Sin City Goes Green, Philanthropic Investments That Reap Incredible Returns and More

 
 
Behind the Bright Lights of Vegas: How the 24-Hour Party City Is Greening Up Its Act, The Guardian
It may be known as Sin City, but that doesn’t mean the indiscretions taking place in the Nevada desert must include harming the planet. A new leafy oasis now offers vacationers a respite from the bright-as-the-sun neon lights that illuminate the Strip all night long. The Park, which features native Southwestern plants, a 40-foot-tall statue originally from the Burning Man festival and large metal structures that keep visitors shaded and cool, might be the only actual green space amongst the seemingly-endless stretch of casinos, but it’s one of many ways that Las Vegas is reducing its environmental footprint.
How to Bet Big on the American Dream, The Atlantic
Despite politicians’ proclamations, the American Dream isn’t dead or even on its last legs. But how much philanthropic investment is necessary for low-income residents to have a shot at upward mobility? The nonprofit advisor Bridgespan Group examined how impactful $1 billion dollars invested in each of 15 different philanthropic ventures would be at reducing poverty. As with any investment, the payout isn’t certain. But with returns estimated at being between $3 and $15 for each $1 spent (not to mention a high probability of drastically increasing program recipients’ lifetime earnings), these are bets that seem to be worth taking.
New MOOCs for Rising Leaders, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Why is it that things are usually out of reach to those most interested? Social entrepreneurs often can’t afford or get to leadership development programs. But now, educational seminars are going to them, thanks to the release of two new MOOCs (massive open online course). Free video classes from Philanthropy U provide students insights from social enterprise greats such as the cofounder of Kiva.org; Leaderosity, which charges tuition, touts among its instructors leaders from The Presidio Institute. Both programs provide access to personnel development that’s desperately needed in this sector.
MORE: Big Bets: How a 12-Month Boot Camp Transforms Low-Income Youths into Whiz Kids

This Is Why Hollywood’s Depiction of Veterans Must Change

When it comes to seeing veterans on the big screen, Tom Cruise leading a protest from his wheelchair in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro playing a final game of Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter” probably come to mind. But Hollywood’s usual portrayal of service members being physically and psychologically wounded is too narrow, says Charlie Ebersol, a Los Angeles-based TV and film producer. “It’s so staid and boring.”

Having on-screen veterans look like ordinary Americans, however, causes our views and politics will change, Ebersol believes. So along with Got Your 6 and support from the White House, he developed a certification system for films and television shows that “contain a representative and balanced depiction of veterans.” (Think: Chris Pratt playing a Navy veteran in the blockbuster Jurassic World, or the latest season of Dancing with the Stars, which featured an Army vet and double amputee doing the Tango.)

NationSwell recently spoke to Ebersol by phone from Southern California about the role Hollywood should be playing in bridging the civilian-military divide.

What misconceptions does traditional media perpetuate about veterans?
That they’re either heroes or they’re victims; they either need our help or they don’t need any help at all. It’s not binary, and the real story is so much more complex and interesting, in that, you have great opportunity in all these veterans coming home, but we don’t take advantage of it because we think they all have PTSD or hero syndrome.

How are you personally changing that narrative?
In keeping with Hollywood tradition, I operate from a philosophy that if you offer some sort of shiny prize or award to producers, they will do what they need to do to get said prize. So we’ve been certifying movies and television shows that do a good job telling veterans’ stories. Lo and behold, people started telling better veterans’ stories when they got a gold star at the end of their show or movie.

Should filmmakers be meeting with veterans to turn their stories into films?
It’s literally that simple. The problem is that, for so long, we were trying to drum up support for the veterans coming home. To do that, people have always [done something similar] to those ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) commercials where the dogs look really pathetic and what’s her name — [Sarah] McLachlan — is playing her sad song. You may donate money, but what they found was the best way to get people to actually adopt dogs was to show how much fun and how fabulous these dogs were.

After Word War II, veterans came back and people wanted to hire them because they were highly trained. They knew they did well under pressure, and some people started really reaching out. We don’t do that [today]. So when you look for a story, all you really have to do is talk to a veteran, say, “Thank you for your service. Can you tell me about interesting people that are in your lives or unique stories?” And the majority of the stories you’re going to hear are not going to be stories of, “oh, my buddy who’s got a massive drinking problem and is living on the street,” because that’s such a fraction of the population. A lot of the stories are going to be about guys who served two or three tours and now they run a hardware shop or now they’re working in a corporation or are in the tech business. Those stories make for interesting characters.

In telling these stories, what have you learned about what defines an American soldier?
Loyalty, duty and commitment. As an employer, when I’m interviewing somebody, if I could know inherently those were a person’s three strongest traits, that would be the ultimate cheat sheet. That’s the beauty of hiring a veteran. You know going in that that person is loyal, feels a sense of duty and is all about commitment because the guy or girl put themselves in harm’s way for their country and for their fellow soldier or sailor or airman. That’s what you’re looking for in a company, in a family, in a friend. You want people that you know are going to show up, and nobody shows up like the military.

What can the rest of us do to support veterans?
The platitude needs to stop being, “Thank you for your service,” and actualize that into something meaningful. The yellow ribbon and the stickers, that’s all well and good, but that’s not actually translating into anything. We have to look past that and ask, “How are we creating job opportunities? How are we creating community support where we’re embracing these people?” A lot of people want to do it under the guise of “They served our country, so we owe them.” That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong: You do have to take into account that we enjoy our freedoms because of them. But I think the other side of it is significantly more important; they have show their true character and their true colors, and in showing us that and in being trained, at the absolute worst, they are certainly the best qualified people for almost any job.

It’s rare that the person I hire into my company is the most suited because they went to the right types of schools; it’s always about how they act under pressure and how they understand teamwork and the mission being bigger than the man or woman. Veterans are always significantly better at that than anyone else.

MORE: Why Is It So Hard to Understand What It’s Like to Be a Veteran?

The Visionary That’s Getting Everyone to the Table to Talk About Social Good

This February, on the exact same day, two governors from two very different states — Nikki Haley, a Republican in South Carolina, and Dan Malloy, a Democrat in Connecticut — both announced social impact bonds to promote family care: one for low-income moms, the other for parents struggling with substance abuse. Both of these bonds (also known as “pay for success”) deployed private dollars to fund the scaling of a social program. If the project succeeds in meeting specific, predesigned metrics, the private backers will profit from their investment; if not, taxpayers don’t owe a penny more. Behind both of these innovative, cross-sector partnerships was Tracy Palandjian, CEO of Social Finance, a nonprofit intermediary between all the parties, who helped bring the “pay for success” model to the United States after seeing it first implemented in England in 2010.
NationSwell spoke with Palandjian by phone from Boston about the daily obstacles and excitements that come with rethinking how American social services can reach more people in need.

Tracy Palandjian (third from left) with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (center), who championed the “pay for success” model.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I have two. The first one is an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others.” Just because one has a great idea and one could often accomplish a lot more, going at it alone is often insufficient if you really want to deliver a movement. That’s hugely evident in our work here. Imagine these very funky public-private nonprofit partnerships with so many stakeholders with very divergent motivations. What motivates a private investor? A sitting governor or mayor? The executive directors of these classic human service providers? We have everyone sit around a table to articulate a common goal — in this case, delivering results to our communities — when they have often conflicting frameworks and very different languages they speak in and very different world-views. Bringing them together around a very common goal among very uncommon stakeholders is something that we have found, yes, it’s challenging, but if we can rally this forth, we see enduring, powerful results coming out of those partnerships.
By way of background for my other one: I didn’t grow up in this country. I’m Chinese, and I grew up in Hong Kong. My grandfather whom I was very close to, his favorite quote was (translated to English): “Distance tests the strength of forces, time tests the hearts of men.” It really is a message about patience. A lot of things take time, and the people who can stay steadfast on that vision could achieve the most. My grandfather was born in 1903 in China. He took his courageous wife — my grandmother — and, at that point, four children, and literally fled the Second Wold War on foot, by boat and by train out of China into Hong Kong and then to Taiwan ultimately. He was a chemical engineer, completely self-taught. He left everything behind when he fled. Along the way, he lost two children. After they made it to safety, he started all over again. He made consumer batteries and completely rebuilt himself, his family and his business. I always think about their lives and what they were able to overcome and what they were able to accomplish. Sometimes, we take three steps backward to take five steps forward.
What’s your favorite book of all time?
One of my favorite books, which I’m proud to say is the namesake of our eldest daughter: a Chinese classic, “Tao Te Ching.” It’s just so poetic and so poignant about how one should live. And it’s full of these non-intuitive sentences like, “It is through being effortless that you can achieve the most.”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Taking a step back, social impact bonds are probably the latest and the most recent comer to this broader investing landscape. I agree there’s been a lot of hype, but the reason why people are excited about it is that the impact is so direct. When our investors get their money back and then some, it’s because somebody’s life has been improved. This very articulated, metric-driven all-around life improvement, whether it’s recidivism or job attainment or education attainment or improved health outcomes, these are the metrics of each of our deals. Someone’s life improvement is the source of the return back to the investor, and that connection is really powerful. While the field started off in criminal justice (and still a lot of projects are focused on reducing recidivism), we’re excited to see there are a lot of projects in early education, in early childhood, in health and in workforce development.
How do you try to inspire others?
I just try to be who I am. I believe, as a person, I’m best when I’m aligned as a human being and I’m 100 percent authentic. I don’t try to say something because it will inspire others. I don’t try to do something because, well, that’s what I believe a good leader should do. I try to model good behavior for my colleagues. I’m not perfect, I have lots of limitations. I try to be a good parent and model good behavior for our children. I feel very strongly about this; I feel like there are too many lessons and advice that people give. People just need to be authentic.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I am probably most proud of the fact that I really think that I understand two cultures perfectly well. Obviously, I grew up in my own [Chinese] culture. My whole family’s still in that part of the world. You never forget your own culture and your native language. But I also think I’ve worked in America long enough and I’ve worked with enough different sectors and different kinds of people that I really understand how this country and this culture works, too. I think that’s just a huge skill to be able to be empathetic, to be able to step into the shoes of others. I think it’s a really important skill to have, especially for our work, which requires us to talk across sectors and work across disciplines.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I’m an artist at heart. That’s what I did as a young kid, all throughout high school and college, I painted a lot, I drew a lot, I experimented with all kinds of mediums. I miss that part of my life. I haven’t done much since I graduated from college. Now, I watch my kids do it, and it makes me very happy.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

The Power of Video Games to Heal America’s Heroes, A Surefire Way to Keep Students in School and More


How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags. 
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War

This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown

After working as an industrial fisherman for decades and witnessing the devastating effects of mass-fishing, Bren Smith decided to look for more sustainable ways to feed the planet.

A few years ago, he developed an unique, vertical 3-D ocean farming model: a sort of underwater garden composed of kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters. Those species are not only edible and in high demand, Smith explains, but they also act as a filter for nitrogen and carbon dioxide, rebuilding natural reef systems and restoring our seas. In 2013, Smith launched the nonprofit GreenWave to help other fishermen replicate his innovative farming model. “This is our chance to make food right and agriculture right,” he says.

Learn more about Smith’s journey and his vision of what tomorrow’s seafood plate looks like by watching the video above.

Special thanks for The University of Connecticut and Professor Charles Yarish.

MORE: Will Cars of the Future Run on Algae?

Dine Out, Feed the Hungry

In New York City, nearly 235 million meals are missed every year due to poverty, but one former bartender in the Bronx has a technological solution to end that.

Spare, a mobile app launched last September, allows diners to automatically round up their restaurant bill and donate extra change to one of the city’s major food banks. Developed by Andra Tomsa, a onetime cocktail waitress and financial advisor, the app has 7,000 users who are each donating an average of $15 a month through their small change. While the user base is still small, Tomsa is aggressively pursuing partnerships with restaurants to offer loyalty coupons (think: a free drink for every third donation) to get to 400,000 users — the magic number she believes can end the meal gap in the Big Apple.

“The overwhelming majority [of those who are food insecure] are working poor. They have two to three jobs, trying to support their families, the elderly and their children on a minimum wage,” Tomsa explains. “The last week of the month, they are choosing between the electricity bill and groceries. They are going to the food pantry to supplement their budget.”

As a student at Fordham University in the Bronx, Tomsa studied the “extreme poverty” of the developing world, but only later did she realize some of those living on less than $2 a day included her neighbors in New York’s poorest borough. In December 2012, she decided to focus her attention on her immediate surroundings, including the area around Yankee Stadium where she lives. Knowing “even millennials who have no money, have money to buy beer,” she started with an analog version of Spare, by collecting dollars at six bars through an extra line on the bill (in addition to tips). But with a newborn son, collecting cash from these nightlife establishments posed logistical problems.

In November 2013, on a date nonprofit workers now call the “Hunger Cliff” because federal budget cuts to food stamps resulted in more than 1 million New York City residents having less to spend at supermarkets, Tomsa’s project took on new urgency. She decided to scale her idea by going virtual. Developing an API (a for-profit venture that her nonprofit Spare leases for a small fee) that tallies donations based on a bank statement, Tomsa was able to automate the collection process.

For those who have money to spare on restaurants, the least they can do is remember those who can’t afford dinner that night.

Homepage photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

MORE: Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change If One Cooked and Served You Dinner?

Questioning How Society Is Constructed Is the Best Way to Enact Change

As a staff member working for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the mid 2000s, Tomicah Tillemann reported to now-Vice President Joe Biden and worked extensively with, he says with a chuckle, “a new senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.”
Inspired by successful policy work, Tillemann remained in government, serving as Secretary Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter (once going 100 hours without sleep in order to perfect a speech) and later, as her senior adviser. That work informed Tillemann’s current position as director of the Bretton Woods II initiative at New America, a new model of investing that combines the public and private sectors and technology to further social impact causes worldwide.
NationSwell sat down with Tillemann at New America’s minimalist offices in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, to discuss the importance of collaboration and why appealing to logic isn’t always successful.
Is there an innovation in your field that you’re particularly excited about right now?
In the work we’re doing right now at the Bretton Woods II initiative, we started from the realization that we’re living in a world with a huge quantum of capital and problems. We don’t do enough connecting the two, and we have yet to develop a business model that allows us to move resources to solve big global challenges. What we have recognized is that with good data and good analytics, you can provide big asset holders with the information they need to see how targeted investments in social impact and development can address the root causes of the volatility that eat away at their profits.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received on leadership?
If you can build a community that is passionately committed to the cause that you are trying to advance, then your job as a leader becomes immeasurably easier. What I’ve tried to do in my work in the private and public sectors and now straddling the two is to bring together individuals that share a common commitment to the work that we are seeking to advance. At that point, I can kind of step aside and get out of the way and watch them do incredible things.
In our current efforts, we are fortunate to have partnered with some of the leading foundations and many of the largest financial institutions in the world. When you put these guys together, provide some vision and serve as a catalyst for their collaboration, they’re going to do spectacular things. The great challenge of leadership is to deliver a vision that can appeal to people who wouldn’t otherwise work together. If you can provide that, then you’ve got it made as a leader.
What inspires you?
My grandfather came to the U.S. as a penniless Holocaust survivor. He arrived with $7 and a salami in his pocket, and his salami was confiscated at customs. Through a lot of hard work and education, he eventually served the United States in the Congress for 30 years and became chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I was able to grow up learning at his feet; I spent virtually every summer in Washington, D.C., with him. The great benefit of that was seeing his commitment to improving the state of the world. He recognized what could happen if you didn’t; he’d seen the evil that could be unleashed when people looked the other direction.
What do you wish someone would’ve told you when you started working in Washington, D.C., but didn’t?
In so much of what we do in Washington and certainly the work we do trying to mobilize the world’s largest asset holders to invest in social impact, we’re trying to change behavior. Part of that is based in logic, but a lot of it goes beyond that. We tend to focus a lot of time and energy on logic, and it’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. In order to do everything else, you need to build communities, relationships and get very good at leveraging different centers of power. Ultimately, you can have the best case in the world, but unless you know how to speak to people through those other channels, you’re probably not going to do what you set out to accomplish.
What is your idea of a perfect day?
My most important job is dad to five amazing kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 16 months. My happiest days involve them. We go to the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest every summer, and if we go out and catch some crabs, read some books together and spend some time on the beach — that’s real tough to beat. It’s a reminder of why you do everything else that you do.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
Definitely my five little people, and they’re in a class by themselves. Beyond that, I hope to someday say that my proudest accomplishment is leaving them a world that’s materially better than it would’ve been if I hadn’t engaged in these issues.
What is something that people don’t know about you but should?
I was born in the car on the way to the hospital. My mother was a very brave woman.
What is your all-time favorite book?
I really like Thomas More’s “Utopia,” which is a great exercise in how to reenvision and reimagine a society. The questioning that is evident in that book and the reexamination of some of the fundamental principles that you assume that need to undergird our civilization is something that we need more of. I think we can benefit from constantly looking at the way our society is constructed and asking, “Do things really need to be built as they are?” To the extent that we can make that part of our constant conversation in our heads, we can do good things.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

This Professional Risk-Taker Explains Why Exceptional Leaders Aren’t Always Confident with Their Decisions

In the early aughts, Annie Duke was an unbeatable poker player. At the very first World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in 2004, she brought home the trophy and a $2 million pot. Later, in 2012, she turned her gambling wins into a speaking business, offering classes to Wall Street traders on risky decision-making and what they could learn from her card-playing successes and mistakes. Once that business became self-sustaining, she folded her cards and largely retired from the game to focus on education, her real passion. Drawing on what she’d learned from volunteering for an after-school program in Northern California and the latest research in behavioral economics, she founded How I Decide, a nonprofit that focuses on developing students’ critical thinking and socio-emotional skills. NationSwell spoke with Duke by phone about the topic she knows best: decision-making, its emotions, risks and rewards.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
People believe that to be a good leader, you have to be incredibly confident. They tend to equate confidence with this idea that you’re 100 percent sure about your decisions and that it’s an unwillingness to admit failure. In order to really effectively lead, you have to allow people to understand that confidence is not that. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake or letting people know that you’re not 100 percent sure of every decision is actually a better way to lead. A lot of people I admire have set a great example by saying, “I just wanted to let you know that I just made this really big mistake, and I thought I’d share it with you because I learned from it.”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In the world of behavioral economics, there’s a big push recently towards actually applying the research in the field to improving people’s lives in the real world. You can really see this with [Stanford psychologist] Carol Dweck, who is very vocal in saying that she felt like she was sort of locked in a box doing her research for a long time, and now, she’s actually bringing that work to the populations that really need it. With behavioral economics, there was a long period of time where people were saying, “Oh, isn’t this interesting? People are very irrational.” And now that it’s starting to be a focus on, okay, that’s true, but how can we actually improve people’s lives through understanding what we know and trying to figure out real-world strategies that would improve decision-making?  
What’s on your nightstand?
Right now, a bunch of stuff. I’m reading “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” [by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner] and “The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing” by Michael Mauboussin. I just finished “Kluge: the Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind,” which is by Gary Marcus, and “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [by Gabriele Oettingen], which is fantastic look at mental contrasting.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish when I first started out as an adult, I had a broader view of what success looked like. I think that I had a super-narrow view of what it meant to be successful, and I wish that there was a more complete view of success, so it also included emotional success: what it means to really be happy or feel fulfilled. I think that there’s a big push right now around mindfulness, which is really wonderful, because I think that it does treat the person as a whole. When I was growing up, success meant you went to this school and you had this kind of job. I think that when I was younger, I was sort of judgmental about that. Like when I met someone, one of the first questions I asked was, “What school did you got to?” As if that matters. I look at people who didn’t take that particular path, and many of them are incredibly successful individuals. But also I think that taught me to be incredibly judgmental of myself, when I felt like I wasn’t being successful or following whatever path I thought I wanted.

Annie Duke gives a talk on Decision Science at World Café Live in Philadelphia.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My children. I don’t think that there’s a close second to that.
What inspires you?
As far as poker is concerned, the inspiration was definitely my brother. He was already doing it, and he’s largely responsible for the success that I had, because without his mentorship, I don’t think that it would have happened. Going into the more academic side of things and decision-making, my children really inspired me to work in that [field]. Another person that inspired me is my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Eastern Europe [and only] graduated from sixth grade, and I went to two Ivy League schools — the journey you can take from getting here not even speaking English to just two generations later. If you get somebody an education, it really removes limitations from their life. I appreciate the arc that happened in my family and how quickly that changed occurred through education.
How do you try to inspire others?
I don’t think about that. I try to focus on doing the stuff that I do, which is what really brings me a lot of happiness. And if someone is inspired by that, that’s great. Obviously, when I’m going and giving speeches, I’m hoping to inspire people to make changes in the way they think. The stuff that we do with kids is to inspire them to continue their education and become better thinkers and all of those things. But me personally, I think if I were really focused on that, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do very well. Because you have to live within yourself and the moment to be effective.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
 

Former Prisoners Find Redemption Running a Prosperous Business in San Francisco’s Public Housing

At the age of 13, Tyrone Mullins had his first contact with the justice system in 1998, handcuffed for starting a small tussle at school. He could’ve been hit with a minor reprimand, serving a few weeks of detention or even a suspension, but instead, he was formally charged with a crime — setting Mullins on a path of near-permanent incarceration for the next half of his life. “From that point on, it was juvenile hall, county jail and prison,” says Mullins, a San Francisco native who grew up in a Western Addition public housing project. As a felon, Mullins had limited employment opportunities after each release. Rejected from positions at hotels, supermarkets, department stores, doughnut shops, Jamba Juice and McDonald’s, Mullins subsided on money from the government ($336 a month, split into two checks). “All that allows is temptation to come in and make you do another thing, follow another walk of life,” Mullins explains. “You may not necessarily want to take that route, but people do things when they’re hurting.” And Mullins was hurting.
Navigating past numerous hard knocks, in 2010, Mullins co-founded a successful business that provides jobs to public housing residents, regardless of their parole status. At three Bay Area public housing complexes, Green Streets pays employees $12.25 an hour to sort trash from recyclables and compostables. While handling garbage is far from glamorous in a city that’s home to Salesforce, Twitter and Dropbox, Green Streets’s roughly two dozen workers wear their grey jumpsuits with pride. For many, it marks the first time they’ve financially supported themselves. (“Legally,” Mullins likes to add.) In a city that’s witnessed a mass exodus of low-income African-Americans due to the rising cost of living, these denizens of the projects can finally point to ownership of an enterprise in a world where so much is out of their price range.

Tyrone Mullins leads the design team from Exploratorium, a public learning lab, on a tour of the Buchanan Mall in San Francisco.

Green Streets got its unofficial start in 2010, when a work crew arrived at a Western Addition affordable housing development, managed by the for-profit company McCormack Baron Ragan, to install solar panels. Worried about thieves, round-the-clock security was desired. David Mauroff, McCormack Baron’s vice president at the time, didn’t have the money for guards, but he had another idea: “Why don’t you hire the guys who you think are gonna steal your stuff?” Resident DeMaurio Lee staffed the job, and nothing was stolen. Mullins, meanwhile, with two out of three felony strikes against him, installed panels himself, after finding the job through a nonprofit. Four months later, after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, DeMaurio and Mullins gathered the courage to approach Mauroff (despised by most residents, Mauroff says of himself, as the man who personally signed off on evictions) and asked for more work. With a background in city-run gang intervention programs, Mauroff could see the determination on their faces and agreed to see what he could do.
The solution appeared when the complex’s next waste disposal bill arrived. At just one project, Buena Vista Plaza East (193 units, known to many as “O.C.” or “Outta Control”), McCormack Baron faced a $14,000 annual charge from Recology to haul trash to the landfill or an incinerator. As part of San Francisco’s plan to become a zero-waste city by 2020, the bill could be significantly lowered by removing plastic bottles, aluminum cans, food, soiled paper and garden clippings from the overflowing dumpsters. Mauroff, who’s now credited as one of Green Streets’s co-founders, told Mullins he would pay residents to sort through waste, earmarking any savings on his bills for their wages. “I’m not telling you how to do this. I will just help you get the resources in place for you to launch this business,” he told the two men.
Neighbors made fun of the crew digging through rat-infested trash piles in their white protective suits. Yet within six months, thousands of gallons of trash were diverted each month, saving the property 60 percent on its bills. Soon, neighbors started handing Mullins their résumés.
To turn the model into a business, complete with hiring plans, a mission statement, marketing and sound financials, Mullins enrolled in free classes at San Francisco City College’s Small Business Institute. Severely complicating matters was the fact that in the Western Addition complex, danger and temptation were omnipresent. In the courtyards, residents had to dodge literal bullets. Mullins himself was sent back to prison for two years for violating his parole.
Tyrone and his crew sort through recyclables.

While Mullins served his time, the rest of San Francisco’s black population continued its decades-long “black flight.” (Since 1970, the city’s portion of African-Americans has been halved, from 13.4 percent to just 5.8 percent in 2014.) Green Streets employees interviewed for this story feel keenly aware of their skin color. Unprompted, they often identified others by race: Mauroff was a “white dude”; neighbors, a “bunch of black people.” They feel that racial differences have been exaggerated by California’s penal system, with which many public housing residents come into contact. In the past, more than half the lockups in San Francisco’s jail have been African-Americans, and last year, four city cops were investigated for trading bigoted text messages. Even in this famously tolerant city, race continues to be a point of tension, says London Breed, one of two African-American city supervisors on the city’s nine-member board. “I am just trying to hold on to evidence that blacks ever existed in San Francisco,” Breed, who grew up in Western Addition public housing, tells the Los Angeles Times.
For those African-Americans who have stayed in the city, the economic outlook looks bleak. The median household income among black residents has fallen to a slim $29,500, while all other racial groups have seen wages rise. (By comparison, the median household pay for white residents, thanks to tech money, now exceeds six figures: $104,300.) Roughly one quarter of the city’s black population relies on subsidized housing, according to data from the Mayor’s Task Force, but the lifeline doesn’t begin to meet demand (only 3.6 percent of applicants receive housing through a lottery system). For the lucky few, like Green Streets employees, housing may be affordable, but the city is anything but.
Gentrification isn’t the only reason why some neighbors are gone: gun violence regularly racks the housing developments. “In San Francisco, with this extreme wealth and income disparity, most of our crime is really centered, not in, but around public housing, these little pockets of poverty isolated from the $1 to $2 million homes right across the street,” Mauroff observers. Last summer, a 19-year-old girl was gunned down in a spray of bullets. The girl’s aunt, Shannon Watts, is Green Streets’s human resources manager. A victim of gun violence herself (taking a bullet in her right leg in 2012), Watts says that her work with Green Streets helped her overcome the debilitating trauma that once kept her captive inside her apartment, door locked and shades drawn.
The difficulties that Green Streets’s employees encounter are considered a badge of honor, a sign of how much they’ve overcome to reach their current success — meager as a minimum-wage job might look to any of the Bay Area’s elites. When Mullins finished his two years in prison, he enrolled in Project ReMADE, a 12-week program at Stanford that trains ex-cons to be entrepreneurs. “I see the transformation I’ve made, and I’m honest with myself,” Mullins says today. “I continue to be a work in progress.”
Reinstated as Green Streets’s operations manager and the leader of the business development team, Mullins took his education back to the informal economy of the projects, where some residents earn extra cash by doing each other’s hair, fixing cars and babysitting, while others sell drugs and break into cars. This self-contained marketplace arose because so many are kept out of workplaces by criminal records or lack of job experience, Mauroff notes. Green Streets bridges that transition to the working world, though it’s not without its bumps. Turf wars between gangs in different housing projects sometimes bleeds over when rivals are staffed together on company cleanup crews. Randolph Lee, the 48-year-old operations supervisor, says he’s responded to fights, stabbings and “a little bit of gunplay.”
A “two-time ex-felon” convicted of murder, Randolph has regularly been tempted to snap back to his old ways. Before he got the job with Green Streets, he says, “I was ready to go back to what I had done before. Just hustling, you know?” he recalls. “I was on my way back to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was going to go get it, go get some bread to pay bills.” Since starting with Green Streets in 2013, Randolph has been promoted through the ranks. In his current role as supervisor, he helps employees productively deal with their anger, pointing to his own story: “The only thing we have is our pride, and how far could that go if we allow ourselves to get incarcerated for life,” Randolph says. “I done terrorized and fought my community. It was time to heal my community. I never wanted my last legacy of myself just being a screwup.”
Green Streets operations supervisor Randolph Lee, pictured with Meaghan Shannon-Vlkovic of Enterprise Community Partners, at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation Film Series in Atlanta.

Mullins envisions the same impact helping the poorest residents of Detroit, St. Louis, Miami and Phoenix, but a recent failed expansion to nearby Richmond and Oakland shows any scaling must overcome logistical issues. Because the two East Bay cities don’t have strong zero-waste initiatives that discount hauling of recyclables and compostables, the trash bill at housing projects only increased by hiring Green Streets. That’s not to say the model can’t be applied elsewhere, but green subsidies will have to be in place for it to work.
The Western Addition and Plaza East projects serve as evidence of just how successful this business can be. There’s a changed vibe and it’s cleaner, too, as 60,960 gallons of trash are being diverted into other waste streams. But more importantly, there’s fewer men on the corner, whispering street names for drugs to passersby. Many, like Randolph, now work for Green Streets, a model demonstrating that an entrepreneurial spirit can be found in any community, Mauroff says, no matter how unexpected. “A bunch of guys and girls in public housing aren’t given the credit for showing they can do that,” he argues. “I want people to understand that: Under the right circumstances, everyone will go back to work and try to compete in the market.”
For all the frustrations tech startups have unleashed on the Bay Area, they’ve also instilled a sense that the calcified structures of the past don’t necessarily need to be around tomorrow. Mullins brought that Silicon Valley ethic to the Western Addition projects. He deserves credit for his own powerful disruption: not just finding a new way to sort trash and manage its pickup, but for an entirely new vision of labor for those the tech world’s prosperity is leaving behind.

For Education to Improve, Emotional Learning Must Be Emphasized

In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s story of the Little Engine That Could who repeats, “I think I can, I think I can,” to power its way up a steep hill. In Silverstein’s version, instead of reaching the summit, the train slips backwards and crashes: “If the track is tough and the hill is rough, / thinking you can just ain’t enough!” the poet writes. Ehrmann took the lesson to heart and, after completing graduate work in sociology at Princeton, founded the educational nonprofit Blue Engine, its name a nod to the poem.
As CEO, Ehrmann takes the hard look at the shortcomings in our nation’s secondary schools, rejects pat inspirational messages and instead provides students with critical support to succeed in higher education. Blue Engine’s most important innovation is the introduction of teaching assistants (known as BETAs), mostly recent college grads, in the classroom. By breaking up large classes into small groups, teaching assistants personalize lessons for class performance and learning styles. With 89 BETAs in seven schools today, the program has been shown to nearly double the number of college-ready students — a 73 percent increase at three schools, according to New York’s 2013-14 Regents test data — and cut the number of failing students by one third.
On a recent weekday morning, Ehrmann, wearing a scarf against the 34-degree chill, plopped down at a table at Au Bon Pain in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. NationSwell spoke to him about rethinking the education sector, leadership and fatherhood.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
There’s an expression that we have here that we have to earn the right to do this work. I think there’s a pervasive illusion that the fact that you have good intentions is going to lead to positive outcomes. And in actuality, it can lead to feelings of entitlement and arrogance and a lack of partnerships — true partnerships — in the communities in which we work. So from the minute we step foot into the office or to a school or to a classroom and sit across the table from a young person, who are we to say that we deserve to be there? We have to earn the right to be there in the eyes of young people, teachers, parents and each other. That’s number one. It feels like that’s the most grounding way to honor the work and not lose sight of what’s most important, which is achieving results.

Nick Ehrmann (far right) stands with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the College Opportunity Summit in Washington, D.C., Jan. 16, 2014.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Number one is broadening the evidence base in how we define success, continuing to embrace academic achievement outcomes, but also incorporating measures of student growth, social-emotional learning, learning climate and the ways that schools can and must nurture the growth of young people more holistically. Students aren’t just data points. They’re people, and I think we’re seeing a really reductionist narrowing of what success means into standardized test scores at the expense of things that help young people grow and learn and develop independently in their lives. I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Dude, I have like 5,000 books. Hmm…
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
I have three boys under five [years of age]…we’re watching “Cars 2” and “Wall-E” for the 14th time, and actually, I just watched the Star Wars trilogy — the original three — with my four-year-old, and he was glued to the set. It’s just amazing.
What’s your biggest need right now?
Sleep! No, I think I’ve got it: a relaxation of the assumption individual organizations can or should scale to solve social problems alone and to encourage the essential forms of collaboration in systemic partnerships, where the most promising organizations become part of a much broader theory of change in how problems get solved. Look at Malaria No More, for example. There was no single organization that would have set themselves up to become the global malaria response. Too often, I think, entrepreneurs face pressure to scale to the size of the problem alone.
What inspires you?
Working with an incredible team. Having the chance to be part of an organization that sees the strengths in young people, instead of their weaknesses and deficits, and builds from that strength without taking credit for it. And the sliver of possibility that this work is going to have a dramatic impact on how students learn across the country.
In turn, how do you try to inspire others?
It’s easy to lose sight of what drives us and unites us as an organization, when the work itself is so hard. And part of my role is to consistently hold that vision and sense of possibility, just grounded in young people, to hold that front and center, so we can recharge.
What’s your perfect day?
I thrive on routine. I’m just going to describe my current day. A perfect day: I’d say it starts with not waking up three times in the middle of the night, step one. Step two: Cook breakfast for my boys. Get in a quick run in Central Park. It’s equal parts being in the field at schools and managing teams. Getting home in time so that Annie [my wife] and I could put the boys to bed. And eking out 36 minutes of “Homeland,” before I fall asleep on the couch. #LivingTheDream.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I was a musician for most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. I play cello, so I grew up doing classical and jazz ensemble work most of my life. I miss it. That would be part of my perfect day, if I had the time. I started around [the age of] four and put it down in my early 20s.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this work?
To not to apologize for thinking big. And to not allow caution or fear to limit people’s sense of what’s possible.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.