Courtney Martin set her iPhone down where she could see it. She had to keep an eye out for a possible text from her husband, who was with their daughter at the bed and breakfast where the family of three was staying while in Camden, Maine.
Martin, an author, speaker and activist, was in town for PopTech 2014, a social impact conference that drew 600 creatives together around the theme of rebellion. As a new mother, Martin arrived at the Camden Opera House with a different perspective than the one she had on stage a few years earlier for her popular TED talk, which focused on feminism and drew on the way her own mother inspired her path to where she is today.
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During that talk, Martin said that we need a range of people and solutions to advance the work of the mothers and grandmothers who have worked so hard to make life better for their children and grandchildren.
In an interview with NationSwell about the solutions that excite her most, the editor emerita of Feministing.com started by pointing to the way the web has created a cost for sexism.
“We’ve really figured out how to get people galvanized, in a sense shaming sexist actors into changing,” she says. The innovation in digital tools, such as online petitions and apps like Hollaback! (which has partnered with New York City to allow victims of sexual harassment to upload their experiences in real time versus dealing with the process of filing a formal complaint) is providing new and more effective ways to battle anything that falls short of equal treatment.
But now, Martin says that the question is how to keep that engagement going beyond the click of a button. “We need some kind of larger strategic goal and plan and way to work together collectively.”
Organizations taking us in the right direction include UltraViolet, a community that launches campaigns for equality — from petitioning congressional representatives to reauthorize and expand the Violence Against Women Act to organizing a rally that was part of what led Facebook to name the first woman to its board of directors.
Martin also points to Make It Work, a community committed to the idea that Americans should not have to choose between earning a good living and spending quality time with their family. Instead of preaching to the feminist choir, the organization works to make these topics accessible to everyone, like through their Make It Work quiz on what television show characters we channel “when work and life get crazy.”
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Martin explains that, despite the way she and her husband have been able to pursue freelance careers that allow them to spend more time with their daughter (who has been on 38 flights and counting), balancing it all can still be a challenge.
“I still have this deep conflict between doing what I love and being with who I love and how do I make it all work?” she says. “It’s ridiculous we’re so far behind on those issues and yet it’s been so difficult over the last decade to make a change.”
Fortunately, the window of opportunity to make major change in areas like maternity leave policy opens wider as elections approach. And with that timing in mind, there are organizations hard at work.
One such group is SPARK (an acronym that stands for sexualization, protest, action, resistance, knowledge), which empowers girls to be their own activists. Breaking the “protect our girls” mold, the organization elevates the voices of young women to discuss their own experiences. Martin, whose first book was Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women, points to SPARK as a solution that inspires her, emphasizing the value of teenage girls expressing how they relate to their own body versus women trying to advocate on their behalf.
Martin, who embodies the rebellion theme printed on stickers and tote bags in the room where she sat, says that she is also thrilled by a cultural shift in what defines a feminist. “For a long time the narrative has been let’s get men involved so they can help women,” she says. “But now we see they have a self interest in the liberation of men and women because were all constricted by these roles.”
Starting with her own husband, Martin points to men who have inspired her by adopting this issue as their own: Jay Smooth, who has put his voice to use not only through his hip hop radio show but also against misogyny; Michael Kimmel, a leader in masculinity studies who is also the founder and spokesperson for the National Organization for Men Against Sexism; and Jimmie Briggs, who started an organization called Man Up, which aims to involve young male advocates to advance gender equality.
Eleven months into motherhood, Martin says her daughter has only made her more passionate — radicalized even — around the issue of work-life balance. “I look at Maya and I just think I want the most equal, fascinating, safe world for her possible and I will do anything to make that happen,” she says.
As she pursues that world, Martin will support the solutions that are out there, while also putting into practice points she made at PopTech that took off in the Twittersphere, including showing up as her whole self and trusting her own outrage.
Tag: Spark
Forget Washington: These Innovators Are Solving Our Nation’s Problems—Together
Constant gridlock, short-term budget deals and nasty political debates have shown us that politicians are seemingly allergic to compromise — even within their own parties. We know that Congress has trouble working together. But thankfully, as authors William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan have detailed in their book, “The Solution Revolution,” a number of business, nonprofit and innovative individuals are working together to solve the problems once reserved for government. From traffic decongestion to waste management, “The Solution Revolution” examines how government outsiders are teaming up to bring creativity and innovation to problem- solving and offers ways for organizations and individuals alike to get involved. Here, Eggers talks to NationSwell about what inspired this revolution, how it’s changed the way we confront challenges and why anyone can participate.
Why the title “The Solution Revolution” — what exactly does that mean?
We wanted to look beyond the impact of this new way of problem-solving and focus on the solution ecosystems that were emerging, where you had players from business, government, philanthropy all converging around problems to create value. This is really the antithesis of how society has traditionally solved problems. Now you see people volunteering time toward these efforts, crowd-funding capabilities, the rise of socio-entrepreneurial capital, all aligned around common objectives: from providing safe drinking water to promoting healthy living.
What was the impetus for this change?
First of all, you have technology that’s enabled organizations to scale much more rapidly than ever before and to connect with other organizations and individuals. We’ve radically reduced the cost of getting involved. Secondly, you have a talented millennial generation that has put purpose over simply making money, whether as consumers in terms of what they purchase, or what companies they go to work for.
Millennials are driving changes in business ethos. And No. 3, you have this huge transfer of wealth, which has gone into these giant foundations, like the Gates Foundation, which have professionalized philanthropy in terms of applying business principles to it and creating markets around solving problems.
Are there examples where this kind of problem-solving doesn’t work? Would health-care reform have benefited from a more collaborative process?
You’d be hard pressed to find an issue today that government or the nonprofit sector is fixing all alone. There will be failures — and you want there to be failures because innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation ends up in failure — but unlike the dot-com bust, this isn’t a business-to-business market. This is more of an approach that’s going to be refined over time.
How can someone who doesn’t have an entrepreneurial or activist background participate in the revolution?
They can raise money for causes on sites like Network for Good or Crowdrise. They can match volunteer requests to their skills on a site like Spark. And there are all sorts of opportunities to do micro-volunteerism, to visit social innovation incubators and get to know some of these models.
What does the Solution Revolution look like 20 years from now?
I think you’ll have an even better capability to distribute problem-solving and get millions of individuals all contributing a little bit, which in aggregate helps to solve a problem much faster. We’re taking massive projects and modulizing them into tiny, tiny components that either humans will do, or computers will do, or a combination of the two. Crowdsourcing policy, distributed problem-solving, the mechanisms of engaging lots of people simultaneously — all of that is going to become more efficient.
You survey a number of innovative approaches to problem-solving in this book, such as Citizen’s Connect, a mobile app that lets Boston residents send in photos of problems like graffiti or potholes, which are then used to generate a work order. Is there a particular area of innovation that impresses you most?
I’ve spoken at over a dozen business schools and startup incubators, and I’m absolutely fascinated by the business models that students and young entrepreneurs are creating around solving problems. They’re so creative, so ingenious. Just 20 years ago, they would have been inconceivable.
Everything from Waste Ventures, which is using carbon credits and other models to give a better life to waste pickers and change how waste is picked up, to Recyclebank, which is using gamification to incentivize recycling. I’m also impressed by the various startups working on food recovery — 20 years ago you would have had public service announcements telling us to stop wasting food. Now you have entrepreneurs saying we can create markets around this. And that’s incredibly exciting.
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