In 1987, Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, an education-focused national service nonprofit that served as the model for AmeriCorps, the federal community service program that was created seven years later by President Bill Clinton. But in 2003 Khazei found himself fighting for the organization he helped inspire. AmeriCorps funding was cut by 80 percent that year, so Khazei and around 700 AmeriCorps members descended on Washington, D.C., and gave around-the-clock testimony to get the funding back. The campaign helped restore all financing, and it helped AmeriCorps get a $100 million increase the following year. The experience also spawned Khazei’s next big project: Be the Change, a coalition-building nonprofit that is dedicated to promoting national service, working on social problems and empowering veterans. “It’s very ambitious,” Khazei says, “but if you get people together that are working to solve problems, they have the answers. They’re not ideological, they just want to see what works and how to make it happen.”
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Tag: NationSwell
Big Bets: 8 Game-Changers Shake Things Up to Solve Our Country’s Challenges
We know about the challenges.
We know that too many young people are struggling to find employment and a ladder up; that too many children fail to receive the sort of education they need to flourish in the 21st century world; that more young people should be given the opportunity to partake in some form of national service — and that too few actually do.
At NationSwell, we are deeply concerned about these problems, and we are always grateful to find a smart report or analysis of the challenges. Developing a true and deep understanding of a problem is the first step in solving it.
But it’s what comes next that truly excites us — and defines our mission.
It’s the innovators, the pioneers, the change-makers who not only understand these national challenges and all of their complexity, but who also dare to solve them. At NationSwell, we are ever-focused on finding them, telling their powerful stories and driving action in support of their efforts.
Who are these leaders, what are their visions for change, what motivates them — and what, exactly, are the big bets they are making to advance our country?
NationSwell sat down with eight innovators at the Gathering of Leaders, an annual event held this past year in Napa, Calif., hosted by leading venture philanthropy organization New Profit, for a series of extraordinary conversations in which we posed some of those very questions.
The answers we got were as varied as they were illuminating — and, to us, heartening. If the odds are anything like Vegas, some of these risk-takers will fail and some will succeed. But, in thinking creatively and acting boldly, what these men and women are doing to tackle our biggest national challenges demands our consideration — and participation.
We invite you to watch and be part of the conversation as we present the NationSwell series: “Big Bets”.
All the best,
Greg Behrman
Editor-in-Chief
NationSwell
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SXSW: NationSwell on the Rise of Online Youth Activists
On the final day of SXSW Interactive (that stands for South by Southwest for the uninitiated), two inspiring student activists joined Greg Behrman, Founder and CEO of NationSwell, and Ronnie Cho, the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, to discuss how they’ve successfully used technology to address national challenges.
Simone Bernstein, a senior at St. Bonaventure University in New York, said her frustration from the lack of information for teenagers who wanted to volunteer in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, led her to work with her brother to start a website called St. Louis Volunteen. This later grew into VolunTEEN Nation, a national organization that lists volunteer opportunities for teens while also encouraging organizations to recognize the potential of younger volunteers.
“So many kids wanted to volunteer but there were very few places they could go to find those opportunities,” she said. “A few months after we launched St. Louis Volunteen, we got hundreds then thousands of emails from people who wanted to volunteer in their own cities.”
Bernstein wakes up at 6:30 every morning, runs three miles, then spends six hours each day working on VolunTEEN Nation — all of this on top of her academic work. She says she is grateful for Skype, Twitter, and other online tools that allow her to lead the national team, including 240 ambassadors across the country.
High school senior Charles Orgbon III talked about his work founding and running Greening Forward. The has its roots in a school project that had him picking up litter around the Mill Creek High School campus in Hoschton, Georgia. Initially, his Earth Savers Club only had three members, but the Internet provided Orgbon with a power platform to rally student action. Using a blog called Recycling Education, he shared posts on environmental issues with, as he describes it, “anyone who wanted to listen.”
Describing the transition that led to Greening Forward, which works to provide a diverse group of young people with the resources they need to protect the environment, Orgbon says that he started thinking toward the end of eighth grade about how he might use technology to advance the impact he could have.
“Let’s do more than just post on a website. Let’s build some resources and support tools to help young people build similar projects like the Earth Savers Club in their own communities,” he said.
The audience, many of them working professionals in their 20s and 30s, laughed when Orgbon defined a young person as someone under the age of 25.
This old 26 year old tweeting in the corner captured some other memorable moments from the conversation:
Cho moderated the afternoon session. While serving as President Obama’s liaison to Young Americans and writing the White House’s For the Win blog (which focused on the remarkable initiatives young Americans advance in their own communities) Cho came across many stories of student innovation. He talked about the importance of a platform to “highlight interesting, effective, impactful work” or Americans across the country.
This is exactly where NationSwell comes in, Behrman said, talking about the website’s model of telling stories about individuals making an impact and mobilizing support around innovators like Ben Simon of the Food Recovery Network. He then shared a video outlining the impact of its call to action.
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“The founding impetus is really these guys, people throughout our country who are doing amazing things, and sometimes they’re overlooked and sometimes people who are interested may not know about them, so we want to be a platform for them, a source for their stories,” Behrman said.
Then panel went on to explore the way tools from social media to smart phones have helped Bernstein, Orgbon, and so many student activists advance their causes and achieve national impact. The audience posed questions ranging from the distinction between activism and service to the role of school curriculum in encouraging volunteering. The conversation itself seemed likely to inspire not only more stories about student innovators who have leveraged technology to address national challenges, but strong support for them as well.
Welcome to NationSwell
NationSwell is a digital media company focused on American innovation and renewal — identifying and profiling social innovators who are developing impactful ways to solve America’s most critical issues.
NationSwell finds inspiration in the people who are rolling up their sleeves and the things they are doing — to drive advancements in education and environmental sustainability; to make government work better for citizens; to engage more people in national service; to support our veterans and their families; to revitalize our economy and advance the American dream; and more.