Month: June 2014

A Worldwide Exploration Right In Our Backyard

Posted on by Case Foundation

This post was written by Abigail Hunter, Daniela Fernandez and J.D. Brady on behalf of the Case Foundation:

Earlier this month, members of the Case Foundation team attended the 2014 National Geographic Explorers Symposium— a two-day event with the world’s top explorers who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge and discovery. This year’s Explorers Symposium was part of the society’s 125th anniversary and a celebration of fearless adventurers, scientists, photographers and storytellers who are making a difference. The common theme shared among all their presentations: we must be innovative when addressing challenges.

Here’s a brief recap highlighting key takeaways:

Food for Thought

Author and activist, Tristram Stuart discussed one of the most critical challenges we face with our global food system: food waste. According to Stuart growing more food isn’t the solution to solve world hunger, instead reforming the current food distribution system is key. Jerry Glover, agricultural ecologist, also spoke on the importance of ensuring regional food security, emphasizing the challenges of population growth, soil erosion and soil degradation. In addition to discussing the importance of domestic and global food security, ecologist and epidemiologist Christopher Golden highlighted the connection between environmental changes in the wildlife and human well-being. Although each of the panelists brought forth unique perspectives, they all agreed on the principle of viewing world problems as opportunities for change rather than seeing problems as stagnant obstacles.

Innovative Approaches

Evolutionary biologist Ryan Carney, robotics engineer Robert Wood and multimedia artist Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) recounted new techniques in their respective fields that were fearless in their approach and pushing boundaries. Miller defined an explorer as someone who takes the established position of the world around them and pivots, which resonated with the theme of the panel. During the question and answer session all three addressed the question of risk in their work, stating that you must push past the risk to accomplish something worthwhile. As Robert Wood eloquently put it: “If we know how to do it, it’s not risky enough.”

Pushing Boundaries

Photographer Cory Richards, a pioneer in educating female populations in Afghanistan Shabana Basij-Rasikh and geographer Kendra McSweeney, who studied the effects of drug trafficking on cultures in Honduras explored the theme of “Pushing Boundaries.” The panel emphasized the emotional connection needed to push past obstacles and make a difference in local communities. Shabana told both the dangers she faced attending school in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the work she is currently undertaking to help girls still affected by limited education opportunities.

Exploration in Progress

The final feature showcased a handful of speakers, who each spent up to three minutes giving “rapid fire updates” on their recent activities. Photojournalist Reza Deghati gave an especially memorable update on his work training refugee children in photography, video, and design so they can become visual storytellers. “I believe in the power of pictures for social change,” said Deghati while showing the audience photographs refugee children took of their surroundings. Another notable talk came from ethnobotanist Maria Fadiman, whose upcoming project will include a book that preserves the cultural, linguistic, and ecological heritage of the Ha people in Tanzania. Her project combines culture, language and photography as a means of addressing preservation issues.

With the wide variety of topics, the 2014 National Geographic Explorers Symposium evidenced the potential of collaborative and innovative projects to solve global challenges. We were honored to join these worldwide travelers along their journey. Learn more about the speakers HERE and follow @NatGeoExplorers on Twitter to stay connected and follow the explorers along the way.

A New Chapter for Impact Investing

Posted on by Case Foundation

Today marks a major milestone for impact investing. Leading corporations, banks, foundations and individuals—including Prudential, the Omidyar Network, and Capricorn Investment Group—gathered at the White House and committed to invest more than $1.5 billion in new capital into companies and funds that strive to generate positive financial and social returns.

To learn more about this groundbreaking capital commitment and how individual philanthropists, family offices, private foundations, private investment firms and venture capitalists can deploy capital through their own platforms, read the new piece by Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation, in The Huffington Post.

In addition to the private sector commitments, several U.S. government agencies, including the Small Business Administration, USAID, and Treasury, also announced programs to support impact investments and social enterprises today. The White House released additional details on the event and commitments on its official blog.

These commitments were complemented by the release of a new report from the U.S. National Advisory Board to the Social Impact Investment Task Force—Private Capital, Public Good: How Smart Federal Policy can Galvanize Impact Investing—and Why It’s Urgent. Since its creation in 2013, the Advisory Board has engaged with hundreds of stakeholders in the impact investing field—from policymakers to foundation leaders to institutional investors and many others—to surface the most compelling recommendations for policies that would support the increase of the amount of private capital that is committed to social change. The report serves as a tool for policy makers and provides recommendations for how federal policies can spur the growth of impact investing.

There is a growing number of investors who want their investment dollars to better represent their values and who are interested in exploring ways that they can do good not only through philanthropy, but also by mobilizing their investment capital. Together, we can forge a path through capital investments and policy changes to lift up market-based solutions for a more meaningful return.

Want to learn more about the Case Foundation’s efforts to support the impact investing ecosystem? Check out our Impact Investing page and follow the team on Twitter at @CaseFoundation.

Meet the MCON14 Be Fearless Pitch It Challengers

Posted on by Case Foundation

Congratulations to the MCON14 Be Fearless Pitch It finalists! New this year at the Millennial engagement conference, MCON14, the Case Foundation will host the first ever Be Fearless Pitch It challenge exclusively for Millennial social entrepreneurs. Up for grabs is $2,000, which the winner can use to help turn their idea into a reality. Both in-person attendees as well as live stream viewers will be able to watch all three pitches and vote to help determine the winner. Be sure to cast your vote on June 19 at 10:50 AM CT by tuning into the livestream at www.themillennialimpact.com.

Here’s a special sneak peak about each of the final three organizations—Ecoviate, Give Mob and Scholarships Expanding Education—and how their big ideas embody the Be Fearless principles.

What goals are you working towards at your organization? How would the grand prize from the Challenge help you achieve that goal?

Ecoviate – Our ultimate goal is to eradicate global warming. Sounds crazy, right? We currently have two technologies, the EcoTube and Greenshields, that reduce emissions from transportation and the industrial sector. We are working towards launching our products after an initial pilot phase. So far, we have bootstrapped and hacked our way into prototypes, testing, and a pilot program. The MCON funds will help us remain fearless with our approach and give us the capital to further perfect our design and go-to-market strategy. We are doing this because we want to show the kids of the world that even teenagers can do impactful things in their own lives with limited resources.

Give Mob – At GiveMob we strive to inspire small acts of kindness that anyone, regardless of age, can participate in. We hope to make charitable giving as easy, accessible, and intuitive as possible on mobile. Our goal is to become the primary way individuals discover, explore, and give to nonprofit and charitable causes while on their mobile devices.

Scholarships Expanding Education – When we initially developed the SEE concept, our outlook centered around scaling the platform quickly. It became clear, however, that long-term, sustainable growth will result from exceptional SEE scholarship organizer experiences. Our goal is to have each SEE user come away from their SEE experience saying, “Wow…that was cool. I did something there”. We want to craft philanthropic experiences that are meaningful and personal. We’re willing to trade slower growth, in the short term, for the awesome stories that will emerge from investing in the experience of each user.

What fearless approaches have you implemented in your life/organization?

Ecoviate – We strongly believe that age is not a determining factor to success. The Ecoviate team consists of some of the brightest young minds in the country. We know that our age is not a limiting factor. The beauty of being young is that it gives you room to take risk and be bold with your pursuits. Using our fearless story, we want to show other kids around the world that they too have the ability to build the future that they want to see.

Give Mob – If we were to win the MCON funds, we would put it towards development of Version 2 of our iPhone and Android app. In the past few months, we’ve learned an immense amount about how people are using and interacting with our app, and we know exactly what we need to improve on. We also have a few new features, including location-based giving and offline interactions, that we are exploring.

Scholarships Expanding Education – We came up with the SEE scholarship creation concept in early 2013. We had what we thought was a great idea, a platform where anyone can create a named scholarship in honor of a loved one, but we had no computer programming experience and no money. During that final semester at Wesleyan I decided to teach myself enough computer programming to build a simple prototype that we could use to explain the concept. I would go to forums, copy and paste snippets of code, and pretty much just see what happened. After five months of this, I managed to cobble together a platform that actually worked. The thing was a mess, but it worked. We built up enough courage to launch it at giveandsee.org as a beta-version of our platform and over the past six months, we’ve helped create 20 scholarships that have raised over $15,000. Putting the platform out there was a bit scary, but the experience has been incredible.

Do you have a question to ask these millennial entrepreneurs? Leave a comment or tweet us at @CaseFoundation with the hashtag #MCON14.

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Ecoviate

Ecoviate creates sustainable technologies and empowers others to do the exact same. To see their incredible work, visit www.ecoviate.com

Give Mob

GiveMob was developed with the idea that mobile giving can and should be as seamless and accessible as possible. GiveMob is a charitable giving app for iPhone and Android that allows users to donate a small sum of money ($5-$10) to featured charities through SMS. Visit www.givemobapp.org to learn more.

Scholarships Expanding Education (SEE)

Scholarships Expanding Education (SEE) provides the necessary tools and logistical support for anyone to create, and fundraise for, a named scholarship in honor of a loved one. Anyone can create a SEE scholarship at giveandsee.org.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Millennials

Posted on by Case Foundation

The Case Foundation invites you to join us at MCON14—a special convening on Millennial engagement—June 18 and 19, 2014, in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Together, we’ll explore how this fearless generation is redefining issues in our communities, building movements to create change and using their talents and resources to inspire peers.

The four themes we’ll be covering at MCON14 include:

  • Culture: How organizations and companies can redefine culture in order to build stronger businesses.
  • Relationships: How technologies build transparent relationships among constituents and consumers.
  • Movements: How Millennials are using communities and a common purpose to promote change.
  • Resources: How to use talent and financial resources to build stronger products, services and human centered organizations.

Whether you join us in-person (register) or via livestream (free), you’ll be able to hear unique insights from our own Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation Dale Partridge of Sevenly; Sujean Lee of Chobani; Justin Herman of the Federal government; Paulie Harraka the NASCAR driver; and many more talented changemakers.

You’ll also be one of the first to hear new findings from the 2014 Millennial Impact Report—part of the ongoing Millennial Impact Project. To date, more than 16,000 Millennials and 50 partners have participated in the project to amplify the voices of this generation. This year the report focuses on corporate engagement with Millennials and offers fresh perspectives straight from Millennial respondents.

Can’t make it? Follow along on Twitter at @CaseFoundation and #MCON14 for live updates from the team.

The Case Foundation is the proud Presenting and Founding sponsor of MCON14 and the official Research and Insights partner for the Millennial Impact Project.

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