Isn’t it time for you to become a revalueist?

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

The CEO of Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin Counties — one of Socialbrite’s nonprofit clients — was recently invited to give a talk at TEDx San Joaquin. So three members of the Socialbrite team, Carla, Shannon and myself, met with the SF Goodwill communications team and hammered out the rough outlines of the 15-minute talk that Debbie Alvarez-Rodriguez fleshed out and delivered beautifully.

TEDx San Joaquin just posted Debbie’s talk, so I embedded it above to showcase what I thought was a stirring idea: The choice before us to live in a disposal economy or what Debbie terms “the revalue economy.”

“We have to fundamentally reimagine our connection to the poor — that word that no one wants to talk about today — to nature, to community and to profit,” she said during her talk to a capacity crowd in Stockton. “We have to start grafting the social principles of fairness and justice into the very fabric of business and profit. … A Revalue Economy is a way of changing the world.”

She pointed to Salesforce, Kiva and Pacific Coast Bank as examples of organizations with a social conscience, and (per the culture of TEDx talks) mentioned Goodwill in passing, given that the social enterprise has played a pivotal role in the Bay Area community for generations.

‘Innovation happens at the seam’

Over the years, she says, she’s become convinced that “innovation doesn’t happen at the edges. Innovation happens at the seam, when two unlikely forces come together and create a new opportunity, a new possibility.”

Sometimes those forces arrive in unexpected places — between employers and people living in poverty or the incarcerated, between consumers and discarded objects.

In the United States, 1 million electronic devices are discarded every day, she said, and only 19 percent of those devices get recycled. At the same time, we have 2.3 million people living in prisons and jails and 5.1 million on parole. Fully 1 in 48 working-age men are in prison.

Do we give up on them? “Do we really want to decide as a society that some people are as disposable as this cell phone?” she says. “I see opportunity and value, and we have to harvest the opportunity of those things that scare us the most. Don’t be afraid to act big, to think big.

“Instead of living in a disposal economy, what if we just began to leverage the value of the people all around us?” she asks. “There is a new value proposition we need to embrace. We need to recruit from the welfare lines, from the prisons, from the street corners.”

She ends with a call asking people to take the pledge to become a “revalueist,” to be intentional about the waste we create, and to embrace the idea of taking a second look at how to leverage and value the resources and people right in front of us. It’s a memorable, and important, call to action.

Watch the video of Debbie at TEDx. I loved it.

What do you think? Are you a revalueist?

The post How to become part of the Revalue Economy appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, cause and advocacy organizations, educators, general public.

We’re still winding down after a whirlwind day Friday at the United Nations. At the invitation of Amine Lamrabat, Socialbrite sent Shonali Burke and myself to give a presentation on how NGOs (international nonprofits, chiefly) working with the UN can use social media to create impact and advance their causes.

This was one of the most rewarding and invigorating gatherings I’ve attended in quite some time, for both the knowledgeable give and take as well as the astonishing scope of the social good being done by the people in the room. Among those attending were representatives of Mercy International Association, Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict, the Norway Mission to the UN, the American Cancer Society, representations from throughout the UN and many others.

Here’s a Flickr set of 32 photos I snapped. Some of the topics that came up during our talk included:

• How do we scale a campaign to 1 million signatures? Our answer: Set realistic goals. Approach the campaign in phases. Build up a community of support and deputize supporters to participate on your behalf. Learn from past mistakes. Depending on your budget, consider using a large advocacy platform like Care2.

• How should we deal with an autocratic regime? From China to Myanmar to Iran, we’ve seen examples of governments that won’t hesitate to crack down on pro-democracy dissidents. Advocacy groups like Witness have learned a great deal about protecting the identity of pro-democracy activists, so absorb their learnings. (See a Witness official’s guest post on Socialbrite on What are our ethical responsibilities when recording video of people under oppression?) Follow Rebecca MacKinnon on Twitter discussing China and cyber-activism. See the latest Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy. And also see the brilliant work-around Tunisian human rights activists undertook by geotagging stories of human rights abuses around the presidential palace using Google Earth, Google Maps and YouTube.

• Should we launch social media accounts in multiple languages? Readers, what do you think? My advice was to use no more than two languages in the same social stream, but to launch separate accounts in multiple languages when you have both the capacity and market opportunity for it.

• How to improve SEO results? Well, that’s a subject for a return day of training at the UN, I hope.

As always, we welcome follow-up questions and conversations with anyone who attended, or missed, Friday’s session. Email me, email Shonali, or call us at 925-600-7641.

Related

• How NGOs can use social media to combat poverty (Socialbrite)

• Fighting poverty by enhancing social entrepreneurship

• Witness: Putting a face on human rights (Socialbrite)

The post A day of social media at the United Nations appeared first on Socialbrite.

One of San Francisco’s largest social services agencies is living its core values — and growing its impact

Guest post by Stacy Coleman
Vivanista

Located in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s harshest urban environments, GLIDE is an oasis that has served poor, homeless and disenfranchised individuals, families and children for more than 45 years. A leading organization for social justice, GLIDE’s core values are rooted in empowerment, recovery and personal transformation for the community it serves. Those values also guide its mission to create a radically inclusive, just and loving community mobilized to break the cycles of poverty and marginalization.

Since launching its first social services in 1969, GLIDE has continually built on its strong foundation of acceptance of and connection to its community and has evolved into one of the largest social services agencies in San Francisco. GLIDE now provides support services that range from meals, housing, primary and behavioral health care, substance abuse recovery, domestic violence abatement, family services, youth literacy, nutrition and wellness programming, housed in five buildings.

I spoke with GLIDE’s communications manager, Joyce Sood, about how the organization continues to thrive in a changing economic environment and its approach for scaling impact. Sood says one of the approaches it takes to quantifying the impact of its programs is by putting into place a strategy and evaluation team. The team looks at each of GLIDE’s programs individually and tracks participant demographics, program services and client outcomes. Each year, GLIDE programs conduct client evaluation surveys to gauge the effectiveness of the program and inform new program integration, design and strategy.

The constant evaluation that GLIDE performs has allowed the organization to consistently expand its services. Twelve years ago, GLIDE built a model housing program for support services and mixed population homeless individuals and families. Sood says the program has served as a nationwide model for affordable and low-income permanent housing. Over the past two years, under the GLIDE Economic Development Corporation entity, GLIDE has built two additional affordable and low-income permanent housing buildings for working families and for homeless individuals, she says.

Another way that GLIDE is able to continually provide a comprehensive set of services is by partnering with a range of funding partners, which includes corporations such as Wells Fargo and GAP, government agencies such as the the San Francisco Department of Children and the California Department of Education, as well as non-profit and private foundation partners. GLIDE has a 23-member Board of Trustees who works with staff to strategize fundraising, partnership building and other means of raising funds for the agency. In addition, GLIDE has an 11-member Legacy Committee of young professionals who work with staff on fundraising events and to cultivate partnerships with next generation audiences, Sood says. Partnering with corporations and professional organizations also helps to spread the word and raise awareness about GLIDE among the younger generation.

GLIDE is diligent about showing appreciation for its donors and volunteers. “We invite donors to become more involved in the organization and community through special events, tours and volunteerism, and to follow the lives of the people being helped,” she says. “We thank our donors through acknowledgement letters, event sponsorship recognition at events, donor profiles in the quarterly newsletter (mailed to 28,000), on our website and through press releases.”

One of its most successful events, the Warren Buffet Power Lunch eBay Auction, was held in June and raised $2.63 million this year. GLIDE also holds an annual themed Holiday Festival in December. This year, the theme is “The Love Grove,” a Jam Session for the Hungry. The event will take place at the San Francisco Warfield Theatre; honorary co-chairs already include Carlos and Cindy Santana, Pete Escovedo, Joan Baez, Huey Lewis, Paula West, Sweet Honey and the Rock.

In addition to the standard social networking platforms of Facebook and Twitter, Sood says GLIDE is an active user of YouTube, Vimeo, PodOmatic, First Giving, and Give by Cell, which all aid in its outreach efforts and in building its community.

To learn more about GLIDE, watch their video above and visit their website at http://www.glide.org.

This article originally appeared in a modified form at Vivanista and is republished with permission.

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