laws, accountability for police and “unethical prosecutors” and access to competent public defenders, says Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat.
This progressive rhetoric is expected from Butterfield’s caucus — known on the Hill as the “Conscience of Congress” — but what is unusual this year is that a group from the right, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rob Portman of Oregon, are also trumpeting reform. Each of these lawmakers has introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at undoing decades of slamming criminals behind bars.
“I say enough’s enough. I won’t sit idly by and watch our criminal justice system continue to consume, confine and define our young men,” Paul, a likely presidential candidate, told the National Urban League last summer. “I say we take a stand for justice now.”
Reform still won’t be easy. Last year, the Smarter Sentencing Act, a proposal to shorten prison sentences for low-level drug crimes, and the Federal Prison Reform Act, a bill that would have given inmates credit for time served in job training and drug rehab programs, both stalled and died without a vote on the floor.
Looking ahead, any future bills will have to win approval from Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republicans chairmen of each chamber’s judiciary committee. Both boast reputations for being tough on crime, and both can delay any bill indefinitely with exhaustive reports, hearings and amendments. But in a hopeful sign last month, Grassley introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, designed to prevent “at risk-youth from entering the [prison] system” and helping juvenile offenders already “in the system become valuable members of communities.”
As is usually the case in Washington, compromise seems to be the way forward. “There will be times when I will encourage the CBC to reach across the aisle and try to reach some bipartisan deals that will not make us feel good, but will move the needle in our communities and communities of color,” Butterfield tells BET. “The fight for the future is not a black fight, a Democratic or Republican fight; it is a fight that all fair-minded Americans should promote.”
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Rosa’s Fresh Pizza Has Given Away More Than 8,400 Slices to the Homeless
Rosa’s Fresh Pizza in Philadelphia has an unusual type of wallpaper: Neon Post-it notes.
Each sticky slip represents a customer who gave an extra dollar so that a homeless person could eat a slice.
The pay-it-forward menu began nine months ago, owner Mason Wartman tells NPR, when someone asked if he could buy something extra for the homeless. “I said ‘Sure.’ I took his dollar and ran out and got some Post-it notes and put one up to signify that a slice was purchased,” Wartman explains.
While lots of take-out restaurants have boxes near the register asking for loose change (a simple reminder of how many people are hungry), this pizzeria took it further, displaying the Post-its side-by-side with letters of thanks from grateful recipients — proving just how much an extra buck can impact someone in need of a meal.
Word of free cheesy, thin-crust pizza has spread, and about 30 to 40 homeless people drop by Rosa’s every day. Luckily, generous customers stop by in huge numbers, too. So far, the shop’s clientele has bought more than 8,400 slices for their neighbors living on the street.
“I just want to thank everyone that donated to Rosa’s,” one message taped on the wall says in bright red marker, “it gave me a place to eat everyday and the opportunity to get back on my feet. I start a new job tomorrow!”
On a paper plate, a homeless veteran writes, “God bless you. Because of you I ate off this plate, the only thing I ate all day.”
Wartman, 27, formerly worked as an equity research on Wall Street. After falling in love with $1-a-slice pizza in New York City, he brought the cheap and simple model back to his hometown and named Rosa’s Fresh Pizza (which he opened in December 2013) after his mother. Even with his knack for business, Wartman’s customers were buying so many free meals for the homeless that he had to abandon the Post-it system once it exceeded 500 slices. Now, he keeps tabs at the register.
Giving away food wasn’t enough for Wartman. Since last November, he’s been selling sweatshirts and donating one to a homeless person for each purchase. The fuzzy garment has his restaurant’s logo emblazoned on the outside and, inside, contains a schedule and a directory for local soup kitchens and homeless shelters. On “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” this week, he challenged national chains like Chipotle to follow suit.
Why do he and his customers do it? “They’re just really nice people, you know? Sometimes homeless people buy them for other homeless people,” Wartman says. “This is a super-easy way, a super-efficient way and a super-transparent way to help the homeless.”
This must be why they call Philadelphia the City of Brotherly Love.
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These ‘Brothers’ Left Wall St. to Make a Difference, and Their Big Bet is Paying Off
NationSwell works to elevate solutions to national challenges both through powerful storytelling on NationSwell.com and its NationSwell Council membership network and events series. Here, we introduce you to some of the innovators who are part of the community.
Over the years, there have been some bad decisions made in the college bars of Ann Arbor, Mich. This is a story about a good one.
Sammy Politziner and Scott Thomas met while students at the University of Michigan when they lived next door to each other as freshmen. The two worked at summer camps together, and after graduation, both served as corps members of Teach for America (TFA). From there, like many of their classmates (even the most idealistic ones), they both decided to pursue careers in finance.
In 2008, nine years out of college, both worked in New York City: Politziner was a vice president at Kildare Capital, and Thomas was an analyst at Neuberger Berman. While in Ann Arbor one weekend for a football game, they got to talking about their lives as they sat before the row of taps at Ashley’s, their favorite haunt. Both decided something was missing.
It had something to do with the year. Recently, the duo had volunteered for the Obama campaign, and the feelings of hope and change that the campaign had infused in so many also struck a powerful chord with the two friends.
They spoke about the difference they hoped to make, the lives they still wanted to lead. When they thought about what they might have to offer, they wondered out loud if perhaps the business skills they had developed during those years in finance combined with classroom experience from their TFA days could help make a positive social impact.
They made a decision to find out.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do…but we have got to go back to being a part of the solution,’ ” Politziner says of the moment that led him and Thomas to found Arbor Brothers, the philanthropic organization named for their college town.
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Arbor Brothers makes grants to social entrepreneurs focused on education and employment in New York (where they are based), Connecticut and New Jersey. Politziner and Thomas support nonprofits they identify as “second stage,” organizations that have already gone through seed funding but have not yet established a track record that would give them access to larger pools of capital. These groups tend to be two to 10 years old with two to 10 staff members and a budget of less than $2 million a year.
The founders of Arbor Brothers practice the concept of engaged philanthropy, combining financial support with countless hours of consulting. Each of their current grantees receive $250,000 in funding over the course of three years, while Politziner and Thomas spend 200 to 300 hours a year working with the leaders of each organization.
“Our view, one of our guiding principles, is not that we have the answer. It’s our job to build a relationship where we can be helpful in discreet, meaningful ways along that path,” says Thomas.
After the pivotal conversation at the pub, the two returned to their finance jobs. But to learn more about the social solutions they might support, they made a commitment that each week for six months, they would have dinner with various leaders in their fields. These foundation officers, nonprofit heads and social-impact consultants revealed there was a real hole in the funding market.
The friends who would go on to form Arbor Brothers learned that members of various second-stage organizations “were doing really good work with kids, but they had never run an organization before. They had never hired somebody, let alone fired somebody; they were doing their budgets on a napkin,” Politziner recalls. “We thought, these people are so talented, and they’ve got such a great idea, and yet, they’re slowly figuring out how to run an organization. And oh, by the way, they have to spend 70 percent of their time actually going out and raising money.”
Once Politziner and Thomas determined how needed they really were, there was no turning back.
While maintaining their day jobs, the two started with a few pilot projects. They spent 100 hours with Nick Ehrmann, then a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, who founded Blue Engine, a nonprofit that places teaching assistants in public high schools in New York City. They worked with Hot Bread Kitchen, an organization that empowers women and minority entrepreneurs in culinary workforce programs, a loan package that financed a move to a full-time kitchen. Then in September 2010, they quit their jobs and focused all their efforts on Arbor Brothers.
When they first got started, Arbor Brothers raised $15,000 — Politziner and Thomas put in some of their own money, and family and friends also contributed. Last year, the public charity had a budget of over $1 million, resulting from donations from individuals, family foundations and donor-advised funds. Because the nonprofit raises its own money, Arbor Brothers has to prove its value to its donors every year in a quantitative way.
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One organization that has benefited from Arbor Brothers is the Connecticut-based All Our Kin, which empowers child-care providers as business owners, provides parents with safe and stable care for their kids and gives children a strong educational foundation before they enter kindergarten. The organization licenses people to run family child-care programs in their homes, then involves them as part of a professional development network — at no cost to participants.
From 2011 to 2014, Arbor Brothers provided All Our Kin with $190,000 in unrestricted funding (money with no strings attached). While the grant money has had an impact, it’s the guidance and knowledge of Arbor Brothers that has really made a difference. Jessica Sager, executive director of All Our Kin, says the hundreds of hours Politziner and Thomas spent with the team in New Haven, Conn., helped the organization set up systems to manage fundraising and budgeting. Arbor Brothers also helped Sager and her co-founder create a plan to expand their model to a second site, and now All Our Kin is in three cities and considering national expansion. “We are rigorous about evaluation,” Sager says, explaining how Arbor Brothers taught her how to use data to track outcomes. “We put everything on spreadsheets”
Politziner and Thomas talk about the importance of an “outcomes focused culture” and “scale of impact versus scale of number of people served” with as much enthusiasm as they talk about their other shared passion, Michigan football.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to step away, and I hope we’ll be close to these organizations,” Thomas says of the Arbor Brothers’ relationship with All Our Kin and other groups. “But unless the tools we built and the conversations we had become embedded into their organizational culture, they’re not in our view likely to be sustainable and successful over the long term.”
Over the past four years, Arbor Brothers has evaluated nearly 500 nonprofits and made site visits to at least 75. Through experience, they have become better at finding the right fits for their funding and expertise. “We made this mistake a couple of times where we would meet a young entrepreneur with a lot of passion and charisma and an exciting vision for change, but we had this nagging anxiety that they were more style than substance,” Thomas says of one of the lessons he learned the hard way. “They were great marketers, and while that is important and can raise money, if someone does not have a high internal standard for quality, those are not the people we’re equipped to help.”
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They’ve also gotten better at taking cues from the leaders of the organizations they serve, figuring out the best ways to put their analytics background to use. For instance, when Arbor Brothers assisted All Our Kin on its financial model, they worked hard to make the numbers user-friendly, later realizing that the organization’s leadership felt more at ease knowing the ins and outs — no matter the complexity.
Politziner and Thomas believe not only in the importance of learning from their mistakes, but also in promoting transparency, so they conclude each of Arbor Brothers’ quarterly newsletters with a “We Blew It!” section where they detail the ways they can improve moving forward.
In the past five years, Arbor Brothers has funded 3 percent of the 500 high-potential, second-stage organizations located in the tri-state area that work to address the root causes of poverty. While Arbor Brothers is on a path to grow (this year’s budget is likely $1.25 million), they want to remain focused on finding, funding and supporting only the most promising of the organizations that fit this description.
“The lens through which we make grants is the concept that social change is extraordinarily hard and it takes a really long time and it’s messy,” Politziner says. “Those three simple tenets inform how we think about how our small pot of capital can make the biggest difference. That means we invest in organizations that make a deep investment in people over time.”
Another way that Arbor Brothers sets itself apart from other funding groups is that they don’t believe in forcing themselves on to boards or attaching strings to their funding. “We come to understand the organization so that we’re on the same side of the table, and their success is our success,” says Thomas.
Arbor Brothers carefully tracks and reports these successes. Doing so helped the organization settle on its three-year-long funding model, which gives them enough time to get these groups to the next level while also having a time pressure in place to reach organizational targets.
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Last summer, Politziner and Thomas gathered the four organizations “graduating” from three years in their portfolio for a backyard barbecue in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It was a moment that caused me to reflect on how far we’ve come,” Thomas says.
All Our Kin celebrated its expansion to two new cities; Green City Force looked back on the long hours spent vetting and prioritizing service opportunities so they could improve placement outcomes for their corps members; and exalt now had refined performance standards in place and looked forward to doing even more for teens who have been involved in the criminal justice system. The fourth graduate, ROW New York, was able to raise more than $3 million over three years to double their program size and outfit a new boathouse — thanks in part to support Arbor Brothers provided on marketing materials and earned-income strategy.
Last fall, four new organizations joined the Arbor Brothers portfolio: New Heights, Coalition for Queens, Springboard Collaborative and OneGoal. (BRICK Academy, which is transforming failing schools in Newark, N.J., GirlTrek, which NationSwell has featured for its work mobilizing black women to walk their way to better health, and The New American Academy, which brings new models like teacher teams to New York City public schools, will continue receiving their funding.)
So far, Arbor Brothers is walking the talk of engaged philanthropy — and it’s working. “It’s a really tough balance, but they do it well, where they’re supporting the growth of an organization — talking about best practices — but they’re not imposing things,” explains Jukay Hsu, founder of Coalition for Queens, which looks to the tech ecosystem to provide economic opportunity to a diverse community.
“It’s not an outsider coming in saying, ‘Do X, Y and Z.’ … They have a unique level of human empathy and understanding and an ability to listen and digest.”
After This Soldier Was Shot in the Head, Comedy Became His Therapy
“A lot of people have asked me how I went from being a soldier to being a comedian,” Retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Thom Tran says in his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. “Comedy is my therapy.”
On his fourth day in Iraq, Tran took a gunshot to the back of his skull in a gunfight. As Tran talks, footage of the incident from the field plays behind him. In it, he wipes blood from his neck and says, simply, “f***.”
Tran, who is now based in Los Angeles and works as a standup comedian, writer, producer, voiceover actor, and traffic reporter, has a punch line for everything.
He talks, for example, about how he holds so may jobs because he is constantly on the verge of being fired from at least one of them. He describes how memory loss — a result of his injury — allows him to hide chocolates from himself then find them with that same feeling of surprise you experience when you find money in a pair of pants. And he even manages to make the audience laugh about the way his father reacted to the video of his son being shot in the head.
“We have to be able to laugh at that,” he says, pointing to the video screen behind him as he stands before an audience that is experiencing shock, inspiration and side-splitting laughter all at once.
“Cause if I didn’t, I don’t know where I’d be today,” he continues. “Laughing, this therapeutic thing that comes from your soul, is the only thing I’ve found that can heal that.”
It’s no wonder Tran went on to found the GIs of Comedy, recruiting military veterans to travel and perform for troops and civilian supporters around the world as a way to bring laughter to them and to help them heal.
Watch his story, then share it with six of your friends.
After America Was Attacked, These Veterans Were Inspired to Protect and Serve
At a Google Tech Talk yesterday, held at the company’s New York City offices, a panel of veterans recalled where they were on Sept. 11, 2001 — a date that motivated so many service members to join the Armed Forces.
In attendance was Joe Quinn, now the Northeast Director for Team Red, White & Blue, whose brother was one of the 658 employees at Cantor Fitzgerald who died when Flight 11 hit One World Trade Center. Former Green Beret Mark Nutsch told the story how he had to explain to his boys and his wife (seven months into her pregnancy) that he would soon have to deploy to get the bad guys. And Master Sergeant Eric Stebner spoke about earning the Silver Star for braving enemy fire to carry the bodies of fellow U.S. Army Rangers — including that of his best friend — in the battle of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan.
Carrie Laureno, founder of the Google Veterans Network, moderated the panel and emphasized the need to acknowledge these “achievements and contributions on behalf of all of us who have not served.”
Laureno led her team at Google Creative Lab to produce “The Call to Serve,” a temporary installation at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City to recognize the stories of Quinn, Nutsch and Stebner, among others. Reacting to the museum lacking any recognition of military accomplishments in the permanent exhibit, Laureno developed this tribute to the untold stories of military members who have served since 9/11.
Touch screens in the exhibit draw you into these stories using Google Tour Builder technology that integrates Google Earth imagery with personal photos and anecdotes provided by nine veterans.
While the exhibit will only be on view this week, as part of the 9/11 Museum’s “Salute to Service,” the tribute will remain online indefinitely.
Browse through the stories of the responders whose stories and service deserve recognition and thanks, then spread the word with the #ThankAVet hashtag.
Veteran Storytellers Take the Mic and Change the Conversation
Got Your 6, a campaign working to change the conversation about veterans and military families, is hosting its Storytellers event in New York City today.
By bringing together service members who continue to pursue careers as change makers and problem solvers, Storytellers represents one way Got Your 6 is bridging the military-civilian divide by uniting the government, the entertainment industry and nonprofits.
The Storytellers that will deliver short presentations include Greg Behrman, founder and CEO of NationSwell; Becky Kanis, who led the 100,000 Homes campaign and is now working on a new project called the Billions Institute; and Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest. Each of their talks will be filmed, released and promoted widely with the help of partners including MTV and The Huffington Post.
NationSwell will feature these videos in the weeks and months ahead so that this celebration of veterans can continue well past Veterans Day. You can take action in support of the Got Your 6 mission by joining the conversation on social media using the hashtag #wagegood then sharing the videos with six of your friends.
In the meantime, here is a glimpse at highlights from the 2013 Storytellers event.
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Think That Casting a Ballot Isn’t Worth Your Time? Here’s Why You Must Make a Trip to the Voting Booth
Despite the pre-election tsunami of pandering political ads, canvassers and online banter about the candidates and initiatives on your local ballots, only about 40 percent of all eligible voters in the United States submit their ballots during the midterms (down from about 60 percent during presidential elections, according to the United States Elections Project).
Since every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is up for grabs — along with approximately one-third of all Senate seats, dozens of governorships, and countless state and local legislative positions — it’s critical that you cast your vote for the most qualified individuals to serve in those posts. Here’s why.
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