Press Contact: Jacob Colker
(773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
Boston, MA – June 17, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce
that we have won an important grant from the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation (http://www.KnightFoundation.org).
This is a breakthrough moment for our team, and we are incredibly
grateful to the Knight Foundation for this opportunity. With this
critical grant, The Extraordinaries will run an intensive pilot in San
Jose, California featuring our volunteer-on-demand software. Over the
next year, we'll be working closely with nonprofits and community
organizations in San Jose to engage and harness the enthusiasm of their
volunteers.
The Knight Foundation is a national foundation
with local roots. The foundation seeks out opportunities that can
transform both communities and journalism, works to help them reach
their highest potential, and works to ensure that each community's
citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.
"We're honored that Knight is giving us this opportunity" said Jacob
Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. "We are excited that our
mission to help community organizations engage their supporters through
micro-volunteer tasks fits with the Knight Foundations' objective of
empowering communities."
The Extraordinaries
delivers micro‐volunteer tasks to people whenever and wherever they are
available by mobile phone and the web, allowing organizations strapped
for funding and resources to engage and leverage their supporters.
Despite busy schedules, we all have time, usually when waiting: for the
metro, in lines, or at the doctor’s office. With these spare minutes,
we can do something extraordinary.
Press Contact: Jacob Colker (773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
San Francisco, CA – June 15, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce today that we have been awarded a 2009 Echoing Green Fellowship!!! Echoing Green received nearly 1,000 applications for these 14 spots, and we are incredibly honored to join the ranks of the Echoing Green Fellows community.
This year's fellows are an incredible group of people. Among the fellows are Former First Daughter of the United States Barbara Bush and her project Global Health Corps (http://www.ghcorps.org), Esra’a Al Shafei and her project Mideast Youth (http://www.mideastyouth.com), and our good friend Stephane de Messieres and his project Citizens Market (http://www.citizensmarket.org). But really, they're all incredible people, and thus we list them all at the bottom of this post.
"After seventeen rounds of review, three rounds of cuts, four rigorous personal interviews, background checks, reference checks, supporting research, and more, we're honored that our project has made it through and met the standards of such an incredible organization," said Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. "Echoing Green is in the business of dreaming with us -- and then helping to make those dreams possible. It's an extraordinary opportunity." Colker continued.
With the 2009 class, Echoing Green has now invested over $28 million in 471 fellows since 1987, providing critical seed funding, health insurance, training, and the full backing of the entire fellows community to make these projects successful. Many organizations which Echoing Green funded at their early stages are today internationally-recognized: Teach For America, Working Today, Genocide Intervention Network, Citizen Schools, JumpStart for Children, College Summit, the Global Fund for Children, and City Year. A full description of the 2009 Echoing Green Fellows can be viewed at http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/year/2009 and a list with brief project summaries is attached below.
To get a better sense of the class of 2009, watch the three-minute video that is viewable from the home page of http://www.echoinggreen.org
Named after the William Blake poem, Echoing Green is a global nonprofit that supports emerging entrepreneurs who enact innovative solutions that address root causes to social problems. It is one of the only organizations solely dedicated to investing in early-stage social entrepreneurs. To drive transformative social change, Echoing Green identifies and assists some of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs launching new high-impact organizations. Through the fellowship program, Echoing Green supports this community of visionaries as they develop new solutions to society’s toughest problems. Founded by the leadership of the private equity firm General Atlantic in 1987, Echoing Green has supported more than 470 leaders sparking change in forty-one countries and forty-one states.
------------------------------------ OTHER 2009 FELLOWS ------------------------------------
Natalie Bridgeman – Accountability Counsel San Francisco, California
The Bold Idea: Partner with communities harmed by international finance and development projects to hold international institutions and corporations accountable and develop new accountability systems where none exist. Accountability Counsel partners directly with communities seeking redress for harm caused by development projects and works to create broad, systemic change through the creation of a new Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism (“FIAM”). At the grassroots level, Accountability Counsel conducts trainings regarding accountability tools and assists communities with strategies to implement those tools, including claims to accountability mechanisms and litigation.
Stephane de Messieres – Citizens Market Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Bold Idea: Leverage crowd-sourcing tools and citizen journalism to better inform consumers seeking to engage in ethical consumption and enable these consumers to use their full market power to influence environmental and social issues. Citizens Market is a user-generated website where anyone can contribute a review and a rating for any company's performance on a social or environmental issue. Consumers can access a company’s scores by searching the site or by using text messaging or a barcode scan for the product when purchasing. Citizens Market’s aim is to host a vibrant online community of 1 million information contributors.
Bethany Henderson – City Hall Fellows, Inc. Pasadena, California
The Bold Idea: Incentivize and empower diverse, top college graduates to tackle social ills from within existing government institutions, thus ensuring our cities have leaders capable of confronting cities’ myriad challenges. City Hall Fellows serve as special assistants to senior city managers working on substantive projects. During their Fellowship, Fellows engage in an extensive curriculum to explore how their city works, why it works that way and the people, organizations and issue that impact local policy making. City Hall Fellows received over 400 applications for its inaugural cohort of twenty-one Fellows. Bethany has plans to expand to multiple cities in the US and to increase the Fellowship class size to between 250 and 500 Fellows per year.
Eric Glustrom – Educate! Boulder, Colorado
The Bold Idea: Empower high school students in Uganda to become the next generation of socially responsible leaders through a two-year leadership curriculum and long-term mentoring that equips students to create social enterprises. Educate! disrupts the rote memorization-based education system in Uganda by equipping high school students to create social enterprises through a two-year socially responsible leadership curriculum, long-term mentoring, and an alumni network.
David del Ser – Frogtek New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Boost the productivity and income of small shopkeepers in the developing world with affordable business tools that can be run on mobile phones. Frogtek develops simple business tools using touchscreens and barcode readers that uneducated microentrepreneurs can use. The organization partners with local community organizations, microfinance institutions, and mobile carriers to distribute the tools.
Julie Carney and Emma Clippinger – Gardens for Health International Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Bold Idea: Enable HIV-positive individuals to improve their nutrition and health through low-cost sustainable agriculture practices. Gardens for Health International (GHI) provides legal support to communities of people living with HIV/AIDS, enabling them to form small business cooperatives and to gain access to arable land. GHI provides micro-loans to the cooperatives, delivers nutritional training and identifies and provides the initial investments for high impact agribusiness opportunities, such as tomato greenhouses, fruit tree nurseries, mushroom production and animal husbandry.
Barbara Bush and Jonny Dorsey – Global Health Corps New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Build the next generation of global health leaders and improve the quality of healthcare services for the poor by connecting outstanding young professionals from around the world with health-focused organizations. Global Health Corps (GHC) partners with organizations with proven success but limited resources to host international teams of young professionals for a yearlong fellowship. GHC recruits outstanding fellows from the U.S. and abroad who possess skills that will add immediate value to the organization and who show strong leadership potential.
Sarah Hemminger – Incentive Mentoring Program Baltimore, Maryland
The Bold Idea: Empower struggling teenagers to break the cycle of poverty, drugs and lack of education by surrounding them with “families” of mentors who fill critical gaps in academic and social support. The Incentive Mentoring Program (IMP) families coach life skills through activities based on three elements: academic assistance; community service; and team building. Without overburdening individual volunteers, a team of six to twelve mentors led by an experienced “head of household” can form customized solutions to the challenges these children and their families face.
Veena Ramanna – IndiaGoverns New Delhi, India
The Bold Idea: Change the nature of political discourse in India by providing constituency and Members of Parliament performance information to voters, citizen activists, and journalists. IndiaGoverns focuses on collecting, analyzing, and organizing development data, such as investments in infrastructure and schools, and performance data in politically meaningful terms. IndiaGoverns then uses community partnerships, mobile phone technology, and the internet to disseminate the information to the electorate.
Angie beatty and Shawn Mckie – The J.U.I.C.E. Project St. Louis, Missouri
The Bold Idea: Combat disease mortality in inner cities by reimagining the corner store as a one-stop shop for nutritious yet affordable food, free exercise training/activities, media/health literacy education, and art programs. Situated in a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood, The J.U.I.C.E. Project provides free and on-site programming that blends media/health literacy education with physical exercise and art for social change. They empower youth to make healthy lifestyle choices by helping them understand how food, physical activity, and behaviors (e.g. heavy television, alcohol, and tobacco consumption) impact their physical and mental health.
Esra’a Al Shafei – Mideast Youth Manama, Bahrain
The Bold Idea: Connect youth from the Middle East and North Africa online to promote human rights, religious freedom, tolerance, and free speech. Mideast Youth provides the only creative space for youth to freely express themselves, and exchange information, experiences, views, and opinions, visibly involving various minorities who have been persecuted, censored, and violently discriminated against for decades.
Dhruv Lakra – Mirakle Couriers Mumbai, India
The Bold Idea: Create meaningful and sustainable employment opportunities for low-income deaf adults in India, thereby increasing their standard of living and making them economically independent. Mirakle Couriers is a full-service courier company that offers delivery and tracking services to clients in Mumbai. All delivery and back office functions will be performed by deaf employees. In addition to providing job training, Mirakle Couriers provides life skills training for their employees including personal financial management.
Adam Stofsky – New Media Advocacy Project New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Empower defenders of human rights and social justice by integrating video and internet social networking into their advocacy strategy, enabling them win their legal cases and organize communities. New Media Advocacy Project will pioneer strategies for using video in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities. It will use social networking to give advocates an unprecedented connection to their client communities, allowing them to locate the best witnesses and gather evidence.
Planes from numerous countries are scouring the Atlantic Ocean looking for signs of the Airbus 330 that recently disappeared en-route from Brazil to France. The search is relying upon a report of another passenger flight seeing something in the ocean, and has been limited by the inevitable setting of the sun. This got us thinking: there has got to be a more efficient way to conduct the search.
While the current on-the-ground search should, of course, be continued, these efforts could easily tap into the power of the crowd to put thousands of eyes to work -- both around the world, and around the clock. Utilizing real-time satellite images, people anywhere could zoom into specific regions of these photographs and scour them for signs of wreckage. Because everything is GPS-referenced, users could then tag any areas that show signs of the plane, and this information would be accessible to those conducting the search in the area of interest. This would increase efficiency in two ways: firstly, it would increase the overall number of people participating in the search for debris, and secondly, it would allow those with specific search and rescue expertise to focus in on regions that are noted of interest, rather than dispersing their focus throughout the entire Ocean. Adam Smith would be proud of this division of labor: it would allow hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens to focus on a specific task that contributes to the whole search process, while those with search-expertise can focus on specific areas with their equipment rather than disperse their expertise and their resources throughout the Atlantic.
What do you think? How else could search efforts like this tap into "The Crowd?" Leave your thoughts in our comments section!
Images from Associated Press.
---
Alex Budak is a recent graduate of UCLA and is currently
pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Georgetown University,
with a focus on Technology and Social Entrepreneurship. He is joining
The Extraordinaries this summer as a Research Fellow.
Produced
and hosted by Jon Gordon, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter based in
Silicon Valley, this daily "journal of the Digital Age" airs during
broadcasts of CBC's As It Happens and Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Edition.
Boston, MA – June 17, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce
that we have won an important grant from the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation (http://www.KnightFoundation.org).
This is a breakthrough moment for our team, and we are incredibly
grateful to the Knight Foundation for this opportunity. With this
critical grant, The Extraordinaries will run an intensive pilot in San
Jose, California featuring our volunteer-on-demand software. Over the
next year, we'll be working closely with nonprofits and community
organizations in San Jose to engage and harness the enthusiasm of their
volunteers. 