The Creative Activist

If you want to solve a problem, have to stop and think about the problem first. Logical, right?  Whether you want to tackle racial inequality, gun violence, climate change, or homelessness in your city you need to explore the challenge. Take notes, ask questions, do some interviews, reflect. This post introduces a couple of techniques you can use to focus on a new (to you) problem. You can use the tools here to help you shift your focus, or reevaluate whether you're focusing on the right thing.  Say your interest is climate change. Maybe you've decided that getting people to consume less stuff is the key to reducing the effects of climate change in the future. If you don't know much about the problem, here are a few key points: 1. The world is warming up with alarming speed, mainly because of human activity.  2. We may not be able to prevent some major changes like a 1-meter rise in sea level and permanent drought 3. Some would argue that adapting to those changes is more...

Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul by David Castro describes some tactics for approaching social innovation in a creative, collaborative way. This post introduces three specific ways of thinking collaboratively, or individually, about social change efforts. Castro offers much more detail on using leverage, systems thinking and design thinking. Three Approaches to Thinking about Social Change : Whenever a group of social entrepreneurs gets together to plan or problem solve, they can choose to adopt one or more modes of thinking about the challenge at hand. The three modes of thinking that Castro mentions each deserves a book or two, but an introduction is easy to supply: 1. Looking for Leverage - This is a social change approach I’ve advocated for in previous posts. Activists should look for places they can intervene in society to produce the most benefit for the resources invested. A deep familiarity with the problem might be enou...

David Castro's book Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul offers some thoughts on leadership that can be valuable to new social ventures in particular. Bad assumptions, the quest for salvation and barriers to effective group thinking could all undermine a social venture. Assumptions in Social Venture Planning: New social ventures should proceed on sound assumptions. This statement should sound familiar and obvious. Putting an idea into practice— by testing assumptions and rejecting the bad ones—does not always happen. This fact is evident in how individuals in organizations plan and solve problems. Castro reminds us that the past might not be a reliable guide for the present. He points out that past experiences often don't translate because the current social environment is not like the past social environment. This is only a problem when social entrepreneurs forget that what worked for their heroes and mentors thirty years ag...

This post is just an opportunity to propose a new way to create programs, policies, and social marketing campaigns that (we hope) work better and cost less in terms of both time and money. Scientific activism is just a process for formally organizing our thinking about social change efforts. That's about all. It can help to have a system or a framework for organizing the work needed to start a new program, a new nonprofit, or a new advocacy effort. I think this scientific activism framework should be based on specific principles: 1. Data orientation - Use of numbers, rates, proportions, and percentages to inform decisions and guide our evaluations, of what to do and what works once we get things going. 2. Leverage - Related to above, we should look for ways to intervene that will produce the most change for a given level of effort (or spending). 3. Targeted innovation - Related to #2, we should champion social and technological innovations that get at the root of social pro...

Random thoughts on starting and funding new programs or projects. A poster to a LinkedIn forum described a plan to re-forest a mountain in AZ. He was asking for advice on how to finance a nursery to grow the trees that would go on the mountain later. I asked a few questions that I want to repeat here, in generic form: Do you have a registered nonprofit organization? Do you have a track record of success with fund raising and/or programs? If you can answer 'yes" to both questions, then grant money might be available. That's one funding option. If you are really new, your fundraising options are a bit more limited. There might not be any point in pursuing grant money, or using snail mail to ask for money, or using the Web to raise some money. You have to network first, and raise money from locals. The old-fashioned tactics for raising money are still available to you. Be original though. Everyone holds car washes and sells candy. What else can you sell, or do for ...

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...

This post might seem totally out of the blue without a few words of introduction, so here it goes: All operating NGOs and all social entrepreneurs have to deal with certain challenges. Fundraising, strategic planning, marketing, and program design all have to be addressed. Even if your “program design” is to copy an anti-bullying program that worked in Detroit there are still going to be design issues to address. You probably have guidelines, checklists, case studies, books, articles, and personal experience you can draw upon. This post is the first of a series, of 20-30 short essays on tools for problem solving and innovation that you, as an NGOer might find helpful. I’ll start with describing some tools you can apply to fundraising. Fundraising starts with, well, with deciding to ask for some money! Before you actually do that certain steps are normally completed. You know that. You also do some planning before even deciding to write a letter. This post is about a technique you can...