One of the greatest challenges of being a teacher is trying to convince your students why they should care about anything that you write on the blackboard. You have to bridge the gap between their current boredom and ten years later, when they will finally appreciate the utility of what they are learning.
Yet there [...]
If you haven’t heard of the Unreasonable Institute, you will. The Unreasonable Institute attracts, incubates, and finances young social entrepreneurs with bold ideas to change the world. Dan, Teju, Vladimir, and Tyler – the founders of Unreasonable – exploded onto the scene less than one year ago. Since then, they have achieved milestones that [...]
We sometimes assume a person’s class by the visual assessment that takes place in an encounter that may take all but a couple of seconds. If we see someone that is sleeping on the street, we assume that they are homeless. There are many levels of economic status in this day and age. The [...]
One of the many challenges of my job as an English teacher in the Basque Country is to inspire a level of understanding in my students on just how big the world is. Now living in a foreign country, the spectrum of cultural differences seems obvious to me, but for my my students, the [...]
In honor of the weekend and all of the mind-boggling, free-thinking that is coming out of the TED conference, I wanted to provide you with a little perspective on just how far we’ve come. “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” is a biro-pen hatched, animated flip book that more or less summarizes how [...]
Social reality game designer, Jane McGonigal, has been proving to the world for awhile now that video games don’t have to be a waste of time and on March 3rd, with the debut of her latest work, EVOKE, she’s going to do it again.
EVOKE is like SIMS on steriods. You think it’s difficult raising [...]
Although I thoroughly enjoy my fair trade coffee, the real day I’m waiting for is when I can fill up with fair trade gasoline. Oxfam and other humanitarian organizations are receiving a lot of glitter over the Haiti crisis, but I think it’s important to recognize some of the other campaigns they have been [...]
The United Kingdom has never had the best track record for taking care of its wanes – from public school horror stories to the infamous Green Street Hooligans – they could do better, but they are trying. This week brings forth the application deadline for ThanksTo.com’s six week Social Enterprise Challenge aimed at helping [...]
Back in August, while I was visiting that Mexican village that is so close to my heart, I spent some time with one of the kids I met when I first went to that place. Adiel was one of the “lucky kids” of the village. His family, due to his sister marrying well, was [...]
The social entrepreneurship crew generally likes to poo poo traditional development.
And why not? It is an easy target given the widely held belief that aid doesn’t work and evidence showing the wholesale ineffectiveness of many development projects. We are increasingly convinced that aid donors – institutional and individual – have dumped incalculable sums down [...]
The fact that I’m finding it difficult to begin this post pales in comparison to the difficulty aid workers are facing on how to begin the relief effort in Haiti. As we all know by now, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Tuesday, just south of the nation’s capital, Port au Prince. It [...]
On my way home from New York City on Saturday evening, I picked up the business section of the New York Times and began reading a column- the headline of which peaked my interest. “You, Too, Can Be a Microlender” by Ron Lieber. I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying the microfinance “niche” [...]
