Stanford Social Innovation Review Article Feed

Neal Keny-Guyer has been the CEO of Mercy Corps since he joined the Portland, Ore.-based organization in 1994. During his tenure the organization has grown severalfold in size, joining the ranks of leading global relief and development groups. Today, Mercy Corps operates in nearly 40 countries; it has a staff of about 3,800 and an annual operating budget of more than $300 million. Before joining Mercy Corps, Keny-Guyer spent more than a decade working in the social sector, first with at-risk American youth at Communities in Schools, then with Southeast Asian refugees at CARE/UNICEF, and finally with war-torn Middle Eastern communities at Save the Children. Mercy Corps’s guiding principles are that those affected by a crisis are always the best people to direct their own recovery, and that in most cases the best way to do this is to help local people create market-based solutions. That’s why you will find Mercy Corps assisting local farmers and merchants as they reopen food markets or paying cash to local workers who are helping clear their streets and rebuild their homes. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Keny-Guyer explains why disasters can create opportunities to change society…

Before the dust settled from the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti in January, the search was on for accurate information. Which buildings were still standing? Where should responders look for trapped victims? How could displaced family members hope to find each other in all the chaos? While humanitarian agencies airlifted crews and supplies to the devastated island, engineers launched programming marathons. Within days, Google released a new online gadget to assist on-the-ground efforts. Embedded on high-traffic Web sites, including the U.S. Department of State home page, Google’s Person Finder allowed anyone to submit information or search an online database for details about the missing. Other Google tools were harnessed to help. Google Map Maker helped aid workers in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, navigate ruined streets. The company created a new Google Crisis Response Web page for Haiti to steer the public toward charitable giving opportunities, seeding the pot with a more than $1 million donation of its own. Google was not the only technology company that rallied to help Haiti. But by marshaling the brains, tools, and cash at its disposal, the Internet giant was demonstrating its special brand of corporate philanthropy. Google isn’t just interested in helping out the…

When school groups visit the Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne, Germany, “teachers often think that their job is to induce guilt in their students,” observes Roland Imhoff, a doctoral candidate in the department of social and legal psychology at the University of Bonn. “But pushing the guilt button may backfire,” he cautions. Supporting this warning is Imhoff’s dissertation, which shows that emphasizing Jews’ ongoing suffering from past atrocities may actually inflame anti-Semitism rather than cool it. “There is a widespread assumption that collective guilt has positive outcomes,” notes Imhoff. Yet several theories in sociology and psychology offer a different logic: Guilt moves people not to relieve suffering, but to exacerbate it by rationalizing that the victims somehow deserve their plight. Other theories reach the same conclusion through different paths: Rather than guilt, people’s desire to believe in a just world or to maintain the status quo can lead them to despise victims. Noting these ironic misplacements of malice, the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once quipped, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Imhoff and his coauthor, University of Bonn professor Rainer Banse, captured this form of anti-Semitism in a novel laboratory experiment. University students first read a passage…

After three years of working at San Francisco’s Mission Pie, Marzett Lee would still rather eat cake. The 20-year-old shrugs off the café’s just-baked pies with a smile—never mind that the goodies are made with seasonal pickings from some of the Bay Area’s finest sustainable farms. Baked fruit just isn’t her thing, she says. Neither are vegetables. Indeed, when she first started working behind the counter at Mission Pie, ingredients like turnip and butternut squash were as foreign as quiche. But as a place to work, the bakery-café has found a steadfast fan in Lee. When she started as a 17-year-old intern, Lee was so terrified of customers that she would root herself to the sink and wash dishes. Three years later, she has had raises in pay, responsibility, and confidence—opening in the morning, supervising other workers during the day, and keeping up small talk with the regulars who file in on weekends. The bakery even helped raise money for her to join an educational sailing program in the Caribbean. “Working here just opened everything,” says Lee, a budding hairdresser who gets to the café via a two-bus commute from her home in the city’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. There, she…

Looking for the cleanest possible way to increase charitable donations? Spray citrus-scented Windex. According to new research, “people are more likely to engage in moral behavior when they are in a clean-scented room,” says lead author Katie Liljenquist, an assistant professor of organizational leadership at Brigham Young University. A few years ago Liljenquist and her coauthor discovered that moral “purity” is more than a metaphor. “When people recall an unethical behavior, they feel literally dirty,” Liljenquist says, and try to “wash away their sins” with an antiseptic wipe. So the researchers set out to see if the reverse is true as well: Does a clean smell make people clean up their acts? To find out, they prepared a baseline and a virtuous-smelling space. For the scented condition Liljenquist would run into the center of the room and spritz a little lemon Windex just before the participant arrived. Participants then either played a one-shot anonymous trust game or filled out a survey requesting donations to and volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. Game players learned that their (imaginary) partner had just very trustingly turned over his or her entire $4 to the participant. The money would be tripled because of the partner’s…

Lorena Carrillo is a Mexican immigrant who supports her family as a domestic worker in San Francisco. Domésticas like Carrillo can feel invisible in the well-to-do neighborhoods where they work. That’s changing, however, thanks to a highprofile advertising and social media campaign that plasters domestic workers’ faces on billboards, buses, and blogs as if they were fashion models. The goal is greater awareness of everything from workers’ rights to nontoxic cleaning products that reduce health risks for domésticas and employers alike. This creative campaign is one of eight to emerge from a national, three-year initiative called New Routes to Community Health. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation, New Routes aims to improve the health of vulnerable and often isolated populations by enabling immigrants to use media to tell their own stories. User-created content focuses on a range of topics and employs an assortment of digital tools. In Boston, Haitian immigrants are producing a series of radio soap operas, or telenovelas, to raise awareness of depression and anxiety within their community. In Chicago, young Latinos are writing and staging theatrical productions that break down cultural taboos about sexuality and other sensitive topics. Although they differ in…

Every hour, 450 low-birthweight babies die in the developing world. Despite mother love and warm blankets, their tiny bodies don’t have enough fat to regulate temperature and protect fragile organs. Outcomes would improve with better access to incubators, but the $20,000 per unit cost, not to mention the need for electricity, makes this an impractical solution for rural villages. A low-tech alternative incubated on the Stanford University campus is now getting ready to roll out in India, which has an unfortunate corner on the world market of low-birth-weight babies. Embrace, a fledgling nonprofit, will soon begin distributing a baby warmer that looks like a miniature sleeping bag. It features a special insert containing a waxy compound. When heated by hot water, this phase-changing material maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for up to four hours. At a unit price of about $25, the baby warmer is a low-cost but potentially highimpact innovation. Embrace CEO Jane Chen was part of the product development team, which included engineering and business students in a class called Entrepreneurial Designfor Extreme Affordability. By the end of spring term 2007, they had reviewed medical research, dispatched a team member to Nepal for fieldwork, and…

Turn kids loose with sand, water, and simple stuff they can move around—and then get out of their way. In no time, they’ll create their own world of castles, fanciful creatures, and vehicles powered by sheer imagination. Such childish fun may seem out-of-date to today’s heavily scheduled kids and their wellmeaning parents. But free play is about to get a big boost. Imagination Playground, designed pro bono by architect David Rockwell in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, is under construction in lower Manhattan. When the playground opens next year, it will showcase a multilevel environment designed to let kids act like kids. Four years in the planning, the playground will come with trained “play associates.” Their charge: encourage youthful creativity while reminding parents and nannies to take a giant step back. Now, a new partnership between the Rockwell Group and KaBOOM!, a nonprofit that helps communities build playgrounds, is preparing to take the essential ingredients of the Imagination Playground to a much bigger scale. The two organizations have formed a for-profit venture that will handle distribution and marketing of Imagination Playground in a Box. The basic product is a container on wheels, not unlike…

On a study trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with a group of fellow philanthropists, Tricia McKay visited a low-income credit union where she saw customers routinely making deposits and taking out small loans. Back in Seattle where she heads the Medina Foundation, McKay couldn’t help but notice a lack of similar services for the working poor of Washington state. She became acutely aware of “payday lenders and check-cashing services on every corner of low-income neighborhoods. We have a market failure,” she concluded, when it comes to serving “the unbanked, underbanked, and want-to-be-banked.” That gap narrowed a bit in May when a five-year effort spearheaded by the Medina Foundation resulted in the grand opening of Express Credit Union. Actually, it’s a reopening of a 75-year-old institution that originally served transportation workers. The old Express was losing members and lacked capital to modernize its systems. The makeover brings in a new board of directors and CEO, a new business plan, and a sister nonprofit called Express Advantage to provide financial literacy education and other support. An infusion of capital includes $1.4 million from the Medina Foundation plus smaller grants from other philanthropists. Through an unusual partnership, Washington’s largest credit union, BECU, is helping…

Guacamole Doritos, Wasabi Funyuns, and Mountain Dew Code Red (which is targeted to African-Americans) are three fruits of PepsiCo Inc.’s diversity initiatives. These initiatives, which include mentoring programs and support groups, attempt to harness employees’ racial and ethnic heritages for competitive advantage. So far, the company’s efforts seem to be paying off: For instance, PepsiCo attributed part of its 8 percent growth in 2004 revenues to its diversity programs, reports a Nov. 14, 2005, article in The Wall Street Journal. Like PepsiCo, many other corporations have claimed that ethnically and sexually diverse workforces generate more creative ideas, tap into more markets, and develop better solutions than do more homogeneous ones. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and so the business case for diversity has often foundered for want of systematic evidence. This summer, however, sociologist Cedric Herring crunched the numbers and discovered that, indeed, more diverse workplaces have higher revenues, more customers, larger market shares, and greater relative profits. “What I’ve done is use real data from real organizations to document what people have speculated about for quite some time,” says Herring, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Results like his are “the holy grail…

Some state legislation makes for game-changing, visionary public policy—developing highway systems, organizing state parks, establishing statewide systems of public assistance. Some is more modest in scope—say, building a trailside museum in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston, or temporarily protecting the raccoons and mink of Red River County, Texas. What is it that leads lawmakers sometimes to craft policies with a broad impact and sometimes to focus on narrow, district legislation tailored to the interests of a specific village, city, or county? According to a new study, the first answer is fierce party politics. It may be hard to believe as one watches Republicans and Democrats rip one another to shreds and log-jam budgets, but political scientist Gerald Gamm of the University of Rochester finds that “in the absence of competitive party politics, you don’t see broad-based policymaking at the state level.” “Party competition puts together coalitions of legislators who are all on the same team, and gives those legislators an incentive to show how they’re different from the other party,” explains study coauthor Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. “It enables parties to become meaningful policybased organizations that compete over different visions…

Australian company Aussie-Bum just launched a new line of eco-friendly underwear. It’s manly, lightweight, and made of banana fiber—the perfect match for a sustainable lifestyle. The company’s marketing material touts the environmental benefits of banana underwear. What it doesn’t mention is that owning a pair may make you behave badly. New research shows that buying green products makes people more likely to cheat and steal. Although the mere presence of ecofriendly options tips consumers’ subconscious toward cooperation and generosity, actually buying them does the opposite. “After having purchased green products as opposed to conventional ones, people shared less of their money with an anonymous other person,” says lead author Nina Mazar, experimental psychologist at the University of Toronto. “They became more selfish, less altruistic.” Mazar and her coauthor designed two online storefronts. One of them carried mostly green goods, such as compact fluorescent lightbulbs and organic potato chips, and the other carried mostly conventional products—incandescent bulbs, Pringles, and the like. Students who volunteered for the study got $25 to spend, and the researchers sat them down in front of one of the two online storefronts. After shopping, the volunteers had to decide how much of a $6 gift to give…

On July 13, 2008, New York City’s poverty rate was 18 percent. Twenty-four hours later it had ballooned to 23 percent. How did more than 400,000 New Yorkers become impoverished overnight? The answer is that Mayor Michael Bloomberg adopted a new and more complex—and, he argued, more accurate—measure of poverty than the one the federal government uses. His action reignited a debate in Washington, D.C., and beyond about how America determines who is poor—a debate that many hope will be settled by the U.S. Congress this year. Most people who care about measuring poverty—academics, policymakers, nonprofit leaders, and the like—agree that the way the federal government currently determines who is poor and who is not doesn’t work. The so-called “poverty line” was determined in the mid-1960s by calculating the amount of money it costs to buy a basic basket of food and then multiplying that amount by three. Each year the line is updated to account for inflation. (The current poverty line is $10,830 for a single person and $22,050 for a family of four.) If a person lives in a household whose income is less than that amount, he is considered poor. If the household’s income is that amount…

In 2005, the leaders of Social Venture Network (SVN), a group of social entrepreneurs, asked me to research why members had difficulty scaling social enterprises up from founder-led to second generation-led organizations. Instead of scaling, why did they almost always sell their companies to larger enterprises? We all believed that a lack of finances was the primary culprit. From a group of 400 social entrepreneurs, SVN executive director Deb Nelson and I selected 75 members for me to interview. It was a diverse group of entrepreneurs: 66 percent had founded a forprofit and 40 percent had founded a nonprofit; 60 percent were male and 40 percent were female; and 89 percent were white and 11 percent were racial minorities. All of them had experienced the challenge of scaling. Surprisingly, our research of best practices and common obstacles revealed that scaling challenges rarely rose from financial limitations, but were generally due to a lack of leadership skills. To successfully scale up, these entrepreneurs needed to think differently and lead differently from their peers. They had to understand that social entrepreneurship is not just a form of entrepreneurship but rather an instrument for social change. They needed to define their businesses less…

In The Power of Positive Deviance, authors Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin take their readers on a fascinating tour to learn about “positive deviance”—an approach to solving social, and even some business, problems. The approach, which the authors developed from work done by Tufts University nutrition professor Marian Zeitlin in the 1980s—has roughly three steps. First, engage the people needing change in the process; they must take part in discovering answers to their problems to adopt changes. Second, identify “positive deviants”—people who seem to have succeeded compared with others, despite having the same resources. Finally, work with communities to pinpoint what the positive deviants do differently, and figure out how the whole community can adopt these successful practices. The authors’ tour starts in rural Vietnam, where they explore how households there might use existing resources to feed their children more nutritionally. Then it’s on to Egypt, where they look for ways to change opinions and practices on female circumcision. Back in Pittsburgh, they examine how doctors and nurses working in hospitals might wash their hands more often. And all the while you feel like you’re sitting at a dinner table as three engaging people recount their round-the-world adventure…

James Bain’s 35-year nightmare began as so many wrongful convictions do—with an eyewitness identification gone awry. On March 4, 1974, someone snatched a sleeping 9-year-old from a home in Lake Wales, Fla., raping the boy in a nearby field. When the child returned, he could offer only a sketchy illustration of his attacker. He was a young man with bushy sideburns and facial hair. But that was enough for the boy’s uncle, who thought he recognized Bain in the details. With police pressing for a confirmation, the boy identified Bain as his attacker—a claim that would later trump defense testimony that Bain’s blood type ruled him out as the rapist. In August 1974, Bain, just 19, was sentenced to life in prison. And in prison Bain likely would have died. But in the spring of 2009, his case caught the attention of the Florida affiliate of the Innocence Network, an international collaboration of pro bono legal and investigative organizations dedicated to righting wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project of Florida had no idea if Bain was innocent, says Seth Miller, its executive director. They believed only that he had the right to a test that would add certainty to the verdict.…

When asked to list humanity’s most pressing challenges in the 21st century, most people would mention issues like global warming, overpopulation, extreme poverty, and nuclear proliferation—social problems that dominate the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Very few people, however, would mention the erosion of civil society and its institutions as an urgent issue that needs our immediate attention. Philanthropists, much like the general public, focus most of their attention and money on solving headlinegrabbing problems in education, health care, economic development, and the environment. Billions of philanthropic dollars, for example, are spent every year trying to alleviate global warming, yet relatively few dollars are directed toward improving the public decision-making process, an essential function in a democratic civil society and one that plays a critical role in determining the future of the environment. Only a tiny fraction—at most a few percent—of philanthropic dollars go to support civil society’s institutional structures and to promote the values and norms of a flourishing civil society. This neglect represents a fundamental gap in philanthropy—one that can undermine philanthropy’s ability to pursue its other problem-solving goals. For without a healthy civil society and what comes along with it—such as an informed and engaged…

I was recently invited to speak to a gathering of young social innovators about ethics and values and the conflicts that can emerge over them. The group included a manager of a Fortune 200 company who was helping his firm develop green packaging design, a business entrepreneur who was designing a way for people in developing countries to use mobile phones to access goods and services more easily, and a social entrepreneur who was attempting to transform the environmental footprint of a significant portion of the food industry. I was invited to speak because for the last few decades I have examined the way business schools around the world teach ethics and values, and I have developed a new approach for preparing future leaders to act on their values. Instead of asking, “What is the right thing to do?” this approach starts at the point when you have already decided what is “right,” and instead asks, “How can I get it done?” This approach is all about building the skills and the muscle to get the right thing done. It is not about perseverating about what philosopher John Rawls might say as opposed to Aristotle, or discussing our immobilizing fears…

In March, Greenpeace posted a video on YouTube of an office worker munching away on a bleeding orangutan finger he found in his Kit Kat candy bar. When Nestlé asked YouTube to take it down, citing copyright infringement, a social media revolt ensued—viral video, Twitter chatter, Facebook hijinks. By May, Greenpeace had extracted a promise from Nestlé to stop buying habitat-destroying palm oil for its products. Social media can be a powerful tool in marketing. “The big story now is that you don’t need a lot of money to get a lot of attention,” says Robert Kozinets, chair of the marketing department at York University’s Schulich School of Business. But it’s not one that is easy to control. “You enter into a game with a different set of rules from the ones you have traditionally been playing with.” When you try to influence people’s communications, Kozinets says, “the message gets changed by the cultural environment.” To understand how word-ofmouth marketing works in online communities, Kozinets and his coauthors closely followed one of the first “seeding” campaigns. In 2006, a marketing firm seeded, or gave away, new mobile phones with a usage tutorial to influential bloggers. “The assumption,” says Kozinets, “was…

In 2000, many colleges and universities began to digitize the slide libraries each had built for teaching art history. At the time, I was the financial and administrative officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Knowing of the Mellon Foundation’s long-standing interest in the arts and education, these academic institutions flooded us with funding requests. The foundation was interested in helping, but it faced the prospect of writing separate and significant checks to hundreds of institutions so that each could digitize hundreds of thousands of slides (with a lot of overlap), catalog those images, ask lawyers to evaluate the intellectual property issues, and have local programmers build a repository. We decided instead to create a new organization that could work both with content owners (museums, artists, and photographers) and educational users to solve the problem collectively—in an efficient and straightforward way. The shared collection would be far more extensive than any one institution could create, and although we would charge access fees, each institution would spend far less than it would by creating its own solution. Mellon created and provided start-up funding for ARTstor, and a few colleagues and I left the world of philanthropy to run the new organization.…