Ben graduated from Stanford University with Honors, Distinction, and Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to co-found Akimbo Design, a Web design firm that created and managed award-winning Web sites for marquee brands like Nokia, Sony Pictures, and Calvin Klein. His company produced three Web design books, won dozens of awards, and had work featured in major media publications including The New York Times. In 2002, Ben took a position as CTO of DFILM, a youth entertainment company creating web and mobile applications. In 2004, he founded Mobile Voter, which was the first organization in the world to engage young voters via text messaging (SMS). With grants from Pew Charitable Trusts and MacArthur Foundation, Mobile Voter registered tens of thousands of voters. In 2007, Rigby wrote the well reviewed book “Mobilizing Generation 2.0: a handbook for using Web2.0 Technologies to recruit, organize, and engage youth.” Ben co-founded The Extraordinaries in 2008. Fun Fact - Ben loves building robots; in fact, he engineered and built a ring bearing bot for his wedding.
Barry Schwartz | The Real Crisis… We stopped being wise
In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s western world is actually making us miserable.
Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.
Schwartz’s previous research has addressed morality, decision-making and the varied inter-relationships between science and society. Before Paradox he published The Costs of Living, which traces the impact of free-market thinking on the explosion of consumerism — and the effect of the new capitalism on social and cultural institutions that once operated above the market, such as medicine, sports, and the law.
Both books level serious criticism of modern western society, illuminating the under-reported psychological plagues of our time. But they also offer concrete ideas on addressing the problems, from a personal and societal level.
“Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us.”
Beginning as a student in anthropology, Simon Sinek turned his fascination with people into a career of convincing people to do what inspires them. His earliest work was in advertising, moving on to start Sinek Partners in 2002, but he suddenly lost his passion despite earning solid income. Through his struggle to rediscover his excitement about life and work, he made some profound realizations and began his helping his friends and their friends to find their “why” — at first charging just $100, person by person. Never planning to write a book, he penned Start With Why simply as a way to distribute his message.
Sinek also contributes to several efforts in the non-profit sphere: He works with Count Me In, an organization created to help one million women-run businesses reach a million dollars in revenue by 2012, and serves on the Board of Directors for Danspace Project, which advances art and dance. He writes and comments regularly for several major publications and teaches a graduate-level class in strategic communications at Columbia University.
“I try to find, celebrate and teach leaders how to build platforms that will inspire others. “
Matthew Bishop, The Economist’s New York Bureau Chief, and co-author of the highly acclaimed book Philanthrocapitalism talks with Lauren Bush, of FEED Projects, Charles Best, of DonorsChoose.org, and Scott Harrison of charity: water.
The conversation aims to spark ideas on innovative ways to give this season.
By 2016, it’s estimated that nonprofit organizations will have to hire nearly 640,000 additional senior-level managers because of baby boomers retiring and newly created positions around financing, fundraising and development.
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Eric D. Ashton, JD, MPH, MS | Associate Director of the NPL Program
Eric Ashton received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters of public health from Yale University. He has significant work experience with both the federal government and the nonprofit sector. Eric has extensive background in nonprofit volunteer work in the areas of HIV/AIDS, adolescent homelessness and domestic violence. Prior to coming to the School of Social Policy & Practice his work focused on children’s mental health policy for a regional nonprofit organization. As Associate Director for the NPL Program, Eric oversees the administrative functions of the program and is available to answer questions of prospective students from the United States and abroad.
“Preparing the Path to Leadership: Executive Summary” is a passionate argument by Emily Davis, MNM, President of EDA Consulting to recruit top-talent into the Social Sector. The social entrepreneurs of today, the future of philanthropic dynamics of the future, or lack there of…
There will be more posts surrounding this topic as time goes on…
We got used to the politics of disappointment — figuring out how soon we were going to be let down. … There’s a different dynamic in the … politics of hope. It’s much more challenging. It means you’ve got to get up and do something. There’s opportunity. If you don’t take advantage of that opportunity, you really have to bear responsibility for not doing so. That’s how I see the time we’re in.
— Marshall Ganz, Lecturer in Public Policy, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
MIT: MITWorld Presents Distributed Leadership & the Obama Campaign
Lecturer: Marshall Gantz
Summary:
The Obama campaign owes its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organization whose roots go back to landmark movements of the 1960s. Marshall Ganz, who cut his teeth on civil rights work and with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, describes how the principles and practices he learned around organizing and leadership played out in the most recent presidential election.
For Ganz, our time represents the end of “40 years of wandering in the desert,” the end of “the politics of disappointment.” We’ve arrived at an extraordinary moment of rapid change — a time of both possibility and uncertainty — with commensurate challenges to political leaders. But Ganz’s take, after years with progressive movements, is that leadership involves “taking responsibility to enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” Leaders recruit, motivate and develop others, constructing a community around common interests, and building capacity from within the community. And unlike businesses, which tend to rely on rigid hierarchies, and systems and procedures, effective volunteer-based organizations must engage and enable lots of people to become innovators, adaptive in the face of uncertainty.
This kind of “civic capital” is precisely what the Obama campaign cultivated and invested in, says Ganz. Thousands of people acquired the skills and practiced “the arts of leadership necessary to self govern in democracy.” Some unique conditions made this campaign so successful, including Obama’s story of hope, which drew on a persuasive personal narrative. There was also the campaign’s strategy of developing grassroots capacity to win caucuses and close primaries; its use of the Internet to attract an army of small-scale, repeat contributors; and its capacity for “continual learning” about what was and was not working.
In the summer of 2007, Ganz served as counselor in LA’s “Camp Obama,” teaching key state organizers to share personal narratives and create compelling politics around human experience and emotion, rather than around issues. He led workshops on motivating from “a place of hopefulness,” rather than of fear, and on how to build from common ground to shared political values and commitments. Obama staffers and volunteers learned how to create mutually reliant leadership teams that could act independent of the campaign HQ; and how to amass and utilize voter information both to get out the vote, and to tap additional volunteers. A “cascade of training and leadership development” led to a massive field organization that built upon itself, where volunteers continually joined and moved up the ranks, and everyone felt “they owned a piece of it.”
Ogilvy AdMan chatting about techniques, skills and advancements in Community Engagement. This interview is a bit dated, set in 2007, yet profoundly timeless content pertaining to how to follow/use tools to create, engage and manage community.
