While living and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Eleanor Allen’s life was changed by 3-year-old Maria Fernanda (her hosts’ granddaughter). “One Sunday I was playing with her, and then she died four days later.”
Contaminated water took Maria Fernanda’s life. “It was so horrible, because it was preventable,” Allen says. “It was so sudden, and I realized this happens all over the world every day.” Determined, Allen saw the situation as a challenge that she needed to help solve. After returning from the Peace Corps, she worked as a consultant on wastewater and sewer systems. Today, she’s the CEO of Water For People, a global nonprofit that focuses on solving one of our most pressing social and environmental challenges: bringing clean water and sanitation to people around the world.
About 1.8 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water. Every 21 seconds, a water-related illness kills a child like Maria Fernanda. Water For People works in nine countries, partnering with local communities and organizations to identify and implement sustainable water and sanitation solutions for rural, underserved communities. Altogether, its programs serve 4 million people.
But installing water pipes and pumps isn’t enough to solve the problem. The developing world is riddled with broken equipment and dry wells built by well-meaning nonprofits that came in, completed the construction, and then left. Water For People used to fly in volunteers from the U.S. to communities in need around the world. But the organization soon realized it’s more important for local citizens to take ownership and learn how to maintain the systems, so it changed its model so that the water projects are much more sustainable.
Today, Water For People uses a concept it calls “Everyone, Forever.” The goal is not only to get everyone access to water, but to make sure the system for doing so is long-lasting. “Our work is done by people who live and work in the communities,” says Allen. Each project begins by engaging with a local politician (typically a mayor) and drafting a formal contract that explains exactly what funding and staffing Water For People will provide and the responsibilities assumed by the local government and community. Residents receive training to maintain infrastructure so the new system remains secure long after the nonprofit leaves. “Our end goal is that Water For People exits and the forever phase is done by the community itself, so the community becomes aid-independent,” Allen says.
“Community buy-in is vital to ensuring the long-term sustainability of a program,” says Erin Connor, critical human-needs portfolio manager for Cisco, which has supported Water For People’s digital transformation. “Water For People has been so successful because it has recognized the key role that communities play in solving local problems, and the role global problem-solvers can play in providing the right training and tools to empower everyone to be a part of the solution.”
Water For People also works on sanitation. “Sanitation and water are always linked, but sanitation challenges are more complicated,” Allen says, explaining that it ultimately involves not only systems, but also individual choices like installing new toilets and learning how to keep water sources clean. Water For People conducts educational programs in the communities it serves, teaching children and families proper sanitation techniques. To sustainably improve sanitation and bring new income into the community, Water For People helps local residents launch businesses that empty septic tanks or outhouses. It also partners with micro-lenders that are already active in the community to offer loans to families installing toilets.
Making a water system sustainable takes manpower, but technology is also a necessity. To identify leaks and ensure that everything continues to work properly, systems must be continually monitored. Water For People staff used to track observations on paper, and then manually input data into spreadsheets. About six years ago, the organization developed a mobile application called FLOW that allowed staff in the field to collect information on the status of water points; they could geo-locate them, take pictures and enter information on flow rate and water quality. The information was sent to an online dashboard, providing Water For People with real-time insight into its operations and enabling it to address failures much faster. Recognizing that this technology could benefit many more organizations, Water For People transferred ownership of the tool to Akvo Foundation in 2012, so that it could scale the solution. With Cisco’s support, Akvo developed FLOW v2.0, which is now used by more than 250 organizations in more than 40 countries around the world.
“The FLOW tool has brought greater transparency and accountability to the entire water sector,” says Connor. “It has allowed organizations to better understand their operations, manage their resources and reach more people.”
The earth has enough water, but the challenge remains: How do you distribute the precious resource fairly and efficiently? Within the next 10 years, Water For People not only aims to reach 7 million people in 50 districts around the world, but it also plans to continue helping new entrepreneurial sanitation businesses grow. Additionally, it’s beginning to partner with national governments and other nonprofit organizations to share what it’s learned in 25 years of working on the problem of clean water. “This is really exciting, because we can leverage our model and have much greater impact,” says Allen.
Bringing clean water to every person around the world is a huge task. By capitalizing on what it’s learned — both its successes and failures — and harnessing the power of the digital revolution to become more efficient, expand its reach and proactively respond to real-time data, Water For People is poised for success.
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver — to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.
Tag: Cisco
Can This Data-Driven Organization Help Those Most Desperate Escape Life on the Streets?
Rosanne Haggerty grew up going to church in downtown Hartford, Conn. Her parents, both schoolteachers, never outright explained why they took their kids to church in a poor neighborhood full of single-room occupancy hotels and boarding houses. Haggerty, however, learned the lesson her folks were trying to instill. “My parents were both very devout Catholics in the social justice wing of the church,” Haggerty says, describing how the family visited fellow church members when they were sick and invited them over for holiday meals. Haggerty grew up with a sense that “we all can be doing more to provide that kind of support system for others.”
Today, Haggerty is a social change agent in her community, serving as the president of Community Solutions, a national organization that aims to end homelessness. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to address the problem, Community Solutions uses technology to capture data and tailor interventions to meet the needs of a region in the most effective way possible. At its heart, Community Solutions’s mission is the same as Haggerty’s parents’: helping people, one person at a time.
Community Solutions works in neighborhoods around the country to provide practical, data-driven solutions to the complicated problems involved in homelessness. The organization has already achieved great success: its 100,000 Homes campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2014, helped 186 participating communities house more than 105,000 homeless Americans across the country.” (Chronically homeless individuals make up 15 percent of the total homeless population, yet they utilize the majority of social services devoted towards helping them, including drop-in shelters.) To do this, it challenged the traditional approach of ending homelessness: requiring those living on the streets to demonstrate sobriety, steady income or mental health treatment, for example. Instead, it housed people first, an approach that has demonstrated overwhelming success: research finds that more than 85 percent of chronically homeless people housed through “Housing First” programs are still in homes two years later and unlikely to become homeless again.
“Technology played a critical role in the success of the 100,000 Homes campaign because it enabled multiple agencies to share and use the same data,” says Erin Connor, portfolio manager with the Cisco Foundation, which has supported Community Solutions’ technology-based initiatives. “By rigorously tracking, reporting and making decisions based on shared data, participating communities could track and monitor their progress against targets and contribute to achieving the collective goal.” As a result of this campaign, the estimated taxpayer savings was an astonishing $1.3 billion. Building on this achievement, its current Zero 2016 campaign works in 75 communities to sustainably end chronic and veteran homelessness altogether.
Technology and data gathering is critical for local and nationwide campaigns since homelessness is intimately connected to other social problems, like unemployment and poverty. One example of the local impact Community Solutions has had is in Brownsville (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., that’s dominated by multiple public housing projects) via the Brownsville Partnership, which is demonstrating that these problems can be solved — to create “the endgame of homelessness,” as Haggerty puts it.
In Brownsville, the official unemployment rate is 16 percent, “about double that of Brooklyn” as a whole, Haggerty says, noting that the statistic excludes those not currently looking for work. In response, the organization works with existing job training programs, digging into their data and analyzing it to improve effectiveness and achieve success.
“Data is at the heart of everything we do, as far as understanding where to focus our efforts and how to improve our collective performance,” Haggerty explains. Analyzing usage data, Community Solutions works with health care providers, nonprofits, and city and state governments to figure out where the most vulnerable populations live, what systems they interact with and what help they need.
Because of this emphasis on data, Community Solutions increasingly thinks of itself as a tech company, Haggerty says. Since 2010, it’s partnered with Cisco to help bring practical, data-driven solutions to communities around the country, opening doors to innovation and progress. When the collaboration began, Community Solutions was a local New York City-based organization. Today, it works with communities throughout the United States. By looking at the problem more nationally and taking an entrepreneurial approach when it comes to applying technology, Community Solutions is now solving homelessness on a much larger scale and having greater impact — producing real social change.
One person benefitting from this tech-driven approach is Toni Diaz. In and out of homeless shelters since the age of 17, Diaz had three children and a fourth on the way by the time she was 23 years old. Escaping from an abusive partner, Diaz took her kids to a homeless shelter. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she says. Right when Diaz realized that she needed to make a change in her life, opportunity arrived in the form of a caseworker from the Brownsville Partnership.
Diaz’s journey out of homelessness took years, but Brownsville Partnership walked with her every step of the way. Today, she’s part of an innovative solution that helps people like her connect to the services and training programs that will help them break that same cycle. Stories like Diaz’s are one of the things Haggerty loves most about her work. “It’s especially satisfying when people we initially encountered in a time of crisis end up in a position where they are paying it forward,” she says. Diaz, Haggerty says, shows “what kind of resilience exists in people in this neighborhood” and communities like Brownsville around the country.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
Editors’ note: The original version of this story misspelled Rosanne Haggerty’s name. It also erroneously stated that Community Solutions’s 100,000 Homes campaign housed more than 105,000 chronically homeless people in 186 communities across the country. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
Meet the Mastermind Behind an Innovative, New Way to Teach Math
In elementary school, Matthew Peterson struggled mightily with math. When an instructor explained a problem, Peterson would be so focused on figuring out the language that he forgot the beginning of the question. In a traditional classroom setting, “If you couldn’t follow the instructions from the teacher, you were lost. You had no way to learn on your own,” Peterson, who suffered from dyslexia, says. It wasn’t until Peterson’s dad started drawing pictures to help his son visualize math equations that he had the breakthrough that turned him onto how exciting, creative and fun the subject can be.
Seeing his challenges in school as an opportunity to be solved, the boy who once hated math went on to study engineering, biology and neuroscience in college. From there, Peterson began to think as an entrepreneur — creating, innovating, problem solving and ultimately, transforming the way mathematics is taught in American schools. “To me, it’s not acceptable that so many students exit the school system afraid of math,” he explains. Starting with a summer research program in 1994, Peterson spent a decade working to prove that math could be taught without language, which can create a barrier to understanding the concept. This is true not only for kids who struggle with language like he did, but for any student since talking about math using words layers two completely different ways of thinking on top of each other.
That mission ultimately became the Irvine, Calif.-based MIND Research Institute and its ST Math program, a series of games starring Jiji, an animated penguin that introduces math visually. Students must figure out how to help Jiji get past a variety of obstacles (each representing an important mathematical concept) by building bridges, filling in holes, and so on. “It is very difficult to create software that will translate into improved test scores,” Peterson, MIND’s co-founder, says. “People have been trying to do that for many years, and there is very little to show for it. But there is a very consistent result that games, especially visual games, can build spatial-temporal reasoning. What our approach does is build spatial-temporal reasoning, and then connect that spatial-temporal reasoning to mathematical understanding,” accomplishing what other software companies haven’t. In fact, schools that fully implement ST Math see up to three times growth in math proficiency.
Alex Belous, education portfolio manager for the Cisco Foundation (which has supported MIND Research Institute since 2004), says that when he initially reviewed their program, its installation and training strategy was predominantly in-person, which wouldn’t scale. “It was an ideal partnership, as we were able to assist with their conversion to a web-based and more scalable delivery method, adding courses and grade levels, as well as creating a teacher-dashboard that allows them to see where students are most challenged and give them relevant help to keep learning,” Belous says. “We’re proud to be part of something that is providing large impact and pleased that ST Math is likely to scale much further in the next five years.”
The United States lags behind other nations in math and science performance, ranking 29th in math and 22nd in science, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. By harnessing the power of the digital revolution, MIND Research Institute and Cisco are able to address this problem and prepare young people to succeed in science, technology, engineering and math fields that are critical to economic growth and global competitiveness.
That formula has proved to be remarkably — and consistently — successful. When MIND’s ST Math software launched, only 12,000 students used it. Today, the program reaches more than 1 million children in more than 3,000 schools across 45 states (including about 70 percent from traditionally underserved backgrounds). In the U.S., only 30 percent of kids leaving middle school are proficient in math. Impressively, students’ math proficiency has doubled or even tripled when using ST Math. “It’s not the students who are incapable of learning, it’s the environment,” Peterson says, going on to explain how the software creates a setting where students from all backgrounds can not only become skilled in math, but learn to enjoy it.
“Many people have this misconception that experiences are fun, but learning isn’t really an experience,” says Brandon Smith, MIND’s lead mathematician. A lot of learning software essentially takes the approach of designing a fun game and then trying to shoehorn some math into it, Smith explains. MIND’s games are designed from the ground up to focus on core math principles. They’re entirely visual — no words or numbers at all — and feature deliberately simple animation. “We don’t want you to be distracted by anything that is not the heart of the matter,” he says.
The result? A fun game where simply uncovering what the next puzzle is teaches kids the underlying concept. It also educates them on how to approach unfamiliar problems, how to think creatively and how to persevere and keep working on something difficult. ST Math enables students to learn at their own pace by giving immediate, personalized feedback on every answer — something that’s only possible using software, Peterson says.
Another positive outcome of ST Math is that girls often find more success with it than boys: an uncommon result among math programs. In the U.S., women are underrepresented in science and engineering fields (representing just 29 percent of the workforce compared to 46 percent of all workers), but programs like ST Math can generate the confidence and enthusiasm for girls to pursue jobs in those industries.
Technology not only makes that kind of learning possible in one classroom, it makes it scalable to thousands of them. “It’s not enough to just do a research program to prove that something is effective,” Peterson says. “If you want to change the world you have to make something that is scalable.”
“People use the term ‘innovation’ so often in Silicon Valley, but it is actually extremely rare to come across something that is truly revolutionary and actually effective and scalable,” Cisco’s Belous says. MIND’s technology demonstrates how the potential to scale and replicate is necessary for a solution to be sustainable and successful at addressing social challenges. Not only does ST Math transform math education, but also it has the potential to be applied in many other areas of education. “This completely new, non-language-based approach has the ability to capture every mouse-click of every child to see where kids are most challenged and refine the games appropriately to make them even more effective. It is fantastic for math education and student outcomes, but the fundamental innovation could potentially be applied to a far wider set of subjects.”
MIND’s games certainly have the potential to revolutionize how young children think about themselves. Studies show that most American students possess what’s known as a fixed theory of intelligence: a belief that “intelligence is something that you’re born with,” Peterson says. That mindset can hold kids back from learning math because they think if you can’t solve a problem, you’re not good at it. The kind of self-directed learning in ST Math reinforces the principle that when you stick with a problem, you get better at it.
Lisa Solomon, a principal at Madison Elementary School in Santa Ana, Calif., sees that tenacity in her students. ST Math software is used at three area schools, including Solomon’s, where nearly 100 percent of students are Hispanic and about 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. “It’s helping us to see what our students really can do,” Solomon says.
These days, when the growing opportunity divide reveals the sheer importance of a strong education, MIND Research Institute not only levels the playing field, it helps struggling students bound to the head of the class and achieve their greatest potential.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
MORE: This ‘USB Port for the Body’ Is a High-Tech, Pain-Free Solution for Amputees
This ‘USB Port for the Body’ Is a High-Tech, Pain-Free Solution for Amputees
Prior to losing an arm and a foot when he fell underneath a train in 2012, James Young went on a run pretty much every day after work. After his initial recovery period was over, and he was fitted with prosthetic limbs, Young tried running again. “It wasn’t worth the pain,” he declares. The agony felt by Young didn’t come from the injury or from the prosthetic limb itself. Rather, the socket — the cup that fits over the stump doctors created at the injury site — caused the distress. (The problem is common among many amputees.) “Sockets are, in my opinion, kind of a nightmare,” Young says. They’re “just pain, pain, pain, essentially.”
Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), located in Cambridge, England, aims to solve the socket problem for good with digital technology. Its solution: an innovation called the Prosthetic Interface Device (PID), which founders Oliver Armitage and Emil Hewage describe as a kind of USB port for the body. Creating a standardized connection between an artificial limb and the body, the PID is surgically implanted at the injury site and a prosthetic limb with a matching connector is plugged directly into it. This revolutionary device is what results when entrepreneurs, surgeons, clinicians and patients collaborate using applied materials, machine learning and neuroscience. Currently in pre-clinical trials, the PID has a projected market release in 2018.
“Today, technology and data intelligence are allowing people to change the way we address and ultimately solve our most pressing social and environmental challenges,” says Tae Yoo, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Cisco. “Digitization is leading to a greater understanding of the connection and interdependency between people, process, data and things. As a company, Cisco strives to inspire, connect and invest in opportunities that accelerate global problem solving; CBAS has an innovative way of tackling this challenge.”
Current sockets pose a number of problems. The fit must be so precise that it continually has to be adjusted, and if a patient gains or loses weight, the socket will need to be refitted or replaced. Even changes in temperature can be enough to noticeably change a socket’s fit. Most patients need a new one every year or two, and because it presses against the skin, a socket can easily cause inflammation, infection and other problems.
CBAS’s device eliminates these problems, drastically improving a patient’s quality of life. Instead of hugging the exterior of the body, the PID connects directly to the skeletal system. This means that the skeleton (not soft tissue, which can easily be damaged or injured) bears the weight of the artificial limb. Connecting to bone also changes the way that the body relates to a replacement limb: “You can have this direct connection to the mechanical, solid parts of the limb, which allows for some proprioception,” or awareness of where the limb is in space, Young explains.
There’s a financial benefit as well. The existing socket-based system for attaching prosthetic limbs to the body is hugely expensive. Every single socket must be custom made and adjusted repeatedly until the fit is perfect. “It’s like someone’s trying to hand-make you some shoes, but they’re always painful, and you’re going to have to keep redoing the process,” explains Hewage.
In contrast, the PID is extremely cost-effective and low-maintenance. Ernst & Young crunched the numbers and found that Cambridge Bio-Augmentation’s PID system could lower the cost of artificial limbs by 60 percent, reducing the need for constant follow-up visits to prosthetic clinics. Any prosthetic limb can be designed to attach to the PID, and a patient can live with the same one for decades. “As an engineer, you constantly benefit from standardization,” says Armitage. “I can buy a bolt from this shop and a nut from this shop and put them together. The prosthetics industry doesn’t have that right now. Making a standardized connector, you enable the rest of the engineers to work with that and move forward and make better devices.”
The advantages of a standardized connection between the body and an artificial limb go far beyond convenience and cost savings. Thanks to some amazing advancements in robotics technology over the past few years, new high-tech bionic limbs can be controlled by patients’ minds (just like a natural limb). The PID can connect with these robotic arms or legs, creating a simple electric connection between the body’s nervous system and the artificial limb.
“It’s not just a standard mechanical connection, it’s a standard electrical connection,” says Armitage. “In order for the mass population of amputees to be able to have access to neutrally-controlled devices, you need a standardized way of communicating with that prostheses. With a PID, the interface between the biology and the engineering has already been done by our product.”
Eventually, the PID could be used to allow other types of devices beyond even the most advanced prosthetic limbs to connect to the body. “I can’t see any way that the USB connector for the body wouldn’t revolutionize the human condition,” Young says, drawing on his first-hand experience with the PID. It’s precisely that kind of blue-sky thinking that drives Hewage and Armitage to continue to innovate, pushing the potential of the PID even further.
To address today’s social and environmental challenges, collaboration and investment in innovative early-stage tech solutions is a must. Digital transformation is well underway in many industries thanks to organizations like Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems. Entrepreneurs who see challenges as opportunities waiting to be solved are already at work — creating, inspiring and helping people thrive.
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.