Andrew Mangino on building the next generation of dreamers

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Andrew Mangino, Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Future Project. 

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We started The Future Project about two and a half years ago. I was in Washington, DC as a speechwriter. Like a lot of young people in my generation, there was a lot of excitement after the presidential election—seen in things like the “Yes We Can” video created here—and many of us went to DC. I went to be a speechwriter to Joe Biden. And by the way, if you’re thinking about storytelling, Joe Biden is the best storyteller you’ll ever encounter. 

I was in DC and felt this incredible sense of possibility, like so many people. But I started talking to my friends, and we all felt a certain lack of fulfillment. There was all this amazing energy, but we were wondering what’s the common purpose: what’s the call to action that’s going to drive our generation to change the world, not just win an election? Many people had been fired up by the election not because of any particular policy, but because there was this new sense of possibility in America. 

The point came up earlier about the interplay between things happening by accident versus planned change, and it’s one that we’ve been wrestling since Day 1. I was mentoring a student in a DC school at the time. Judging by the statistics, it was one of the most struggling schools in America, just a few blocks from where I was living in DC. There was a complete disconnect between that school and the community and the energy that I, and so many people I knew, felt. 

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Ashoka Fellow Tim Carpenter on changing how we look at aging

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Ashoka Fellow Tim Carpenter, Founder and Executive Director of EngAGE and host and producer of Experience Talks. 

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I founded EngAGE 15-16 years ago now, and I worked in senior healthcare for ten years before that, so I’ve been basically working with older adults since I was four years old. 

I’m Irish, so I’m kind of genetically disposed to storytelling: we’re the world’s greatest liars, and storytelling was a competitive sport in my family that usually happened at the dinner table. I learned very early that older people told the better stories, so I ended up at that end of the dinner table, in part because that’s also where the dessert went. 

We provide programs primarily in independent, low-income senior housing communities. And when I first walked into my first one, what they had on the wall to look forward to every week were two things: one was bingo, and the other was donuts. And I thought, “I’m going to be a genius in this industry if that’s the bar that I have to jump over.” 

I looked for a model for how to change it, and there wasn’t really anything cool going on. So I thought, “What’s another model that I could apply to this?” And I thought about college, because if you look at college through the right sort of goggles, it’s a similar sort of launching-off point. In college, you’ve gone from high school to a new place, a new community, and there’s this sense that, “I can do anything with the rest of my life”. Somebody hands you a catalog, and you start picking which kinds of things you want to be doing each week, and who you are, and what you want to become. 

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Ashoka Fellow Ai-jen Poo on building the caring economy

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Ashoka Fellow Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Co-director of the Caring Across Generations.

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I wanted to start by introducing you to my grandmother. She’s 87-years-old, and she lives in El Hambre in a retirement community for Chinese American retirees. And she lives a really good life. She lives independently in her own apartment, and she watches kung fu soap operas, and she goes to church twice a week, and she plays Mahjong–she’s an incredible Mahjong shark; don’t take her on. She really does live a good life. She taught me most of the things that are valuable and useful to me in my life today. She potty-trained me, and that was useful, and she also taught me most of the values that I hold true. And one of the things that she always used to say is that we should always appreciate the people in our lives who take care of us because care-giving is life’s greatest gift. So one of the things that I wanted you to do as we go through this presentation is to call up someone in your life who’s taken care of you, who you really appreciate, and just think about the value of that relationship in your life. 

Let’s take a moment to think about those people. Now let’s give a round of applause to the people in our lives who play that role.

My grandmother lives a great life, and she’s fully independent, and the secret to her independence is this woman named Mrs. Sun, who is her care-giver, and comes to her house three times a week to help her with the things that she can no longer do on her own: cooking, heavy lifting, taking her to some appointments, washing—some of the stuff that’s just harder for her to do on her own. Mrs. Sun also took care of my grandfather before he passed away. He had a stroke which left him paralyzed on half of his body, so she actually used to come seven days a week for 12 hours a day to support both of them. Needless to say, Mrs. Sun has played an incredibly important role in our family’s lives, and in our community, and really in the economy.

Millions of domestic workers like her are doing that work, supporting American families, every single day. At least 2 million workers are going and taking care of the most precious elements of our lives every single day: our children, our aging loved ones, our homes, so that we can go to work knowing that the things we value most are in good hands. 

And despite this really, really important role that domestic workers play in our communities and in the economy, they’re among the most vulnerable workers in the economy. We see all kinds of abuses: everything from human trafficking, to not being paid for years on end, to sexual assault and violence. And there’s the whole spectrum: there are some employers who are really wonderful, and then you get the whole end of the spectrum, in which there’s nothing mediating that relationship. We compare it to the Wild West, because you never know what you’re going to get. 

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Ashoka Fellow Eric Dawson on unleashing young people’s moral imaginations

In early May, Ashoka teamed up with the team at Wondros to bring together a handful of amazing thinkers and doers from both the social impact and creative worlds, to examine what it takes to advance an idea in place of a program, and to identify the ingredients of modern-day movement-building. What follows is a transcript from a talk given by Ashoka Fellow Eric Dawson, Co-Founder and President of Peace First. 

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I founded Peace First almost 21 years ago. I’d been a sort of pissy kid, and founded it around this idea that we have a narrative about young people in this country—and I actually think it’s global—which is that we tend to think about young people as the future. “You’re going to be a great artist someday,” or a great writer or a great whatever, which is sort of like saying you’re not a great writer or a great artist now. So we have a potential narrative for young people. 

We have a victim narrative for young people, so young people are things we need to protect or keep safe. We have a lot of resources in keeping kids safe and protecting them and keeping them healthy. And then we have a narrative around perpetrators: young people are violent. They’re dangerous. They’re black and brown, they have AK-47s. So we incarcerate young people. We medicate young people. We turn our schools into prisons—literally, with metal detectors and police officers, or spiritually, with these sort of deadening, zero-tolerance policies: don’t talk in the halls; sit in your seat. 

We’ve been really interested in this question of how we create a counter narrative. One part is this idea that young people are the present: they’re leaders, they’re organizers. The other is that they’re powerful: that young people can effect change. And the third is that they’re positive. They’re hungry to be called to something. That’s language for us around peace-making—so when we talk about peace-making, we’re talking about the critical skills of social-emotional learning—empathy, perspective-taking, conflict resolution—married to the critical skills of creativity and civic engagement. How do we unleash young people’s moral imaginations?

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Enough arguing already: Create an experience & tell good stories.

Family_copyright Melanie Brown_Insight Labs

A couple weeks back, we teamed up with the folks behind Insight Labs to try to crack just what it’s going to take to make empathy a norm in today’s education system. Tucked away in an industrial warehouse in Half Moon Bay, and joined by more than a dozen leading thinkers & doers from across a variety of industris—including design, advertising, media, and academia—we wrestled with the very same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for months: what exactly do we mean by empathy? And why exactly is it more important today than ever? And what’s it going to take to spread not a curriculum or a program, but an idea? 

This was a group that wanted to believe that empathy was the next big thing, but wasn’t convinced as to why. So we spent nearly 2.5 hours trying to make sense of what empathy is and why it will matter more tomorrow than at any other time in history, at which point it wasn’t at all clear that we were going to get anywhere. It was then that someone said, “You can’t thrive without the 4th R: reading, writing, arithmetic, & relationships,” and that our job was to supply the tools for doing that. This quickly became the room’s ah-ha moment. 

The end result was a set of takeaways that will help guide the next phase of Start Empathy. But looking back, they’re also takeaways that all of us who after for systemic social change would do well to keep in mind:

  1. Empathy is meaningless without changemaking, and changemaking is dangerous without empathy. We’ve come to realize that empathy carries too many associations on its own. A big part of our job is to unpack the term, remembering at every step that what we’re after is applied empathy, and a collective commitment to equipping kids with the skills they need to be life-long changemakers. 
  2. It’s about relationships. We spent the first two hours circling around “what is empathy” and “why is it important?” It was only when a woman described it as “the 4th R” that it clicked for people.  Relationships are something that everyone can see and experience themselves—through the growing number of friends you can connect with on FB and LinkedIn, the increasing # of people you interact with each day, etc. This also bridged the gap between cultivating empathy in students, and modeling it yourself, as you can establish the same goals for teachers and students alike. Working in isolation is no longer an option, whether you’re a designer, a scientist, or an educator: it’s all about the team-of-teams. 
  3. Forget arguments: tell good stories. The turning point in the conversation was what we’ll describe as “the Molly moment.” Ashoka Fellow Molly Barker, founder of Girls on the Run, and a key champion behind the Empathy Initiative, had flown in from Charlotte to join the day’s discussion. Molly described what they’d achieved through GOTR, reaching 190K girls each year and mobilizing 47K volunteers, and started to cry as she explained that there was something transcendent about that experience that’s impossible to put to words. Her opening up suddenly gave everyone else in the room permission to do the same, and to get away from all of the political back-and-forth of “empathy is this versus that.” It was at that moment that Nina Rappaport, founder of Kimochis, said, “it’s the 4th R,” and everything shifted. While flawless arguments and showcasing the evidence-base are important, in the end, it’s all about good storytelling.  
  4. Start with the outcome. Toward the end, Hilary Hoeber, Public Sector Practice Lead at IDEO said, “You can design or relationships. You can’t design for empathy.” Empathy is fuzzy for most people, but any teacher can teach in a way that supercharges relationships. And a child or adult’s ability to forge relationships is something that you can (and often already do) measure. 
  5. This must be experienced. Our charge now is to recreate everything that happened in that room over the course of three hours, in three minutes for everyone who finds us online or as members of our schools network. Everything we do—whether through an event, or an online videos—should lead to an “empathic experience,” or this will never fly. It’s time to recreate “the Molly moment” in everything we do.  

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