I wrote about Opportunity Threads and the state of textile manufacturing in North Carolina in Next American City. If you haven’t seen yet, their #longreads weekly called Forefront, you are missing out. 

In Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution, author Edward Humes describes how Wal-Mart shifted their approach to find real economic value in baking in their sustainability plan into their business plan. No longer does one mean ignoring the other. 

Humes also shows how coalition building and showing, not telling helped the former CEO of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott and his executives see the negative impact their business was making. When Jib Ellison, who was hired by Wal-Mart to lead their sustainability plan design wanted to make a point, he didn’t just show up in their office and give a power point, he made connections. He invited the Wal-Mart leadership team to meet with dairy farmers, see the effect of global warming in Iceland, and meet with cotton farmers. In one excerpt- the woman responsible for sourcing cotton got to experience the difference between the way organic cotton was made and the traditional methods of showering the plant with chemicals. She now could identify with the magnitude of the problem because it was her eyes that were burning from being exposed to all the pesticides. The hardship of others was now her reality.

In another example: when Lee Scott saw the outpour of gratitude after Wal-Mart spent more than $17 million on Katrina relief, he saw the importance of a company that can do good and how it can dramatically change people’s views. After coming to this conclusion, he decided to undertake a dramatic change in Wal-Mart’s core business. While Wal-Mart still has many problems (it could fix  a lot of them by treating their workers with dignity) they are trying to change the status quo of the modern day behemoth company and their relation to the environment. 

This book is a must- read. 

Excerpt from the chapter: Questions are the New Answers from the book Little Bets by Peter Sims

He talks about how people who are creative and innovative are more like anthropologists— they put themselves in a lot of different situations and make connections that others don’t.

Sims quotes Steve Jobs saying—“A lot of people  in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problems.”

There’s always more questions to ask, and more people in which to ask them. 

Douglas Brinkley starts his sweeping historical account of the Ford Company with these three quotes:

“Every institution is the lengthened shadow of  one man.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

..a person educated entirely through books is only half educated…The genius of America is production; and a large percentage of our productive enterprises are headed by men who have come up from the worker’s bench.”— William Knudsen

Businessmen go down with their business because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about—men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year’s ideas.”— Henry Ford

It is nice of Scott Lehigh to mention in the Boston Globe today that young people are more supportive of gays than people over 40. No shit. Why should we care, with all the problems that are happening around the world, what two people do in the privacy of their own home (or in public)? 

What is even more difficult for me to understand is Ron “I don’t read my racist newsletter” Paul’s theories on government, and I think most young people do not find any sanity in his beliefs. 

Lehigh is right to say that people under 40 are more progressive, but he is wrong to think that a majority of young people would support Paul over Obama. It is true that we have grown even more disillusioned by the political process and a president who has been bullied by freshmen congressman who feel it is evil and unholy to compromise, but I do not like being associated with  Paul fans or any of the others that voted for him. 

If the Republican presidential nomination process were not such a joke, Paul would not get any attention for actually suggesting solutions to problems. For most of the candidates, they are still campaigning like its 2000 and we have not experienced the Great Recession and had to fight two wars. Paul actually addresses our debt problem, but his solutions are delusional and even though we are young, we know that they aren’t viable. 

Next time Lehigh writes about young people and what they believe, he should note that almost 60% of people between the age of 18-29 voted for Obama in 2008, and I assume a similar amount will strike the lever for the president in ‘12. Yes, Paul and his fringe voters have their time in the sun, but they definitely don’t deserve to be idealized in the Boston Globe. 

Last summer,  Brian C. Mooney, untangled the web of policy and politics and told a clear story on how health care reform happened in Massachusetts. This week,   Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two Globe writers, told a similar story in their new book The Real Romney.  The clip I created is more about the politics and the cast of characters that were involved in pushing the bill forward, and it’s worth reading more to fully understand the complexities and results of the reform. The next step is to reign in the costs, but in 2012, 99% of people in Massachusetts have health care and more businesses are providing care to their employees. 

I was struck by some of the comments from my New Prosperity article. I like the question from Rick Riker— “If you were going to build an educational system from scratch, would it look like this? We both seem to think no.” Yes, we would never create a system that doesn’t work for such a large part of the population. 

Chet Ensign, 60, writes, “Don’t look at the world like it’s a peg board and try to shape yourself to fit one of the holes; look at the world like it’s a lump of clay and try to turn it into something more to your liking.” 

Aaron Gerry says “ I am a firm believer that you learn best by doing. Put another way, a well-rounded education involves experiential learning; coupling theory in the context of what you know with real world practice.

The Times had a superb #longreads piece on the scam of the online cyber schools. Students are not learning, the software is faulty, but these for-profit companies continue to grow. They target low-income school districts where they can get more money from the government per pupil, and then offer a low quality product, and take the profits to their shareholders. The CEO makes 5million dollars. This is not the way to use technology for education, and hopefully this company will get brought down as more people are aware of the exploitation. 

Back to the Basics: Financial Literacy and Civic Engagement

New Prosperity

By Nathan Rothstein

I remember the moment I couldn’t be in high school anymore. It was the fall of my senior year, and my peers and I were doing the minimal amount of work possible in order to best prepare for college applications. The learning was over, and now it was simply busy work required to pass the state course credit regulations. My parents observed the way I would  come home physically and emotionally drained, so we came up with a solution. At Lexington High School, only four credits were needed to graduate entering senior year, so technically one could leave after the first semester. And just like that, I left. In the spring semester, I took the History of Mexico and the History of the United State since 1945 at Suffolk. It was a pretty nice arrangement, and looking back, I have no idea how I got away with it. I took one class a day and came back for high school track. I was able to get college credits, learn what college courses were like, and not have to spend a majority of my time watching the clock tick away.

Ten years after my escape from high school, my generation faces a gloomy future. Almost once a week, The New York Times publishes an article analyzing the dire straits of generation Y, and the challenges it faces. One week it was the pipe dream of law schools. Law students are racking up six figures in debt, without a guarantee on a meaningful high paying job and the pension that comes with it. Another week, an article described how the “the best and the brightest” who headed to Wall Street now find themselves back at home, jobless, due to a first-in, first-out policy as the big firms shrink. This past week Adam Davidson wrote about what the people at Occupy protests already recognize: the social contract is over. “It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot.” The average Gen Y person has $25,000 in college debt, and only one in five of us have a job.

The status quo is not working. Many high schools are not preparing students for college and/or financial success. When students drop out of school now, they are most likely going to end up being the financial responsibility of the federal and state government. I am proposing a different way for our country to do post-secondary education. It may not work for everyone, but we need to start the conversation somewhere.

Let’s start with the junior year of high school. This is an intense year when academic rigor increases. My U.S. history teacher helped me find my passion by encouraging me to learn the stories (and learn about the character) of the people who built this country. I learned the facts, and I learned how to research, develop, and put together my own arguments. I was lucky to have a great teacher, but in other subjects like math and science that were more challenging, I struggled. While it was important for me to be taking math, at the minimum I should have been taught basic financial literacy. How does the stock market work? Why do companies sell shares? What does a bank do and how does it make money? What are mutual funds? What is the benefit of car and life insurance? What do I need to know about student loans? What’s the difference between the debt ceiling and the deficit? Our country expects us to know this stuff, and then when we run up credit cards, take out predatory loans and foreclose on our houses, it’s our fault.

For others, the math comes easy, but they never learn civics. At some point in school, we are given an overview of the functions of our government, but by the time we can vote, we are expected to spend our time focusing on getting into college. As we get ready to make a voting decision, this is the time when civics education is crucial. We need to know what decisions our local government makes compared to the federal. What’s the difference between Congress and the Senate? How does federal policy affect our daily lives? What role do the courts play? How does a law getting ratified? The list goes on, but like sex education we get a few of the basics and are expected to make the right decisions with limited information about the details.

Once we hear back from colleges in the fall of our senior year, or whether or not we even go to college, rather than spend six months watching the time pass, how about high school students go through an extensive financial literacy and civics program? Whatever occupation we choose, these skills are necessary. Let’s not just stay the course because of tradition. Let’s shift from a rigorous testing environment to set education on a new trajectory.

When I visited my sister in the fall of 2006 at Yale, I was amazed by the resources at her disposal. Every day an amazing leader would visit the school, and pass along wisdom to the future leaders of the world. It was hard for me to imagine myself really taking advantage of this at 18 and 19. I don’t think I was alone to not really know what I was doing in college during those first few years. I was learning, but could have used some more real world experience. For many, college is the next step on a path that seems to be set by someone else. For many others, college is not even an option. Something has to give.

There are programs like Global Citizen Year, which gives high school graduates the opportunity to volunteer around the world. Students take a year off and come back more prepared to take advantage of resources at their school. Americorps programs likeCity Year give students the opportunity to do this work in American cities. We need more programs like this. The NBA makes players spend at least a year in college, while colleges should think about making it mandatory for students to spend a year volunteering before enrolling. There are many 18 year olds who are ready to begin a rigorous academic experience after high school, but this does not mean that they should not be exposed to the realities of a country that has real problems to fix.

If this shift happens, young people will show up for college more prepared, more focused and ready to build their skills. They will probably have already failed, learned from their mistakes, and be better able to deal with the stress of higher education.

I’d go further to say the undergraduate experience should not be more than two years. After two years, students will have a B.A. They will be 21 or 22, and then they can sign up for a new kind of service to our country by joining a program that will have them teaching financial literacy and civics to high school students. For two months, these recent grads might can attend an intensive financial literacy and civics training session. As part of the program they can learn teaching strategies. Upon completion, let’s deploy the new ‘experts’ as instructors around the country. For a year or two, these instructors can go and help other young people become active members of society.

After finishing this service, recent grads might enter into a trade school or an apprenticeship. For every year that they do a program like Americorps, their higher education is heavily subsidized—not just a $5,000 stipend as it is today. The best way to learn 21st Century skills—thinking critically, analyzing data quickly, interacting with diverse groups of people—is to go out and do it all everyday.

Let’s face it, our education system no longer works. Students are dropping out at record pace, and even if they make it through, they are in debt, and usually don’t have the skills that can get them decent-paying meaningful jobs. We have a school to prison or debt pipeline. Too many people are either behind bars or are figuratively locked up with debt and have no way of getting out. Only bold, revolutionary thinking will get us out of it. As Thomas Friedman said, “that used to be us.” We were the ones who built a society where every returning soldier had the opportunity to make their lives better for their kids. They came back from a war in Europe with money for school and a house. Now they come back from the Middle East with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and no job prospects. Let’s get back the basics by taking on the responsibility of preparing young people to become financially independent, civically and socially-conscious adults, able to make their own way in the world.

Nathan Rothstein himself is on a long windy path to success. He spent four years working on recovery projects in New Orleans, is an active member of the Boston entrepreneurship community, and now works at the DailyFeats. Nathan has been featured in The Boston Globe, USA Today, NECN, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune for his work. He has presented workshops on the subject of how young people can make a social impact at Yale, UMass-Amherst, Howard, MIT, Harvard, and Tulane University. He also volunteers at Charlestown High School with the Build program and is on the Public Policy committee for the Jewish Community Relations Council. Learn more at nathanrothstein.com.

I have a blockbuster deal in mind. It’s non-traditional, but  I think it would satisfy many die-hard NBA fans. Here is the deal—the 2011-12 NHL season,  the 2012 MLB season, 2012 Presidential election and throw in John Lackey  for the NBA season to start on November 1st. Remember— Blake Griffin is playing at the (whatever bank paid this month) Garden in the second week of the season, and that is a must-see for all Celtics fans. We don’t need Theo Epstein to approve, let me just get one yay on twitter. Ok, I got a retweet— deal was approved.

Unfortunately, the 2012 presidential election will still make us all dumber as candidates will go down the slippery slope of trying to reach the elusive independent voter and sink to the lowest common denominator, and more hockey highlights will creep into the daily Sportscenter top 10. This gives me the chills. As the leaves turn orange, there is nothing I would rather be talking about than who the Celtics will sign with their five remaining roster spots, but I have to resort to a discussion on the lockout.

Every time I start reading a story on the lockout, I stop myself, and ask, “do I even care?” The answer is no- I just want my NBA back. Most of the owners have made a lot of money in their lives, and I always thought the reason you buy a franchise is to show off how much money you have, not try to make even more money. But I guess that’s why I’m not in their position.  

I also think the NBA has a great leader in Derek Fisher . He’s a stand up guy and the owners would have nothing if Kevin Durant couldn’t excite fans around the world, and Nate Robinson didn’t wave his towel on the bench. After the 2010-2011, the NBA may have never been as well regarded. The drug problems of the early 80s were a distant after thought, the post-mortem depression of Jordan retiring and then being re-born was long gone, and the league had discovered and developed a new generation of stars. Despite the youthful influx of premier talent, an experienced team ultimately ended up the winner. The NBA was at its peak, but then fell off the cliff.

David Stern deserves a lot of credit as a businessman for helping to make the NBA a global, and very wealthy brand, but this nonsense has to stop. The millions that both sides are fighting for right now is an insult to the millions of Americans who will never make anything close to what these guys make. The NBA player at the end of the bench now makes $475,000, which puts him in the top 1%. For most people that is enough. While the owners need to realize that they are not what the fans come to see, the players should at least acknowledge how absurd it is, that someone like Brian Scalabrine can make $15 million dollars.  Let’s get the NBA back, or all year I will just be working on my Pinterest board of 90s basketball players, and that won’t win me any friends.

I wrote yesterday about #occupyboston, and why it makes sense to go to the streets. It seems like every other action has led to compromise and Republicans winning the good sentiment/pr of the American people. 

Krugman agrees, and gives a recap of what has happened in three short acts:

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

There is a jobs bill in the senate that needs passing. There are now hundreds of people out in the streets talking about the other 99%.

I heard a few people sitting outside South Station today, safely across the street, discussing the #occupyboston tents. “What’s the deal, why do they hate capitalism? Is it just because they don’t have jobs?”

People have also been complaining that they don’t have a list of demands. But that is not the point. When even some Democrats (see Landrieu, Nelson, and Schumer) won’t consider a jobs bill because it includes taxes and regulation on big oil and the wealthy, it’s hard to do anything but turn to the streets. 

I remember in college when people turned to the streets to protest Operation Iraqi Freedom, and what began as an anti-war protest quickly digressed into an anti-Israel/divestment demonstration so I’m always weary of the first people to turn the streets. But in interviews and talking to the organizers of the #occupyboston, I’ve been impressed with their anecdotal comments in the press. Recent college graduates have too much debt and others are upset about the growing disparity between the rich and poor. As the political process  seems more  stagnant and out of touch than ever, people are fed up, and rightly so. We may not agree on everything, but there’s 99% of us who have a lot more in common than we think. Let’s focus on that. 

There are three events that will always shape my generation’s outlook on the world. Monica. 9.11. Katrina. 

Monica

When a slightly plump, overly flirty woman started showing up on the cover of our biggest dailies, our innocence was lost. Bill Clinton, as I would learn later, was probably the most talented politician of the 20^th Century. He was also the most feared by the Republican Party. Not a single day in office did the Newt led congress not plot his demise. From whitewater to Paula Jones to government shutdowns, Clinton knew the power he held. The skills that made him win a presidency—the charm, the southern accent, the enormous appetite for politics (and fried chicken), and the uncanny ability to make everyone in the room feel not just important, but the most important- also led to his destruction. Here was a president who had led a country out of recession, and by the end of the succulent decade, was running a surplus. He may have had his foreign policy squabbles- Rwanda, Black Hawk Down, but on the world’s stage, he made the right peacekeeping decisions- see the Balkans. The world was his oyster, and when he ran for re-election, the best the Republicans could muster was an aging political lifer, who was hurt by one of the strangest candidates of our existence—see Ross Perot. But when he left office in the winter of 2001, a man who’s only major accomplishment at the time was to be the son of a president, had run successfully on restoring American values. Though the election had been stolen, enough people were disgusted with the amount of times oral sex was mentioned in the paper to vote for a man who had no business being president. This was the election that should not have ever been close. But when I turned 17 that winter, the neo-cons had seized control, and had no interest in listening to any of the outgoing president’s warnings about a looming terrorist organization named Al Queda. Kenneth Starr and the Clinton hate machine had gotten what they wanted, and in the end, we all got Bush.

9/11 

Like everyone, I remember where I was; high school improv class. The principal announced that a plane flew into Tower 1. “It was an accident,” we were told. 30 minutes later, the second tower was hit, and on a sunny day, any word that could give the illusion of a mistake was no longer mentioned. We all streamed out, and headed to our next class, and watched as the panic and destruction ensued. The news did not get any better that day, nor in the next few weeks, or maybe in the ten years since.

Eighteen months later, Colin Powell, the New York Times, Tony Blair had all agreed with the Bush (Cheney) Administration, sanctions were no longer going to work; we needed to bomb the shit out of Iraq. In late March, as Fox News “Shock and Awe” coverage began, I was in a homeless shelter in Atlanta, only steps away from the state house. For our alternative spring break, we spent a majority of the time in an after-school program in a part of the city where the Olympics had not provided the intended economic development. But on this night-the night Bush said, we were fighting for the democracy of the people of Iraq, I was with Americans, mostly war veterans, who were homeless and dumbfounded. These were people who had defended our country against another elusive evil (communism), and were now down and out of luck. Some were mentally ill, but many others just had one bad break after another. They had lost jobs, run up health care bills, and had to deal with other very ordinary misfortunes. So you could imagine how it seemed strange that we were bombing some other country in the name of democracy. The homeless veterans could probably make the most prescient statements. They already knew that the war was going to be fought by the poor, and when the veterans returned, there was no GI Bill waiting for them to buy a home. For the next ten years, as our troops returned to this country, sometimes physically disabled, but every time emotionally scarred, our country did not provide the support system they needed. If the family of a killed soldier was living on an army base, they had ten days to leave.  The army itself has admitted that more soldiers die by their own hands, than by the enemy. We have created a monster abroad, and thousands of inner demons that tear at the psyche of our peers. While many of us never have to face the evils of war, too many others, see it all around. Osama may be dead, but his war is not. If their intention was to destroy the pillar of the western world, the American financial epicenter—we may have already lost.  As the bill runs up on two unjust wars, and our economy continues to falter with dozens of millions of people out of work, our future has been leveraged by money hungry and moral-less investment bankers. The supposed “best and the brightest” created a system that rewarded a broken trust between financial institutions and the public. We lost almost 3,000 people on 9.11,thousands of soldiers in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. The wars continue, and the great American pipe dream lives on: we can pay for everything without asking the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share.

Katrina

Katrina came swiftly to the Gulf Coast tearing roofs off seaside homes and then it moved west to the Crescent City. When it hit the industrial canal at a Category 3 level, it seemed like the worst part, like the winds, had already passed. But then the water started to rise, and a breach was discovered. A levee system that had not been properly maintained, could not handle a strong storm, and a thousand people drowned. In the matter of a few days, the city flooded, and by the Friday after the Sunday storm, 80% of the city was under water.

Like many other college students at the time, I remember where I was—at my apartment flipping through college football and Entourage episodes waiting for the school year to begin. I changed the channel, and saw thousands of African-Americans migrate towards the superdome.  I was not alone to think that this was a foreign country, this could not be the mighty U.S. But the floodwaters uncovered our dirty little secret; urban poverty. All of the redlining, failures of urban renewal, school-to prison pipelines, police brutality, urban corruption that had led to these issues, were now in the face of every American who turned on the TV. Our failure to invest in our levees shined a light on our failure to confront our greatest downfall—our failure to stand by our founding father’s words—“all men are created equal.” In reality, in the 21^st century, the hidden meaning of the words in the 18^th Century- that only white men who owned property were created equal, were still true. It was clear that there were many people in our country that did not start at the same starting line.

Up until that point, George Bush was relatively well liked. He had been re-elected, and unfortunately was still commandeer in chief. But the complete mismanagement of the crisis, and the destructive cronyism that prevented New Orleans from receiving the federal assistance it required, blew the lid off the can of approval. I was struck by the individual stories I heard when I arrived in Gulfport in March 2006. People, who had paid their taxes and insurance notes all their lives, were abandoned when they were in most dire straights. The insurance companies found every loophole to not cover their policyholders’ damages. While their shareholders profited over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of homeowners in the Gulf could not return home. The damages were too expensive, and the federal assistance proved inconsequential. When the state of Louisiana tried to step in and create a helpful program, it turned out to be inherently racist. Homeowners were given assistance based on their pre-Katrina real estate values, rather than on the damages that were done. In African-American neighborhoods, the payouts were smaller, while in white neighborhoods they received what they needed. New Orleans quickly turned into a harbinger of our country’s ailing economy. Homes were abandoned, wealth disparity increased, and the underlying systemic problems were not addressed.

This is what our generation has witnessed, and the problems can seem overwhelming. We do not trust those in power, and it is hard for us to not challenge what people say, “Is just the way it is.” We live in a very different world than the spring of 1998, but all is not lost. The great challenges have brought a lot of people closer and more committed than ever to fighting the status quo. Our commitment to social justice and equality is unrivaled. A majority of our generation votes progressive, doesn’t care about the sexual orientation of our peers, and without having any pragmatic reason to do so, are hopeful for the future. Let us only look backwards to learn from our mistakes and remember the lives that have been lost. To quote a song I was taught as a child, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall study war no more. 

My new article on social entrepreneurship in Next American City Magazine

Alan Khazei has built some great organizations in his lifetime partly because he knows how to make sure people remember him. I met Alan at the Masschallenge offices a few weeks ago, and received this letter in response. I spoke to him for only a few minutes, but he seemed enthusiastic about Swellr, and his staff knows how to support his ability to make connections. Nice touch