Tag Archive: social


Potential presidential contenders Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee will all make appearances in Iowa this month, throwing more speculative fuel on the already fiery debate over the Republican party’s pick for the 2012 election.

Their visits are also turning the state into a culture war battle ground, and Huckabee launched a fresh attack this weekend by celebrating the national “significance” of Iowa’s decision to oust three state Supreme Court justices who approved same-sex marriage.

“The significance and historic nature of the judicial elections here in Iowa were far bigger than the borders of Iowa,” said Huckabee in a speech at an evangelical gathering Sunday. “It was a very important statement that voters made, a statement that resonated across the country and one that I think will give legs to a larger movement over the next few years.”

The Iowa justice recalls were a rallying cry for social conservatives this overwhelmingly money-minded election year, and Huckabee made sure to stay on top of the waning tide: he stoked the flames in June by refusing popular Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ calls for a “truce” on social issues.

“The issue of life and traditional marriage are not bargaining chips nor are they political issues. They are moral issues,” Huckabee insisted at the time. Though certainly heartfelt, Huckabee’s latest outburst also reveals insight into his 2012 strategy.

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You might think that more water would be the last thing a flood victim would want to see, but gaining access to clean drinking water can mean the difference between life and death after a devastating deluge.

Floods not only hold the devastating potential to displace thousands of people from their homes, and kill or injure those in its path, but the surges often cut off large populations of people from food, medical supplies and potable water. Without access to these vital resources, health risks and fatalities can multiply exponentially in a matter of days or even hours.

In many cases these horrible circumstances are compounded by the fact that for those who were homeless before a flood, gaining access to clean water was already an enormous challenge. As Change.org blogger Steven Samra pointed out earlier this year, when massive floods swept through Nashville in May, residents of the city’s largest homeless encampment not only lost all their personal possessions, but also lacked the social safety net available to those who had been previously housed. Unable to access local, state or federal aid, without the assistance of housed friends and family, and dislocated from what limited resources (food, water, etc.) they may have had before the flood, many peoples’ situation went from bad to worse.

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Looking for some cupcakes or cookies with rainbow frosting on them, to celebrate National Coming Out Day? Don’t head to Just Cookies in Indianapolis. The bakery, inside Indianapolis’ City Market, refused to accept an order from a gay student group at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Why?

According to the man who owns the bakery, rainbow cupcakes and cookies celebrating LGBT pride violate the values of the bakery.

“I explained we’re a family-run business, we have two young, impressionable daughters and we thought maybe it was best not to do that,” said co-owner David Stockton to a local Fox television station. He then added that it’s his bakery’s decision to decide what is obscene. Apparently rainbow colors fall under that label. “We have our values, and you know, some things … for instance, if someone wants a cookie with an obscenity, well, we’re not going to do that.”

All of a sudden making cookies and cupcakes for a gay student group is against family values? So much for customer service, and so much for making a good impression on those daughters, who were just shown by their parents that discrimination can come in the form of baked goods. Meanwhile, the Indianapolis City Market has a mission to enrich “the city’s economy, expands its educational options, enhances its culture.” Having vendors that refuse to serve LGBT customers doesn’t do any of that.

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War Widows: Sri Lankan Women Take Charge

They don’t beg for pity. At home they’re boss. They wield a hammer by day and at night cradle their children. These are the women of northern Sri Lanka. Some 15 months after the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan authorities stopped, these women have become sort of superheroes. With their husbands lost in the fighting, war widows are taking charge of their families and their neighborhoods, too.

The idea of a female-headed household is hardly implausible. In many South American countries women have organized to gain independence in their male-dominated clans. In Sri Lanka, what’s impressive is the speed with which these households grow (some 40,000 in the north, according to the Center for Women and Development).

What forced these women to fend for their families is necessity. A fierce civil war that began in the 1970s claimed the lives of thousands of citizens. Many males died, disappeared or are still in the custody of authorities. What might have been an effective strategy to dismantle the opposition has left homes without their traditional breadwinners.

Enter war widows. They tend to their homes, feed the children and work in hard labor jobs by day. The numbers are increasing: 89,000 of them in the east and north according to official figures.

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Respect Labor Rights in Mexico.

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Respect Labor Rights in Mexico.

I think the single most important thing for our field to be engaged in is creating the institutions of self-propogation. Put differently, I think we need to be investing heavily in universities, incubators, and other programs which make careers in social innovation and entrepreneurship both more realistic and more likely to make a difference. For that reason, I was incredibly excited to see that Legacy Ventures has entered into a strategic partnership to support Ashoka U.

Ashoka U is the university-focused program of Ashoka, one of the longstanding leaders of this field. For the last two years, it has been convening students, staff, and faculty at just under a dozen universities around the country in order to build their capacity to work with their administrations to design social entrepreneurship programs that meet the particular needs of their disctint campus environments.

I think it’s infrastructure approach is the right one. When we started building out our programs at Northwestern around 2004, it took a broad range of students with connections to array of staff and faculty who were starting a diversity of different but related initiatives to really push the campus from thinking about our work as neat but small to an essential category of student activity to embed at the core of the NU experience. That sort of shift only happens when you have the right insiders empowered, and the Ashoka U program is in a particularly good place to help students learn how to do this most effectively.

Legacy Venture is a fund-of-fund that invests in a cohort of top tier for-profit venture firms and then delivers those returns to specific philanthropic causes. In this way, it not only creates a differentiated pool of resources for philanthropic investment, but creates a specific pipeline conversation between the for-profit venture space and the social venture world that I think is as, if not more, valuable, at this early stage in the industry.

Legacy is making a $100,000 investment in Ashoka U. The money will help Ashoka U triple the size of it’s consortium of Changemaker Campuses over the next five years. That would mean expanding from it’s current crop that includes: Babson, College of the Atlantic, Cornell, George Mason, Johns Hopkins, the New School, Tulane, UC Boulder, and the University of Maryland. This is one more example of the expanding focus on human capacity that I think is driving the startup space.

To learn more about Ashoka U, visit their website.

Photo Credit: soot+chalk

Legacy Ventures and Ashoka U Partner to Amplify the Human Capacity Pipeline

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