Tag: entrepreneurs

The Newest Way to Solve the Country’s Biggest Problems

Posted on by robbie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government into the Digital Age

Posted on by robbie

Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.

The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes?
Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.

What specifically are you integrating into government operations?
Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.

The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way?
There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.

Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?

The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business?
There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.

Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy?
If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.

Where does that project stand now?
We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.

The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.

In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference?
We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.

You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans?
I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.

MORE: This Is a Smart, Nonpartisan Way to Improve Local Government

This User-Friendly Tool Gets You In The Know Before You Vote

Posted on by robbie

With the presidential primary election looming, Chicago public school teacher Megan Augustiny introduced her high school civics students to BallotReady, an online guide to down-ballot races. (Think: state attorney, judgeships, city council — candidates that first-time voters in her class had never heard of, but would soon be electing to office). The nonpartisan site compiles essential information that voters need on little-known candidates — their job experience, positions on controversial issues and endorsements accrued — making it easy for students (and all voters) to “access information in the way they are used to,” she says, favoriting contenders as if their sample ballot were an Instagram feed.
Which is just what Alex Niemczewski and Aviva Rosman, two recent University of Chicago grads who co-founded BallotReady, had envisioned. Both are reserved, heads-down types who prefer to focus on their work, speaking softly about their high-minded ideals of involving more people at all stages of the democratic process. The two built the site in their spare time and spent just $180 on marketing to launch BallotReady. Within a few months, it irreversibly changed voter behavior across Illinois, where thousands of people logged on to the site. During this year’s bombastic election season, instead of skipping many of the contests, or worse, casting an uninformed vote, BallotReady users now have at their fingertips valuable information about local and regional candidates that are virtually unknown to most people.
For a glimpse of BallotReady’s reach, all one needs to do is log on to Twitter on Election Day.


In states where it’s active, BallotReady is so popular that politicians ask to add specifics to their profiles, offering new possibilities for local campaigns that are too small to attract media coverage or buy their own advertisements. If a school board member sees her opponent vows to support a charter school expansion, for instance, the incumbent may add more details to her education platform. “If a candidate says, ‘I support education,’ we don’t include that, because everybody does,” Niemczewski says. Although, “if a candidate didn’t support education, we would include that,” she adds.
BallotReady emerged from a collision of two pasts: Rosman’s as an enthusiastic electioneer and Niemczewski’s nonprofit work, as well as her knack for code. A self-avowed political junkie, Rosman started participating in the political process in middle school, driving with her dad from their native Massachusetts to New Hampshire and attempting to sway the state’s swing voters every election. In 2004, she nearly failed two high school classes when she used frequent flier miles to campaign for John Kerry in Florida. Four years later, while staffing a congressional race in Illinois, Rosman realized her knowledge was severely lacking. “I was trying to inform people about my candidate, and yet, I was unprepared to vote for all these other people on the ballot,” she remembers. Then in 2014, Rosman ran for a seat on the school council in Chicago. She asked Niemczewski, an old classmate then coaching Chicago’s unemployed into IT jobs, to vote for her. “I didn’t even know there was an election,” Niemczewski says, admitting to missing the vote. The two stayed in touch and a few months later, collaborated on the guide that developed into BallotReady.
More than 160,000 voters in Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky and Colorado have used BallotReady to inform their choices — a 10-fold growth from its launch last fall. The site is expanding its reach, developing profiles for candidates in Maryland, New Hampshire and Florida. Scaling hasn’t been easy: “It takes a lot of phone calls and relationship-building. That’s kind of daunting,” Niemczewski says, noting that 100 volunteer curators are needed to build candidate profiles, “but it’s also exciting, because it means we can really help.” By year’s end, BallotReady hopes to reach 1 million voters, and by 2020, to be in every state.
Since BallotReady is committed to educating every American citizen, it devotes resources to eliminating digital access issues that arise. Once, Niemczewski responded to a request from an elderly woman in an assisted living center. After the woman reported being unable to load BallotReady, Niemczewski troubleshot the problem by backdating the site’s functionality, so the senior citizens could use it on their outdated computers.
Ultimately, BallotReady’s founders work to make their innovative site as user-friendly as possible — to both the older electorate and young, first-time voters alike. That mission is just one of the reasons why teachers like Augustiny thinks that its online repository of candidate profiles is a great way to get Millennials more involved in elections. “The Internet is so pervasive at this point: it informs everything that we do, especially for younger people. Not having that information readily accessible online was a real disservice to young people,” she says.

As a teacher, Augustiny always wants her kids to develop in-depth research skills. But when it comes to voting — an activity that’s made so many Americans apathetic — she’s in favor of turning to BallotReady for a digital shortcut.
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.
MORE: Investing in the Future: This Visionary Program Gets Students Hooked on STEM

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

Posted on by robbie

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

How One School System Is Fighting Back Against the Achievement Gap, A Better Way to Help the Homeless and More

Posted on by robbie

 
What Are Massachusetts Public Schools Doing Right? The Atlantic
The Bay State may be tops when it comes to reading and math, but officials aren’t resting on their laurels. Instead, they’re directing resources towards Massachusetts’s achievement gap, which remains stubbornly high. Can a focus on social-emotional learning and childhood trauma bring disadvantaged students up to the same level as their more affluent peers?
Give Directly to the Homeless Through a New Sharing Economy App, Fast Co.Exist
Known as the “City of Goodwill,” Seattle is living up to its moniker. Thanks to one tech entrepreneur and an advocate for the homeless, residents can now use the WeCount app to donate unwanted items (think: blankets, coats, sleeping bags) directly to those most in need. With homelessness an ongoing problem in many urban areas, let’s hope this technology spreads across the country — fast.
What If Mental Health First Aid Were as Widespread as CPR? New York City’s Planning to Do It, Yes! Magazine
Often, law enforcement encounter people suffering from mental illness, yet many haven’t received the education necessary to recognize and provide assistance (instead of arrest). In response, the New York Police Department is joining forces with the National Council for Behavioral Health to provide 250,000 first responders with mental health first aid training. The ultimate goal? To prevent suicide, which currently takes 40,000 lives each year.
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These 5 Smart Gun Technologies Could Be the Future of Firearms in America

Posted on by robbie

Would anyone shopping for a new car buy one that wasn’t equipped with seat belts? Live in a house without smoke detectors? Use a chain saw without a safety brake? It goes without saying that consumers expect products to be safe. But when it comes to one of the most deadly objects — a gun, which killed more than 30,000 Americans in 2013 — people are hard-pressed to find one with state-of-the-art safety features.

That’s not because the technology isn’t readily available. Back in 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to manufacture handguns with a built-in lock, but boycotts curbed sales. More recently, in California and Maryland, stores stocking the leading smart gun in production were met with vicious backlash online, protests and death threats. Some question the reliability of smart guns, and others believe that they threaten the Second Amendment. But Stephen Teret, a policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says unequivocally, “Smart guns are going to save lives. They’re not going to save all lives,” he continues, “but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”

Many Americans share his sentiment. In 2014, through the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, Silicon Valley luminaries like Ron Conway pledged $1 million toward research and development of smart gun technologies, and last month, President Barack Obama signaled his support. Which devices are the most promising? NationSwell interviewed five leading inventors about their prototypes.

A small wireless transmitter, disguised within a ring, communicates with a circuit board in the gun’s handle.

TriggerSmart by Robert McNamara

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology keeps guns from firing when they’re in the wrong hands. TriggerSmart’s small wireless transmitter (disguised inside a ring) “talks” with a circuit board in the firearm’s handle. When they’re within less than two inches of each other, the gun unjams. (The technology works nearly identically to keys that remotely unlock car doors.) And unlike fingerprint recognition, the signal communicates through material, like a glove.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Florida-based company manufacturing the technology, started investigating how to build a smart gun after wondering why he could remotely lock and disable his iPhone, but not his gun. He approaches the issue of gun violence with a foreigner’s eye. Uncomfortable with the regularity of shootings of America, this level of gun violence “doesn’t happen every day in Ireland,” McNamara points out, speaking with the thick brogue of his homeland. “We never hear of a child shooting themselves or their mother, or a police officer being overpowered.” Recognizing that U.S. politics around smart guns are “a bit of a hot potato,” McNamara hopes to capitalize in an industry avoided by many. Previously working in construction and property development, he now spends his days courting big investors with the hopes of soon bringing TriggerSmart into final states of testing.

Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core resembles a knife block.

Dual:Lock by Timothy Oh

Dual:Lock is a throwback to traditional safety measures, but with a contemporary twist. In essence, the device is simply a high-tech, wall-mounted gun safe. Rather than punching in numbers or spinning a dial, the safe opens with a fingerprint scan. Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core looks like a knife block; its carbide retaining pin locks the weapon in place.

With relatives in law enforcement, creator Timothy Oh says that he was raised with an ingrained sense of the devastation gun violence can cause, as well as the importance of firearm safety. The native of Orange County, Calif., and current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., built his first smart gun in high school. After uploading his idea to an online forum and receiving extremely negative feedback, he started listening to consumers’ desires and conducted 500 interviews with military, law enforcement and civilian gun owners. Many told him that they keep their guns loaded and unsecure in case there’s an emergency. “Immediate access and security are two values that are conflicting right now in the current market,” Oh explains. For these gun owners, Dual:Lock provides faster access than traditional closed-door safes (the device opens within 0.8 seconds). A prototype will be tested at the Los Angeles Police Department gun ranges this fall, and eight gun stores in the Albany, N.Y. region, have signed letters of sale intent.

Chloe Green works on the breadboard prototype of her technology, gUNarmed™.

gUNarmed by Chloe Green

Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Umpqua Community College. Fifteen-year-old high school student Chloe Green says she’s read too many news reports about, “children being killed and the families being torn apart by gun violence.” Green comes from a family of gun owners, but thought she could bypass the political divide and enhance “safe, responsible gun ownership” with technology.

Her early-stage device, gUNarmed, will use satellites to track a gun’s location and automatically jam the magazine when inside schools and government buildings. (The owner can program additional excluded areas.) When a firearm is detected in a prohibited space, a motor on the magazine prevents bullets from entering the chamber and could send an alert to local law enforcement. Currently, Green has mapped out the electronics in a breadboard prototype, but she doesn’t know when she will advance to the next stages since her young age makes it difficult to network professionally. Still, she doesn’t plan to let that derail her. “I’ve always been interested in the process of making, tinkering and inventing things,” she says, hoping to save American lives from firearm deaths while also getting other young women involved in STEM.

A mini camera that can detect distances is installed in this smart bullet.

EverLokt by John William Stein

Pennsylvania resident John William Stein believes that smart guns will only sell if they are attractive to gun owners. The one-time biotech inventor for pharmaceutical companies knew little about firearms, but he was moved into action by the Sandy Hook massacre. (A few weeks after the shooting, dozens of kids walked onstage at his church to sing Christmas carols, and he could only think of the other children who had been lost.) The 75-year-old’s first device was a safety round hooked up with a motion-sensor that pinged parents by cell phone if shaken (a sign that a child or an intruder had found their gun). But that device seemed too simplistic to motivate firearms enthusiasts.

So recently, Stein decided to take advantage of today’s increasingly compact processors and cameras and installed a miniature lens into the head of the bullet. Using its ability to detect distances, this smart bullet would not fire if a person is less than three feet away or if a child is looking down the barrel. At the same time, however, the bullet would release if aimed across a room in the direction of a home invader. Still in the early stages of development, Stein’s bullet could also film the incident for law enforcement, and a second camera in the back could snap a picture upon discharge to show who fired the gun.

Before developing this biometric sensor Kai Kloepfer, built a remote control robot.

Ægen Technologies by Kai Kloepfer

Boulder, Colo., teen Kai Kloepfer describes the 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting, where 12 people died at a sold-out midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” as feeling like his September 11. The loss of life was close — he had visited the Century 16 theater with his friends — so the self-taught electronics nut who participates annually in the local science fair focused his next project on something socially relevant: creating a smart gun. His first attempt involved iris recognition. But that idea foundered when he realized the sensor would be incompatible with sunglasses, thick eyeglasses or shooting in the dark. The next logical alternative? Fingerprint recognition.

Going on four years later, Kloepfer’s biometric sensor is located on a gun’s grip. It captures an image of a person’s fingerprint and checks it against a database of authorized users. If the system finds a match, the gun unlocks. As soon as the owner releases it, the device relocks — a vital feature if the firearm is used in self-defense or is stolen. “The whole goal is to remove human error from the equation as much as possible,” Kloepfer, now 19, says. Kloepfer’s current 3-D printed plastic model unlocks within a span of 1.5 seconds, but he aims to reduce it to just half a second. Just weeks away from his first live sample, Kloepfer is already a long way ahead of most high school science fair projects.

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

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

Posted on by robbie

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

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

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

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

The Surprisingly Simple Way to Improve Child Development, A State Protects Its Residents From Contaminated Water and More

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To Help Kids Thrive, Coach Their Parents, New York Times
When it comes to nurturing healthy, successful children, the focus is usually on improving education and nutrition. But research proves it’s much more basic than that; coaching parents to create loving, stable environments at home has the biggest impact of all.
The Flint of California, Politico
The poisonous drinking water in Flint, Mich., dominates the news headlines, but contamination is a problem numerous low-income communities face. With a landmark bill, California law now protects citizens’ need of H20, declaring that everyone has the right to “safe, clean, affordable and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking and sanitary purposes.”
How to Clean Up the Dirtiest Vehicles on the Road, CityLab
Individuals can lessen their carbon footprint by opting to drive a Prius or Tesla instead of a gas-guzzling SUV. But to really reduce the greenhouse gas created by transportation in the U.S., those pumping out the most emissions — buses and medium- and heavy-duty trucks — must green up.
MORE: This Engineer Co-Founded Tesla. Here’s His Next Electric Idea

Thanks to This Man’s Vision, 22,000 People Are No Longer Living in Poverty

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A native San Franciscan, Daniel Lurie has witnessed his hometown change as two tech bubbles inflated, introducing “tremendous wealth” and sometimes crowding out those living, by contrast, in “tremendous poverty.” The son of Brian Lurie, a rabbi and head of the Jewish Community Foundation for 17 years, and stepson of Peter Haas, one-time head of Levi’s and renowned gift-giver, Lurie has philanthropy in his blood. In 2005, not yet 30 years old, he co-founded the Tipping Point Community to harness the money swelling the coffers of tech companies and other businesses, distributing more than $100 million directly to the Bay Area’s most effective nonprofits and social enterprises.
Rather than “building institutions” — libraries, universities and hospitals — this new generation of donors wants to see their charity have a measurable impact. As a result, their methods and tools have improved. NationSwell spoke with the man who’s educating members of the Bay Area about how to best share their riches.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I live by the motto that you hire the best people. You surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, that hire people that are incredibly competent and you let them run. No one can do this work alone.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
“Between the World and Me” [by Ta-Nehisi Coates]. We’ve talking a lot about race and class and power here at Tipping Point, and I think there’s probably no more important book out there than that one.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In our T Lab program, we’re providing funding to high-performing, established organizations for research and development, which is definitely something new for our sector.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started the Tipping Point Community?
That my job would never be over. I mean, I knew it, but what’s great is that it’s also what’s needed to be inspired each and every day. We live at this nexus of great wealth and privilege here in the Bay Area as well as great poverty. It can be daunting, the chasm, but when you get to meet people who are wealthy and are really committed to these issues, that gets you fired up. And when you get to meet executive directors or clients on the ground doing the hard work every day, that also gets you fired up, despite the fact that the numbers are still overwhelming for those who live in poverty. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but it’s also easy to get inspired.
Who is the most inspirational person you’ve encountered?
The first one that comes to mind is Martha Ryan, who runs the Homeless Prenatal Program. She’s been doing this work for 27 years, and she’s always evolving and innovating. She’s tireless. She always humbles me. Homelessness is an extraordinary tough issue. It’s obviously top of mind for everybody, and here’s a woman who’s been tackling it for almost three decades. She’s still going strong and more committed than ever.
How do you try to communicate that inspiration to others?
I don’t think it’s that hard at our organization. We hire great people that are committed to our mission. I think they understand the daunting task that our partner organizations — 45 groups — are working on each and every day. Knowing that we are supporting such excellent work and such difficult work, I think, motivates our staff. And when they do get daunted, overwhelmed and a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, I can always point them to a Martha Ryan or Sam Cobbs at First Place for Youth who always gives us hope and always can tell us a story of success.
Last year, our groups at Tipping Point, we moved 22,000 people out of poverty concretely. That’s an amazing number, and one that, if we have a rough day, we can point to. It’s pretty easy to look around our portfolio of organizations and find inspiration.
What’s your biggest need right now?
We need people not to turn away from the problems of our time. In the Bay Area right now, I’d say it’s homelessness. I’m into three decades of seeing this problem in San Francisco, and I’m seeing more mentally ill living on the streets and encampments and tent cities popping up. We’re seeing our brothers and sisters and children not only living on the streets, but dying on the streets. We just had a police shooting of a homeless man here in the Mission District, and we had a homeless guy stab a California Highway Patrol officer the week of Super Bowl under an overpass. It’s not safe any longer — not only for people walking down the street, but it’s also not safe for those that are homeless. It’s not okay for us to treat our brothers and sisters this way. It’s not humane. And this isn’t just San Francisco: it’s New York, Seattle, L.A., Dallas.
It feels intractable, and I would just say it’s not. I’m not saying we can solve it overnight, but if we have the political will and we use our various resources at our disposal, then change can happen. I would ask people to get engaged. It’s pretty easy to give up and throw your hands in the air and say, “This problem is too big. It’s unsolvable.” The more people that believe that we can change this, the more likely it is that we do.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I don’t like to sit around strategizing and planning for very long. I’d rather try something and fail than plan something for a long time. I’m probably oriented towards action, rather than planning.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline

Allergy-Friendly Food Is Expensive. This Pantry Feeds Families That Can’t Afford Special Diets

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At just 12 months of age, Emily Brown’s daughter was diagnosed with allergies to peanuts, eggs, dairy, wheat and soy. Because allergy-friendly food can cost two to four times the price of regular food, Brown’s family quickly became overwhelmed by its ever-increasing grocery budget.

Neither the federal nutrition program Women, Infant & Children (WIC) nor a local food pantry provided any financial relief to Brown since few of the available food products were safe for her daughter to eat. After meeting Amy Goode at a food-allergy support group, the two mothers launched the Food Equality Initiative, aiming to make food that’s safe to those with allergies more affordable and accessible to those in need. In 2015, the inspirational duo opened Renewed Health, the country’s very first allergy-friendly food pantry. In just a year, it’s provided assistance to more than 70 clients and has distributed more than 12,350 pounds of allergy-friendly food.

Watch the video above to learn how the pantry provides a safety net to low- and middle-income people with food allergies or Celiac disease.

MORE: One in Five Baltimore Residents Lives in a Food Desert. These Neighbors Are Growing Their Own Produce