Tag Archives: stanford social innovation review

  • Where’s the focus on collaboration and early education?

    September 9, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Senior Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    It’s September and so, like every year, there’s a breadth of blog posts and articles on improving academic success. And this is something that’s personal to me since I’ve been a student for, well, pretty much 22 years — give or take a few relatively short professional and non-professional breaks in between.

    Image via Stanford Social Innovation Review

    On September 4, writer Arshad Merchant (who is also a partner with Wellspring Consulting) outlined, on the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) blog, the most important areas in which they thought students needed help to complete their degree, and thus, improve graduate rates all around, which included:

    1. Staying on track to graduate—which meant selecting a suitable major, understanding what requirements they must fulfill to graduate, and using strategies and support to improve their academic performance
    2. Building their employability—through securing part-time jobs, writing a resume, and defining a desired career path
    3. Maintaining sufficient financial aid—by renewing their scholarships, staying current on scholarship payments, and making smart financial decisions
    4. Managing life—by staying connected with people who cared, maintaining a positive attitude, and resolving problems that might challenge their ability to graduate

    The title of the piece was called “A Simple Method to Improve College Graduation Rates” and it was looking specifically at a Boston-based organization called Bottom Line that helps low-income students get into college and, of course, graduate.  The problem was that not a successful amount of them were.

    So from the four areas of need outlined above, they created DEAL: “Degree (academic performance, on track to graduate); Employability; (access to financial) Aid; and Life (emotional support).” Not super innovative, huh? Which I guess is where the “simple” comes from in the title. One commenter named Yvonne C. Hunnicutt said: “Isn’t this common sense for ANY college student?!” While I don’t fully agree that this is the case, since a lot of DEAL is easier said than done, I do think most college students do recognize the necessity to keep those four areas in mind even if they don’t fully articulate it that way.

    As a grad student myself, my main concern is this: why doesn’t DEAL mention the collaboration with the college itself? Most colleges and universities offer this kind of support whether it’s mentoring, career workshops, financial advising, etc. However, it is true that a lot of students (including myself as an undergrad) don’t take full advantage of these resources but they’re there.

    And what about pre-college? Pre-high school even? The 2011 PBS special with Tavis Smiley Too Important to Fail shows many young black males don’t even make it to college; they don’t even graduate from high school. This, for the most part, is because of things that happen way before an organization like Bottom Line intervenes. This includes but is not limited to: poverty, institutional racism, disproportionate suspension, crime in the community and unprepared educators.

    DEAL did in fact increase the graduation rate at Bottom Line, which is great, but it’s important also to go beyond that and consider who gets into Bottom Line’s program to begin with. Who is already excluded from that? As a child of a grade one teacher (so I’ve had too many dinners to count where the topic revolved around pedagogy), I’m a firm believer that educational success (employability, knowledge, literacy, etc.) must be considered holistically from the early days.

  • The links between racial hybridity and organizational hybridity

    July 20, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org.

    Hybridity stems first from biology, but it’s come to be known in postcolonial theory as having to do with the fusion between identity and culture.

    Yesterday’s Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) webinar focused on the “Hybrid Ideal,” as it were. The first featured presenter was Julie Battilana, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior Unit at the Harvard Business School. “Hybrids transcend the boundaries between typical for-profit and notfor-profit organizations, she said at the get-go. “They pursue a social mission while engaging in commercial activities in order to generate revenues.”

    Indian critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, which centers on it as a site of subversive resistance, can shed light on the possibilities of hybrid organizations such as social enterprise. For Bhabha, as he writes in The Location of Culture, in-betweenness produces a “moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative with a double edge, which like the coloured South African subject, represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality.” Similarly, Françoise Lionnet uses the French word “métissage” in order to illuminate the strength and subtleties in being on the edge of two (or three, or four) things. In Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender and Self-Portraiture, she contends that métissage is considered “the site of undecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of action.”

    Hybrid organizations allow for a sense of assertive criticality; there’s a space for a fuller kind of business that doesn’t rely on A or B but melds A, B and C. The SSIR webinar as a whole emphasized that the lines between for-profit and non-profit are being obscured. While many purists consider true social businesses as being completely revenue-generating, Battilana pulled from examples that showed the mix between gaining an independent income and relying on donations. In order to differentiate a spectrum, Battilana used the concept of “integration,” that is, “the extent to which an organization pursues both social and financial goals through the same set of activities.”

    Rather than looking at hybridity as a liminal state, it can exist on its own, as its own—but this doesn’t deny the necessity for organizations to adjust, imagine, transform and even revert. In postcolonial theory, hybridity creates a space for addressing and struggling against oppression and the same goes for social enterprise.

    By breaking through conventional notions of wholeness, social entrepreneurship can thrive through productive—and disruptive—initiatives.

  • Thoughts on SSIR’s ‘Driving Innovation and Impact with Digital Media’ webinar

    May 30, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org

    As a community manager for SocialBusiness.org, I was eager and ready to tune in to Stanford Social Innovation Review‘s webinar today, “Leading in a Hyperconnected World: Driving Innovation & Impact with Digital Media.” The line-up was pretty impressive: Ben Hecht, President & CEO, Living Cities; Claire Diaz Ortiz, Head of Social Innovation, Twitter; Steve Downs, Chief Technology & Information Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and Regina Starr Ridley, Publishing Director, Stanford Social Innovation Review.

    Essentially, it all came down to this: how can we use digital and social media effectively? By “we,” I’m specifically referring to the collective “us,” those of us who are in the realm of creating social change whether it’s through business, charity, government or civil society. The go-to example for Twitter-meets-transformation is the Arab Spring. Ortiz explained how the events that went on there “took on a new face” because of those who could access the viral information. For instance, the #jan25 hashtag was started by a 21-year-old female student in Egypt.

    Hecht also explored the change-making aspects of digital media and pointed to paradigm shifts. He said there is an “increased understanding that in fact to solve the world’s problems you need to work together because it’s so complex.” Because of the extent of the complications that the world is (and has been) knee-deep in, we can’t rely on one actor; collaboration is key.

    It’s no surprise that people (especially “web-y” people) tend to romanticize the impacts of digital media. In explaining another paradigm shift, Hecht mentioned the ubiquitous argument of how the “means of consuming and sharing news and information is widely democratized and inexpensive.” True. But what about the digital divide? Even if we look within and not across countries, it’s clear that access isn’t at all equal.

    “A report last year by the World Bank estimated that every 10-percentage-point increase in the availability of broadband boosted economic growth by 1.2 percentage points in developed countries,” Iain Marlow and Jacquie McNish wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2010. The global digital divide has similar implications.

    However, even if not everyone has access to the same information—and access to how that information is disseminated—”ideas can go viral,” as Hecht confirmed. I mean, just look at the #Kony2012 campaign. And so, during the webinar, there was talk about real-life engagement, so to speak. That is, what happens to all of this online action, networking and communication? Where does it go?

    Hecht asked, “How do you go beyond short-term media and move it into the long-term commitments that are needed for change?” Aptly, Ortiz responded: “Socia media is the tool. There has always been a tool.”