Photo of sticky note courtesy of Shutterstock.
Over on The Muse I wrote about when turning down a job offer might make sense for you and your career. Just over a year ago I turned down a seemingly-perfect job because it didn’t seem like the right fit, and I haven’t regretted it a day since. You’ll want to consider mission, growth opportunities, warning signs, timing, and money. Read my advice here.
This article was originally posted on the Huffington Post.
With news that the graduate Stafford loan rates will increase next year, and New York Times headlines like “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” you don’t need to look far to see that the higher education experience is broken. While MOOCs and other initiatives attempt to mend a failing system, some organizations like Watson University, Enstitute, and Experience Institute are hoping to create an entirely new educational system through experiential learning and personal development.
A recent Pew study backs up the notion that more experience in education is desired. According to an Atlantic article about the report:
It found that, yes, a third of college graduates who majored in social science, liberal arts or education regretted their decision… But overall, when asked what they wish they’d done differently in college, ‘choosing a different major’ wasn’t the top answer. The most popular answer, given by half of all respondents, was “gaining more work experience.’ Choosing a different major was the fourth most popular response, after ‘studying harder’ and ‘looking for work sooner.’
Not everyone learns best in a traditional classroom. Experience Institute (Ei), which welcomed its first cohort last year, encourages its students to establish their own classrooms by undertaking three apprenticeships or independent projects while also completing five modules of curriculum designed specifically for the program. Ei’s curriculum is taught in the form of meet ups that take place in Chicago in-between apprenticeships and cover community building, self-awareness, storytelling, operations, and design thinking. The yearlong program offers the graduate school experience at a much cheaper than the norm price tag of $13,000. (more…)
Originally posted on HuffPost Impact.
Paulo Freire, author of the seminal 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, saw the world not as a given reality, but as “a problem to be worked on and solved.” That mindset is a quality we attribute to the greatest social entrepreneurs. Yet, when so many well-intentioned social ventures globally seem to leave individuals dependent on aid instead of empowering them, Freire’s book should be required reading for every social entrepreneur.
While many in the social enterprise space are now excited by what we call “empowerment non-profits,” “human-centered design,” and “co-creation,” Freire and others working in activism and participatory development have been advocating for working with, and not for, the oppressed for more than 50 years. Furthermore, our culture of glorifying the social entrepreneur through awards, praise, and aspiration is contrary to the values of liberation. Based on the understanding of oppression and liberation from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the role of the social entrepreneur would not be to act as liberator of the oppressed, but to work with the oppressed in the liberation of themselves and their oppressors. (more…)
My article originally posted on Huffington Post Impact.
A friend transitioning from the corporate world to the social enterprise space recently asked me how to assess a social enterprise. How do we really know when an organization is doing quality work we should rally behind and having a real, positive impact, versus just using the right buzzwords?
The short answer is you can never really know. But there are a few aspects of a social enterprise, beyond their mission and approach, that you can critically examine before deciding to join or support one.
How do they talk about impact?
There are numerous ways to measure impact, and entire firms dedicated to doing so. There is no one “right” method, but the way a social enterprise talks about their impact may be an indicator of their operations and worldview.
Let’s say there’s a social enterprise that uses all the popularly accepted words about sustainable and holistic community development. And then when they talk about their impact they say, “We’ve built 100 schools in five countries in the past 10 years.” Maybe they have a video or slideshow of “people whose lives they’ve changed,” but not much more than general statements, and certainly nothing to prove sustainability or transparency. Maybe it’s just another case of Three Cups of Deceit. Or maybe they’re revolutionary, but how are we to know?
There is nothing wrong with statistics. They’re great. Here is how Educate!, a social enterprise operating in Uganda, talks about their impact:
My article for Huffington Post on Happy Feet Home. Support their launch campaign here.
When a child is terminally ill in India, they face a difficult road ahead. Their family is burdened with grief and expenses. Children are segregated from peers in their community due to a culture of fear and taboo for the terminally ill. When families from a rural area travel to a metropolitan city for medical support, they often have no place to live, turning to the streets. The lack of holistic medical and emotional support for a terminally ill child and their family exacerbates the grief and loss of hope. Enjoyable moments in the precious remaining time are limited. Two young entrepreneurs are changing this situation for the better by building India’s first children’s hospice center with the aim of ensuring that children and their family’s last days together are filled with dignity and joy.
Mansi Shah and Abhishek Tatiya are hoping to provide holistic medical and emotional support through Happy Feet Home, a daytime center in Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital (Sion Hospital) that will offer counseling, activities, and memorable moments for children and their families in their last days together. “Even if it is four months, let the child have the best four months ever,” Mansi proclaims. “At Happy Feet Home, we’re giving that kind of support and care. It’s a child-friendly space, colorful, vibrant, and full of joy. You step in and feel happy,” adds Abhishek.
My latest article on careers for BrazenLife.
Whether you’re a new graduate, considering a career change or in the midst of a job search, it’s easy to get excited by all the job opportunities out there. It’s also easy to get overwhelmed. Where do you start looking for the right job if you don’t even know what the right job for you might be?
Numerous guides and life coaches can help you “find your passion and realize your potential.” But if you don’t have the money or time to invest in these resources, you can still make progress on your own. Start by asking yourself these three questions, which will help increase your self-awareness, narrow your job search and evaluate your opportunities.
An article I wrote for the Huffington Post. Be sure to check out and contribute to the crowdfunding campaign for UnLtd USA.
After spending a year voluntarily living in transitional housing for homeless and day laborers in Charleston, South Carolina, Derek Snook had an idea that could guide the homeless in his community towards self-sufficiency by creating a better model of a temporary employment agency. The only problem was that he didn’t have the resources or network to help him launch his idea. Working with a friend, they weren’t sure where to start. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We literally Googled how to start a non-profit temporary employment agency and nothing came up,” Derek explained. “We were two 23-year-old guys with an idea and a dream, and it was about not giving up.”
The challenges of social entrepreneurship were not lost on Derek, who started working on IES Labor Services in 2009. Four years later, he’s raised money, employed staff, hired over 50 workers daily, and added more than $100,000 to workers’ wages through the IES Hope Fund. While Derek was able to successfully build his non-profit, many aspiring social entrepreneurs fail to move beyond the critical initial idea phase.
Until recently, there has been a noticeable lack of support for start-up social entrepreneurs at the earliest stages. Now, several new initiatives, including Social Good Startup and UnLtd USA, are aiming to fill this gap by providing funding and mentorship while building leadership and business skills for aspiring social entrepreneurs.
One of my last pieces for SocialStory’s Celebrating Failure Series.
For the next edition of our series on lessons from failure, SocialStory spoke with Vipin Thek, who works for the Global Office at Ashoka. He previously led the Youth Venture program in India and co-founded an organization in Chennai that works to prevent child sexual abuse.
Here is his excellent advice for changemakers everywhere:
1. There is no failure, only growth
“I don’t follow the concept of failure,” says Vipin. “I believe that if you really look at life, there is no failure, only growth. When we do something that doesn’t go as planned, we need to learn from those experiences and grow from there, and not view it as a failure.”
The report on how to better design ed-tech interventions in APS in India is published. You can view it here.
I spoke with my friend Erin about her new non-profit, Sucre Blue, for SocialStory.
Erin Little was 10 years old at a church camp in rural Missouri when was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. She had no access to hospitals or specialist doctors, and didn’t meet another diabetic until she was almost 21. Her experience is not unlike that of the 60 million diagnosed with diabetes in India.
Diabetes affects 8% of the world population. If India’s diabetic population reaches80 million as projected, it will have the largest diabetes population in the world.
Talking about co-founder and start-up issues in our Failure series.
Social entrepreneur Hemant Nitturkar learned several important lessons about how to run a social enterprise after one of his ventures failed, in part due to team disunity. Here is what Hemant shared with SocialStory about his failure experience.
SocialStory: Tell us about the social enterprise you founded.
Hemant: First generation entrepreneurship is on the rise in India, but these entrepreneurs lack access to mentors and early-stage funding. While I saw a lot of good things happening in the entrepreneurship space, I felt they were all happening in silos. I had conceived an end-to-end service for early-stage entrepreneurs, which ultimately took shape as CARMa Venture Services Private Limited. I had planned a spectrum of services such as mentoring, early-stage capital raising, post-capital raising interventions, and developing entrepreneurship hubs in Tier II towns and many other support services. To pull off such a complex operation, I scouted for and eventually identified several people to join my team, who brought with them skills and experiences to complement my own. I served as the Co-Founder, CEO, Chairman, and majority (over 65%) shareholder of the private limited company.
Kevin F. Adler’s Baby Steps To Success With alumn.us (SocialStory)
The latest piece in my Celebrating Failure series for SocialStory.
SocialStory continues its Celebrate Failure series with a contribution from Kevin F. Adler, an entrepreneur and applied sociologist. He is the founder and CEO of inthis, a social invite platform for connecting people around their shared experiences. His first book, The Great Catalyst: How Disasters Can Bring Us Together or Tear Us Apart, will be published by UPA later this year.
A great failure lesson from my Celebrating Failure series over at SocialStory.
Whether a Founder, CEO, or entry-level employee, everyone fails. Learning from that failure can often lead to greater success, and change lives, which is why we cover lessons from failure here at SocialStory.
Devanik Saha is a Teach for India (TFI) Fellow who had to learn from his failures in the classroom early on in the job. He has since been awarded for his innovation in the classroom. Devanik is now in the second year of his fellowship as a Grade 4 teacher in a low-income municipal school in Sangam Vihar, an unauthorized area in New Delhi.
Leverage The Failures Of The Past For Greatness In The Future – Steve Hardgrave (SocialStory)
The latest in my Celebrating Failure series for SocialStory.
For this installment of SocialStory’s Celebrate Failure series, we spoke with Steve Hardgrave, a social entrepreneur who has worked in Mexico, the United States, and India.
Steve—who is now based in Bangalore, India—was previously the Founder and CEO of a microfinance organization that worked in a slum outside of Mexico City, Mexico.
An article I wrote about peer mentorship for Brazen Life.
Imagine…You just had an invaluable meeting with one of your mentors. You feel really stuck at work, unsure whether to take that great promotion or follow your passion with the startup that asked you to join their team. Your mentor went through a similar dilemma, and their advice was fresh and honest.
Now, what if we told you that your mentor was not a senior leader in your field, a professor or your boss? Rather, your mentor was your peer—someone at the same level as you in their career. But, you ask, how can a peer be a mentor, and why would I even want a peer mentor?
Here are four reasons why you should have a peer mentor and some key steps to building a peer mentoring relationship that will last a lifetime:
Hila Mehr 