Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. By Paul Hawken.

I read a lot of books dealing with the intersection of business, the environment, and sustainability. Overall, this emerging genre leaves me excited yet apprehensive about our future. There are scores of brilliant people doing truly amazing things, yet our problems are titanic and time seems to be growing short. I brought this apprehension into Blessed Unrest and Paul Hawken managed to erase it, leaving behind a newfound hope. If you have any interest in human rights or the environment there are many books you should read, this is one you need to read.

As a foundation for his thesis, Hawken writes a short history of the environmental and social justice movements. There will be nothing groundbreaking here for anyone who has followed these fields, although I enjoyed the refresher and was impressed with his research. What is groundbreaking is how Hawken adds it all up. He sees the emergence of a giant web of individual forces for change, often unaware of each other, working toward the same goals in a fashion similar to the human immune system.  Hey PosiPeople, how does it feel to be a big ol’ white blood cell? This is a powerfully hopeful book, bound to become a classic.

Most of the book is made up of an appendix where he begins to define and categorize the seemingly endless movements and organizations that make up “the largest movement in the world”.  In fact, this book has come directly from Hawken’s work at the Natural Capital Institute, which in turn has created the WISER project, which in turn has a website. Click through and you’ll get the idea.

Five PosiPeople apples out of five, I couldn’t recommend it more. And of course, the Amazon link.

Charitable organizations, like the people they serve, can be divided into two groups: the have’s and the have nots. The have’s - organizations such as large universities, hospitals, and museums - probably had a good fundraising year this year. They have endowments that cushion the impact of bad years. Their fundraising machines work with the precision of any corporate marketing group reaching out to their list of wealthy donors to secure large gifts.

According to today’s Chronicle of Philanthropy, wealthy donors’ give to the have organizations.

“A study released this month of more than 8,000 gifts of $1-million or more to 4,000 nonprofit organizations found that the largest share of those dollars, 44 percent, went to higher education, followed by hospitals and other medical institutions (16 percent), and arts and cultural organizations (12 percent). Social-service groups received just 5 percent of the dollars, according to the study by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research.”

Demand for services at the “have not” institutions has increased even as donations are stagnant or decreasing.

When newspapers carry stories about $26 billion endowment at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it is easy to imagine that there are plenty of places for the have nots to go to get money. But the truth is that major foundations like Gates and Ford receive 2000-3000 grant requests A DAY. Sometimes, I wonder if it isn’t easier to get into Harvard than to get a grant from a major foundation.

If you are thinking about charitable giving at this year’s end, consider thinking about the organizations who do not send you requests by mail or call on the phone, especially the smaller, human services institutions.

About the author
__________________________

Bea Bezmalinovic Dhebar is encouraged by the creativity, diversity, diffusion and fusion of ideas taking place among people around the world. She is particularly interested in the ways in which new entrepreneurial ventures - whether led by business, government or non-governmental organizations - can make a difference in our quality of life. She has no financial links to any of the organizations mentioned here.

This quote is brought to you at the good folks at the Foundation for a Better Life. This quote is about courage. Enjoy!

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”

- James Neil Hollingworth (1933–1996)

I do a community e-newsletter, but I do not know whether anybody other than I would read it. The newsletter is about changing the status quo, starting with awakening people to all those little annoyances within the status quo which could be, should be, changed for a better quality of life. In one e-mail folder there are bits and pieces for future articles and opinion pieces.

The Bali conference on climate change drew me to an article which reported on the Pope’s admonishing environmentalists about exaggeration:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

(more…)

Social entrepreneurship is so intertwined with politics that it is impossible to get away from a political discussion. I hope that readers determined to figure out the politics- social good conundrum will join me in figuring this mess out. But beware, there are tangents as I attempt to see an even bigger picture.

I confess, until I arrived in Washington D.C. 3.5 months ago I had spent very little to no time investigating the platforms of different political parties. Because of politics, the culture here has got to be one of the most complex and intriguing in the world. The place is literally teeming with non-profits who all think they are making society a better place for humanity, and teeming with people who are politically charged and motivated.

What is confusing and complex is trying to understand people in these non-profits who are extreme in their political views. Were they first principled before starting or working at a non-profit and thereafter align their principles with a political party; or were they first wrapped up in politics, and then start a non-profit per their political ideology? How is it that there are people who care equally as much for disadvantaged individuals, but are on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum?

(more…)

For the last several weeks I’ve been talking about plug-in hybrids and solar technologies; but Cleantech is about more than just the technologies. This week I’d like to shift gears and talk about Cleantech ideals and the American vernacular.Have you ever heard someone say, “we were so poor we had to reuse our tinfoil”? I’ve heard this said as a joke, but I suppose it started as a real quote reflecting Depression-era frugality. Yet this seemingly innocuous phrase is a bigger threat to sustainability than Exxon-Mobil. It’s not the actual discarding of (aluminum) foil to which I take exception, but the assumptions inherent in the phrase. (more…)