May 2012
56 posts
Will your team let you know when your idea is... →
Check this NYT link where Ashoka board member and friend Kyle Zimmer speaks about building the right team culture. I love Kyle insights. Each time she comes to board meetings, I know I’ll get at least one quote from her that will serve me the next 6 months. Next time maybe we should all come in dinosaur costumes to our board session…
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It's Panel Week!
This week is panel week for the US team. This means that 7 social entrepreneurs will be visiting our offices to have conversations with 4 panelists. While these social entrepreneurs are here, they have an opportunity to make a 3 minute professionally produced video describing their work (see a few from the last panel here and here). Binders of background materials are being couriered to panelists,...
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Don Shalvey's Commencement speech: 7 Lessons For...
As graduation season slowly passes, people’s favorite commencement speeches are being posted online for continuous viewing and contemplation.
I stumbled upon a collection from the Chronicle of Higher Education that had this fantastic portion of Ashoka Fellow Don Shalvey’s speech at the University of Southern California:
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned since my...
What's like finding 25 needles in 600 haystacks,...
One of the most common questions we get from people is “How do you select Ashoka Fellows?” When faced with the question, we have two options: describe the process itself-its steps and our Fellow selection criteria-or explain why it exists and what its impact is on social entrepreneurs, on the sector as a whole, and on us. This week we are about to embark...
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Co-funding roles across the network
Pleasure to spend time last week with George Roter, Ashoka Fellow in Toronto and co-founder of Engineers without Borders-Canada. George seems a smart user/shaper of the network. He spotted an opportunity to co-fund a role with two other Toronto-based Fellows: they agreed to hire one person to do the same thing with each of their organizations: look into operational inefficiencies and help the...
Anna the mailwoman
Our package to Forbes delivered by Anna herself. We just signed an agreement with Forbes to partner with them to spread the ideas of social entrepreneurs from our network into the stream of consciousness of the business entrepreneurs in their network. Or in simpler words: an Ashoka blog in forbes dot com. It will be so interesting to see which stories get more traction than others, and how do...
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Winning at Pinning →
Beth Kanter selection of the non profit organizations doing the best things with Pinterest
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Attention budding novelists: A lesson in... →
Every morning, my inbox experiences a mini-deluge comprised of useful to-do’s and provocations: monthly challenges from GOOD, inspiring tales and thought experiments from the DailyGood, and as of the last month+, writing prompts from Figment. Who knows, after all, when I’ll finally get that hankering to pen the next Great American Novel.
Often, these merely add to the pile of unopened...
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Trending? Empathy
It’s hard to tell whether my empathy radar is acutely sensitive, or whether empathy really is on everyone’s mouth these days. It sure does feel like empathy is around every corner, behind every tree, under ever rock, etc etc.
Just today in my inbox: check out this writing exercise of the day—unprompted by anyone on Ashoka’s empathy initiative— from novelist and...
