Last Tuesday rounded out my week of action-packed, star-studded microfinance bliss.  The micro-marathon began the previous Wednesday, when I arrived in San Francisco for the second annual Microfinance USA Conference, which brought together professionals working internationally and in the burgeoning domestic microfinance field to share best practices and discuss the next frontier of poverty alleviation.

I arrived back in Seattle just in time to catch Muhammad Yunus give a Town Hall lecture about his latest book, Building Social Business.  I expected my evening in the presence of the father of microfinance to be the fitting capstone to my microadventures, only to be surprised with an opportunity to see Dr. Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC–yet another highly successful and well-established poverty alleviation organization–speak on two days later.

All that microfinance mania resulted in a broad array of industry perspectives, predictions, and personalities.  Here are some highlights:

The Neverending Story. Additional services MFIs could offer—such as business education, agricultural development, and health care—was a major theme both at the conference and in the subsequent lectures in Seattle.  BRAC offers incredibly comprehensive social programs in Bangladesh in tandem with the banking services the organization offers.  In addition to establishing primary schools and extensive public health initiatives, BRAC has been using social businesses—the theme of Yunus’ lecture and book—to answer clients’ needs since the 70s.  Dr. Ahbed explained that originally these businesses, such as urban retail outlets to market rural artisan goods, were called Program Support Enterprises and evolved from market opportunities to service clients.

To Profit or Not to Profit? This question came up on many of the conference panels, and is a debate Yunus has weighed in on in the past. Elizabeth Funk of the Dignity Fund addressed the fear that for-profit lenders will unreasonably inflate interest rates for excess profit.  Funk argued that market forces and wise investors would eventually disallow excess profit, but acknowledged that in a young industry abuses are slower to be corrected.  Funk also brought up “mission drift,” or the fear that institutions will lose focus on poverty in favor of profit.  Funk reasoned that in cases when people at slightly higher socioeconomic levels seek loans, it’s often to expand small business, which could lead to more employment opportunities.

Stephanie Cohn gave a great rundown of the pragmatic, high-level approach the Omidyar Network uses to maximize the social impact of their investments.  She used three examples to illustrate the spectrum of this flexible approach: 1) Grants in areas where subsidized capital is needed, such as communities with little financial literacy; 2) For-profit investment in areas that can reasonably offer a market return; 3) A hybrid of the two.  Cohn explained that it’s not so much about tradeoffs between for-profit and non-profit approaches as deliberate sequencing and deciding what is appropriate for each market.

The first microfinance institution in India to go public, SKS, came up several times at the conference.  Maya Chorengel of Elevar Equity pointed out that SKS has had an extraordinary rate of growth that’s made it the largest MFI in the world (over 6 million borrowers with almost $1 billion portfolio), which would not have been able to achieve without employing market-driven financial tools.  Chorengel compared this to the slow-growing pace generally facilitated by private donors and foundations, which makes it difficult to rapidly expand and reach more borrowers.

A Brave New World. Technology is enhancing microfinance worldwide, particularly the opportunities that widespread cell phone proliferation provide.  Kenya’s M-PESA system was cited at the conference as a preview into the future of mobile banking, and has been the subject of recent blogposts by David Roodman and Ignacio Mas.  The importance of wireless technology for tracking information in the field and possibilities such as mobile microinsurance came up as well.

Chuck Slaughter, CEO of Living Goods, summarized his vision of Microfinance 2.0 quite succinctly: franchising.  Microsavings was another hot topic.  Abed envisoned a collaborative frontier that facilitates “brain circulation” rather than “brain drain.”  Amidst all the opinions and predictions for what will be next for microfinance, there seemed to be a consensus that transparency and consumer protection are crucial for ensuring an honest, socially successful future in microfinance domestically and abroad.

Happy (belated) World Fair Trade Day!

After my colleague Melinda told me about a cool fair trade company she’d recently discovered, I decided some arduous primary research was in order.  I eyed the glossy wrapper of a bar that claimed to contain “Heavenly Chocolate with a heart,” took a deep breath, and sampled the 70% dark chocolate inside.  Mmmm…now that I can safely vouch for the blissful sensory experience that Divine Chocolate’s name implies, I thought I should explore the “heart” of the products and the story behind their creation.

I didn’t have to look further than the inside of the wrapper for the second phase of my research.  Assuming that a Divine bar consumer doesn’t tear the packaging to shreds in a hasty craving-fueled frenzy, he or she is treated to a rich organizational narrative printed on the paper jacket in addition to the rich cocoa it contains.

The Divine story begins in 1879, when the first cocoa was exported from Ghana.  During the next century, cocoa farmers in Ghana have endured a “precarious business” in which “the world price for cocoa often dips below the level at which it pays enough for small-scale farmers to survive.”  In order to weather the tumultuous industry more effectively,  a group of farmers banded together in 1993 to form the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative.

By 1997, the farmers had secured outside investors and were able to launch their own fair trade chocolate company in the United Kingdom.  Profits that Kuapa Kokoo members earn from Divine Chocolate sales are invested in their communities so that “each year more villages can sink their own drinking water wells, build schools, or benefit from healthcare schemes.”

A few years ago, Divine Chocolate crossed the Atlantic thanks to investments from Oikocredit, Lutheran World Relief, and Serrv international.  Chocolate from the Kuapa Kokoo cocoa farms has been available in the US since 2007, and can now be found at over one thousand locations across the country.

To learn more about how you can support fair trade companies like Divine Chocolate, visit OikocreditUSA.

Like many kids, my mother scolded me as a child for picking at my food or complaining about things that I didn’t have.  “There are people in this world that are starving!  Be thankful for what you have!”

Despite my mother’s regular reminders that children in other countries were starving, extreme poverty did not truly register for me until I was about fifteen, when on one of our family vacations, our flight (oddly) had a layover in the Port-au-Prince airport.

It is possible that I have blown the significance of this event in my life out of proportion, but I like to think of my descent and ascent out of Port-au-Prince as the moment when the word “poverty” finally gained meaning for me.  Even from a bird’s-eye view, the suffering was apparent and shocking.

The concept of social injustice was nothing new to me at this point.  I was raised in a politically active household, and as far back as I can remember, current political events were nightly dinner topics discussed between my parents.  After viewing the Port-au-Prince slums however, dinner table debates over local zoning laws or criminal rights just seemed comparatively unimportant.

I feel lucky to be immersed in a circle where my family, friends and colleagues are passionate and sympathetic people with dynamic interests.  Every day I am introduced to new worthwhile causes.  Unfortunately, with this knowledge sometimes comes a sense of self-doubt. I sometimes wonder if perhaps the energy I spend on poverty alleviation has been misplaced.

This week, I spent some time speaking with my wise colleagues at Re-Vision Labs on this topic, and I found many similarities in their stories.  Most had stumbled across their passions.  Their initial interests were circumstantial, reflections of their immediate surroundings.  Once you head down a path working for a particular injustice, it grows its own momentum.  You learn more about related causes, and your skills become tailored to your interests.

At some point, all of my coworkers have been introduced to other worthwhile causes.  I was expecting to hear from them more about how they reconcile spending their time on one thing when there may be something else out there that is more urgent.  For most however, this does not seem to be something that really weighs upon them.  I encountered a general sentiment that most causes on our radars are interrelated and equally important.  You spend your energy where you can be most effective, and if an opportunity to support another cause through your established networks presents itself, then capitalize on it.

In hindsight, my findings shouldn’t surprise me at all.  After all, RVL’s mission is founded upon the power of communities to be vehicles for innovative solutions.  It seems like the passions that drive us are little bit like communities themselves: undeniably interconnected, often unpredictable, and potentially  world-changing.

This post originally appeared on One Green Generation.

A couple of years ago I met a wonderful woman, who inspired me very much with her stories of the vanilla growers around the world.  Much as the small coffee, sugar cane, tea, and cocoa growers struggle against corporate giants, so too, do the vanilla workers.

And there is another battle the vanilla growers fight:  the battle against synthetic vanilla flavoring.  Did you know that most of vanilla “flavoring” is not vanilla, but synthesized chemicals from a laboratory?  Check the label:  if the label says “vanillin,” it is likely synthetic.  And if it is an imported bottle, unless it is at least $20 and is 35% alcohol, it is probably synthetic or at least partially so – regardless of what the label says.

It takes 3 years before a vanilla vine is mature enough to produce a vanilla bean.  Once a flower forms, it must be hand pollinated within a few hours of opening, and then the bean sits on the vine for 9 months before it is ready to be picked!  Once picked, it must go through a curing, drying, and resting process which gives it its rich flavor and aroma.

Small vanilla growers care deeply for the vines, the earth, and the rain forests in which the vanilla grows.  And yet often they don’t earn enough money to adequately feed and clothe their families, pay for schooling for their children, nor have access to basic medical care.

In 2005, Patricia Rain nearly single-handedly created a distribution and information network of thousands of vanilla growers around the world, to help empower them.  She has persevered in her work, despite cancer that has hit her body more than once, and works against the odds to do whatever she can for the growers: helping create strategies for marketing their crops – including creating an online distribution hub, navigating Fair Trade and organic certification, and creating a united position for fair wages and the opportunity for better lives for vanilla farmers and their families. Many call Patricia “The Vanilla Queen”.

But Patricia would be upset with me if I made this post about her.  Because it is not about her, it is about the vanilla growers and their ability to change their own industry for the better.   And it is about you and I, who have the power to help them:  we can help each of the vanilla, coffee, tea, cocoa, and sugar growers around the world – simply by be conscious of our buying choices.

It is worth it to buy Fair Trade, organically grown products because we are all in this one world together.  Fair Trade reflects the true cost of a product, so that the people that grow and cure the crops are able to live a decent, happy life.

Understanding weather patterns gives us a better understanding of the delicate world around us and how little signs can be indicators of overall trends.  In college, I was fascinated with mathematics.  In Differential Equations, we were shown footage of the Narrows Bridge and I watched as the bridge contorted to collapse.  I was asked to examine the model and solve for the threshold of structural capacity (the breaking point of the bridge).   Needless to say I fell in love, who wouldn’t?

Then I was introduced to Chaos Math, modeling life: I was captivated.  Chaos, in simple terms, is a differential  equation with infinite variables all constantly changing.  A homogeneous differential equation is balanced by a sum greater than or equal to zero.  Our weather is a homogeneous chaotic system, infinite variables constantly moving toward balance or zero.  Temperature, air presser, humidity’s, etc., all seek to balance themselves in their immediate environment and that can be described using chaos math.

Our weather system has an infinite number of variables, which makes for a complex system. Events happen seemingly out of nowhere and appear random when in fact they are not.  The classic example is a butterfly flapping their wings in Australia that helps to cause a tornado in Mississippi. That may seem farfetched, but the idea is that everything is tied together in one system.  That butterfly had a very small part of the equation that balanced out with a tornado.  No matter how small the effect, it was there, that is why we call the system “chaotic.” When an infinite amount of variables exist it is impossible to determine the next set of events with certainty, but we use trends to watch the health of the system and where paths might leads us.

Why is this significant?  Well, if you follow the debate over climate change, you’ve heard a lot of arguments around a trend of global warming—the year’s average temperature increasing—which is merely an indicator that an imbalance exists.

What you are probably noticing all around the world are temperatures becoming less consistent with the season, as well as having elements of extreme outliers. Every year it seems records are broken for high and low temperature.  Storm cycles are becoming increasingly extreme, colder, wetter, and longer; on the other extreme drought periods, dryer, hotter, for longer; the evidence is worldwide.

This is what I see every day: a system out of balance using large and sometimes violent systems toward its efforts to balance, pushing the system into greater and greater oscillations; reminding me of the narrows bridge.  The Narrows fell because the wind blew through the channel in a perfect pattern, like pushing a kid on a swing.  For the engineers, it was an unforeseeable occurrence they could not have anticipated.

As for the weather, the earth was made with circular systems that all complement each other.  Plants absorb CO2 and produces O2, animals the opposite; except the system could not account for our energy producing CO2 as well.  So, the yearly deficit is culminating an enormous debt.  Climbing CO2 levels in our atmosphere are an unforeseen occurrence that Earth’s weather system cannot accommodate.  CO2 and other toxic gases in our atmosphere are the culprits, they are taking the system off course and that’s where chaos can become dangerous.  The system has started to wobble, if we do not find a way to balance CO2 levels in our atmosphere, the system will oscillate past its relative threshold and violently correct itself or collapse.

Earlier this month, the F5 Expo, a conference for businesses professionals on the changing trends and technologies of the Internet, took place in Vancouver.

I had no idea it had even occurred until today when I happened to strike up a conversation with my co-worker Barb about blogging, creating online community, understanding what role social media is currently playing in our world today, and attempting to understand what role social media will play in our future world.

To give you some background, I work as an Admission Counsellor at Quest University Canada in Squamish, BC. My job as an Admission Counsellor is to create a community for Quest. I spread the word about Quest help bring students to campus who then become part of the Quest community. I do this generally by zipping around British Columbia and sometimes the U.S. visiting high schools and attempting to meet prospective students in person to speak with them about what our university can offer.

Of course, like any self-respecting university (and perhaps, as Social Media becomes more widespread, like any self-respecting business), we also try to engage prospective students in the Quest community through social media.

The social media aspect is more Barb’s job than mine. She puts together a website showcasing the Quest community in an unfiltered and open way (the site launches on May 17th). This website is meant to be interactive; it allows current Quest students to blog at their leisure, post whatever pictures they want, and essentially express themselves freely. The idea is that prospective students will log onto this site to interact with the Quest community. In this manner, they get to see the Quest students in action – no face to face recruiting necessary, which ultimately saves us time spent traveling to schools and saves prospective students time traveling to visit our campus.

As Barb and I were talking about the benefits of blogging and using social media to create community around Quest, we both found our conversation converging on a common point: Social Media isn’t the be all, end all to marketing strategies and community building. Our stats in the Admission Office, for example, show that the personal visits we make as Admission Counsellors to high schools are by far the most effective in recruiting students despite the fact that the upcoming generation of youth are supposed to be more “plugged in” than any other generation preceding them!

It was at this point that Barb mentioned she had attended the F5 Expo in Vancouver on internet technologies and social media. The infamous Malcolm Gladwell, author of the New York Times Best Sellers The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, was the keynote speaker of the Expo. In case you haven’t heard of Gladwell, he’s quite possibly one of the most notable and respected forecasters and analysts of pop culture trends of our time. All four of his books have given society important insight into how society itself functions.

Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s speech was therefore the much awaited event of the F5 Expo, but what Gladwell said absolutely shocked the gathering of social media gurus, Twitter maniacs, and Facebook zealots. According to Barb (and a lot of other blogs out there if you care to look), Gladwell basically said that social media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Shocking! At a conference on Social Media? The nerve of that man!

Gladwell most definitely did not say that Social Media was a complete waste of time. On the contrary, social media strategies are useful in building community, awareness, and followers – look no further than Barack Obama who built a good portion of his campaign through social media if you want proof on the usefulness of social media. What Malcolm wanted to emphasize is that the relationships we build online through Twitter, through Facebook, and all the other myriad of social networking sites are really quite weak. Would a Twitter follower of yours ever stick their neck out for you? I doubt it…

Gladwell’s told his audience that if they truly want to network to the best of their abilities, then they must do it in person. It’s the personal relationships that culminate in mutual respect and trust, and if you want to build a successful business, corporate empire, or world changing movement, it’s that personal interaction that you need to incorporate in your big plan. So while Social Media is useful in building community initially, proper care and attention needs to be devoted to ensuring that the online community is reflected in the real world as a real community.

Re-Vision Labs does exactly this. They build community online, but they also manifest it offline.They have moved beyond the social media hype to integrate more traditional methods of face to face community building with social media strategies to create solid and real-world networks of respect and trust, and that’s a recipe for success. I’m proud to be able to say that I’ve been a part of a company that knows how to take community in its shallower online manifestation to its stronger, more tangible manifestation of face to face interaction.

To be entirely cliche and a little bit corny, RVL knows how to ‘keep it real!’ As we move forward into our understanding of how social media is affecting the way we live and work, being able to effectively channel social media efforts to ‘keep it real’ will become more and more important.

The GoGreen Conference at the Hyatt, Olive 8 was a modest explosion of various who’s who in this and that in the progressive, green-loving arena.  A particular session, Social Media and Your Sustainable Message: Maximizing Outreach Through Online Forums had me itching to intrude with answers to audience questions, but as the sworn-to-silence videographer, I thought it tacky to turn the camera unto myself. This would have been particularly obnoxious, given I was standing in everyone’s way to begin with.  I’ve included summaries of the panelists’ answers, as well as my responses to questions I considered especially relevant to social media strategy.

Q: How much labor does social networking take?

No time at all if you:

1. Know what your objectives are before diving into Twitter, Facebook, etc.

2. Are an efficient social medialite because of fulfilling #1.

At Re-Vision Labs (@RVLcommunity), my objectives are as follows:

1. Connect with a community of news sources, thought leaders, and interested parties around Government 2.0, Environment, Education,Global Development,  Community and Social Media (the last being my personal favorite, of course).

2. Engage with these folks and organizations online.

All one needs to do is spend a week (or really, a couple full days) building an infrastructure which makes achieving the above objectives really easy.  This infrastructure falls into two broad categories in Twitter:

1. Populate Twitter lists

2. Create a loose daily quota sytem of # RTs, DMs, @Replies, Bit.ly links, and “Original Thoughts” (as I call it) to ensure daily engagement that neither overwhelms you nor allows you to slack off, nor, most importantly, ensures you don’t become a Twitter Tool.

And on Re-Vision Labs Facebook (in which content can actually be more influential because it addresses a more intimate audience typically, but is actually harder in my opinion to engage people as a business site without the same wall-to-wall commenting options as individual sites):

1. Have a just plain cool site with pithy and/or interaction-reaction oriented wall posts, a colorful photo album, video gallery, polls, and, my personal favorite, friend highlights.

2. Invite friends to fan your page with personalized messages.

Ricardo Rabago from PCC Natural Markets immediately said, “It takes A LOT of labor,” to my surprise.  But I realized he was referring to his birth into the Twitter and Facebook universe.  The getting started phase is always a drag. But it gets exponentially easier once you build an infrastructure.  The most important question to ask yourself before fully committing to a social media strategy is, as Robago eventually asks the audience, “How do you develop a system where the information is coming to you?”

Re-Vision Labs founding partner Gabriel Scheer, on the other hand, responded, “Twitter can also be pretty lightweight.  Depending on what your strategy is, you can just check in once in a while and see what your followers are doing, whether you’re following anyone.”  It is what you make of it.  Like college, or intramural sports, or Basket Weaving 101.

Nik Blosser, Founder and President of Celilo Group Media summed it up best, in my opinion: “15 to 30 minutes a day, which isn’t a lot of time, but you do have to build it into your routine, and that’s probably the hardest part.”

Q: Can you give me an idea on the speed by which you’re converting new fans and followers?  And second of all, how are you complimenting your online with your offline presence?

Gabriel responded:  “I fundamentally believe that it’s really about the offline.  The online facilitates that.  It’s kind of like email; you don’t email your friends because you like emailing, you email to get some transaction accomplished.  Social media is another way to continue the conversation.”

I would like to respond in typical, feisty Aurea manner: Well, if by converting you mean objectifying fans and followers as potential clients, and employing only metric-laden tactics by which to drive new fans and followers into actual customers, then you’re probably on the wrong track.  I am not anti-statistics by any means, but I think that hyper-focusing on, say, calculating each Facebook fan to be $3.60 turns us into the same short-term numbers-obsessed tools who littered Lehman Brothers and other investment banks and hedge funds who together precipitated the fall of the financial universe.  And brought us down with them.  Don’t cheapen my online community building.

Numbers are easy, and numbers sell.  I think the most effective means to “converting” Facebook friends and Twitter followers into “clients,” is to truly and consistently view them as online neighbors who you want to build strong relationships with.  The point of prioritizing (prioritizing, not exclusively pursuing that is) the principle of social media — community connections — over statistics or example, is just plain Good Neighbor politics that serve you in the long run.  If your Rhododendron is hanging over their fence, they don’t simply uproot the entire bush because you’re just another sneaky Automaton involved in 2-D people mining to them.  If you value others through community engagement, not individual price tagging, your friends will become over time loyal customers, not bargain-shoppers.

Q: How Do You Avoid Burnout?

I think everyone had a good point and there isn’t really an answer to this question, as it depends on the person behind the computer screen, business objectives, and your overall strategy.  As Ricardo Robago respectfully assured the audience, “You can’t be there 24-7.  But people understand.  As long as you can get back to them in a reasonable time, people understand.”

Gabriel, taking that a bit further, asked us to recall that “it’s a dialogue between you and a community of people — it’s not just about you talking to them. You don’t always have to respond to other people, because other people will.”  True—once you getting to a tipping point, or critical mass, your friends and followers will facilitate the conversation for you much of the time.

Personally, I think that one simply avoids burnout the way anyone avoids burnout—by being passionate about what you do.  With respect to social media, burnout is avoided by loving information, people, and ideas.  (And by being consistently engaged so you don’t have to drink from the firehouse every time you get thirsty).

Q: What are the dangers that Twitter, or Social Media has with regard to your competitors seeing [content you post] or your followers and then targeting them?

I think Gabriel summarized this nicely: “It’s the same with any marketing ploy; who’s to say that if you put up a billboard a competitor can’t put one up across the road?  As you’re thinking about it from a crowdsourcing perspective, there’s having a great idea and then implementing that idea.  If you have a thousand great ideas… well, if you pick up the top ten ideas and your competitors pick up the next ten, you’re still up in front.  So it’s the action around the ideas in the first place and then how you engage that community around those ideas.”

Ditto.  The idea launches you into the war zone, but successful and speedy implementation is what wins.  But I’d also like to discuss how the internet and social media has really elevated the importance of “Giving away” ideas, thoughts, and recommendations.  Freebies are great advertising and a proven marketing strategy – and SO much easier to do now that you can advertise free webinars, seminars, and blog posts by experts instantly on the internet.  It’s the equivalent of a restaurant atmosphere now and how to entice customers into the door; preparing and serving quality food is what interested parties will pay for, based on the long-standing faith that quality yields quality.  Social media tools are the most cost-efficient and convenient way to show off your store front and what you have to offer– but the core value that drives repeat business is in the pay-for content that isn’t free online.  And that can’t be easily replicated by competitors combing through your tweets and blog posts.

Remember the golden era of the US government, the early 60s? We had the sexiest President and First Lady the country had ever seen, and being in civil service seemed, well, a noble profession. Despite being embroiled in a demoralizing war, the government was running innovative programs that got people excited, or that felt somehow tangible, and over the decade we put a man on the moon, set up new systems to protect fast-dwindling wild areas and save endangered wildlife, worked toward a more racially just society, and more.

What happened? Over the years, to many government became synonymous with waste and opacity. Right or wrong, politicians and citizens of all political stripes decry the waste in government, the redundancy, rightfully complain about inefficient systems, snails-pace process, and inaccessibility.

However, government is becoming sexy again. How? Technology. Governments large and small across the US and the world are beginning to realize the benefits of numerous technology-driven new opportunities: cloud computing, open data streams, collaborative platforms, and social media, to name just a few. While countries like Australia and Chile have long led the way in some areas (for example, Chilean businesses have been able to file paperwork with government agencies for things like business licenses for nearly a decade), the Obama administration has pushed the US down a fundamentally new, innovative road. Nowhere is this more evident than in this recent blog post from the White House’s Open Government Initiative, in which the White House announces the release of Open Government Plans. These plans will, in the blog’s words, “make operations and data more transparent, and expand opportunities for citizen participation, collaboration, and oversight. These steps will strengthen our democracy and promote accountability, efficiency and effectiveness across the government.”

So how does all this technology make government sexy? Indeed, data and technology alone won’t make government sexy again. Rather, we must note that we are a culture that reveres innovators, risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and it is through these new efforts that we once again have a change to (re)imagine both our nation and our government. As Thomas Friedman paraphrased Microsoft’s Craig Mundie in a recent article:

What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”

It’s not enough to simply open up data and hope enthusiastic geeks will do cool stuff. It’s time for our country to re-engage the minds of not only our youth, but to re-open the doors to risk-takers, thought-leaders, and the globally curious. It’s time to seek a new social contract around innovation, and around governance, asking citizens to once again take up the challenge of doing things no one has done before, and to use government – efficiently run, technologically savvy, equipped with the best people around – as a vehicle to unleash that innovation on a world desperately in need of it.

Are you, are we, up for the challenge?

Waste Not, Want Not

This week, Director Mai Iskander’s film Garbage Dreams will premier on PBS as part of the station’s Independent Lens series.  The documentary features three adolescent young men “raised in the trash trade” in Cairo.  Adham, Osama, and Nabil are part of the Zaballen community, which is one of the oldest urban recycling cultures in the world.

The Zaballeen people saw economic opportunity in trash collection over a century ago, and have built their livelihood around the business.  Since there is not much money in garbage pickup, the Zaballeen make the majority of their revenue from recycling.  About 80% of the trash they collect is recycled by hand and then sold as raw materials.

The film chronicles the Zaballeen struggle to maintain their recycling program after the city of Cairo hires foreign corporations to take over garbage disposal in the city.  Although the corporate program recycles only a small fraction compared the to Zaballeen, the city government prefers the foreign companies because they are perceived as modern.

In an effort to combat the foreign competition, the Zaballeen community launches a grassroots campaign to organize the enterprise, modernize their services, and educate the surrounding community.  The community sponsors a Recycling School that teaches reading , writing and computer skills as well as safe recycling practices.  Iskander includes a few community meetings and some footage of door-to-door canvassing efforts, but I found myself wanting to see more scenes focused on Zaballeen community organizing than the one-hour time frame would allow.

One of the most interesting segments of Garbage Dreams is when two of the young boys, Adham and Nabil, are selected to travel to the United Kingdom in order to study modern waste management.  The boys are appalled at how much garbage is wasted at the high-tech plant they visit.  Adham tellingly remarks, “Here there’s technology but no precision.”

In a very brief segment near the film’s conclusion, Iskander included updates two years after the launch of the Zaballeen campaign.  Unfortunately, the foreign corporations seem to be winning the battle.  Yet there are still signs of hope, as one community member notes that people around the globe are finally starting to care about trash and understand its environmental, political and economic importance.

Garbage Dreams is the kind of documentary that left me wanting to see more, learn more, and do more.  Luckily, there is a fantastic interactive website that allows viewers to do just that.  The site is packed with additional information, discussion guides, and lesson plans to help people learn from the film.  There’s even a game that simulates the Zaballeen business process and challenges players to match the 80% recycling rate they have achieved (no easy feat, even for a die hard recycler like myself—I only reached a 32% on my first attempt.)

Garbage Dreams premieres tomorrow, April 27^th on PBS.  Check local listings here.

Yesterday’s Earth Day Expo sponsored by King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks really took me back…to the age of the dinosaur.

April 22 marked the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.  Anyone who spends a few minutes online would likely be exposed to some type of Earth Day publicity through Facebook news feeds, headlines in your RSS list, Twitter updates, and the like.

While I spend nearly my entire day on Twitter and Facebook, unarguably the most widely shared social media platforms right now, I never saw anything from King County about its Earth Day Expo at Westlake Center, the bustling center of downtown Seattle.

Well, to be fair, I did, but it was one update on Twitter around lunch reminding friends and followers to check out the Expo.  What Expo?  Expo?  Wait, it’s work hours, though.  How am I supposed to attend an Expo?

Lamenting, Not Complaining

What year is King County living in?  Who goes to a booth anymore?  Who collects government brochures and pamphlets?  Who’s going to call a government phone number to “get more information” on recycling?  Even full-color fliers stopped attracting people after… 1975.  Come on!

To no surprise, retired and homeless friends represented a good share of Expo visitors, along with a colorful array of pensive loiterers and, to a much smaller extent, working individuals like you and me.  Teens and hipsters were no where around during the hour I was there.

I’m lamenting, not complaining.  As a classic progressive Seattleite, i.e. pro-government and very forgiving, I just hate seeing LOST OPPORTUNITIES to:

1. Educate the community.

2. Engage the community.

3. Influence community behavior to improve long-run public prosperity.

A particular bummer is the fact that the booths held a variety of quality information, quirky and fun games like “Spin the Wheel,” and even refrigerator magnets illustrating the types of things that can and cannot be recycled.  The booth-sitters were knowledgeable and energetic about being green, going green, and the County’s improvements in sustainable living.

I got to check out the Noxious Weeds exhibit, fully staffed by an arrangement of the offensive plants to meet personally, learned about a bunch of upcoming recyclable products, toured the new Rapid Ride bus, and scored a couple free Metro tickets for answering a recycling question right – a gold nugget for someone like me, who lives off spare change and doesn’t have a car.  Pass on the pamphlets, ma’am, hit me with another Recycling Jeopardy question so I can score more Metro passes.

How To Get With 2010 Painlessly

As we should all know by now, the most effective means to movement building is through a combination of online and offline engagement — and when it comes to the public sector, I personally think the online presence is more important, since government doesn’t have the innate flashiness and attractive quality that draws crowds like a Lady Gaga concert would — or even a balloon artist.  Government, to an admittedly young urban hipster like myself who digs her Happy Hour iPhone app and prefers text messaging over phone conversations, is about as interesting as my grandma’s girdle.

I hate being bored.  And you can betcha bottom dollar I’m not going to engage with anything boring — because I don’t have to!  I can find whatever I want whenever I want with a touch of my fingertips on my smart phone.

As self-consumed as this sounds, I think others are like me.  At least my peers (lol), but they do represent a pretty big slice of the King County community.  We like free stuff, competitive trivia, online games and interaction, video blogs, and wacky YouTube blips.  We like it instantly and on a screen so we have the freedom of choice about whether or not to engage.  We’re socially shy digital media geeks and gamers who do NOT want to talk to civil servants face-to-face at an Expo in broad daylight.  We’re Gen X and Y, educated, many with graduate degrees, all progressive and environmentally-sensitive in that quintessentially “I buy organic” kinda way, and many with above-average intellect but the socially constructed attention span of a flea.

So what to do?  Well, I hate the nauseatingly hackneyed bullet points social media “experts” spew about how to engage a community.  They all center around the same three tenants, in my opinion:  Identify your audience, understand how they get most of their information, reach out to them through these channels.  Duh, right?  I can’t believe the infinite versions of the that trite fodder gets retweeted.  Here are three things to keep in mind that are less harps-in-the-sky and more doable:

1. Hire *additional* creative, hip web-developers.

2. Ensure IT isn’t digging in their heels — they need to be leaders, not reluctant underlings.

3. Mobilize online communities around your issues by engaging them with creative, always-fresh content.

And to drill further, here are three possible cost-saving and painless ways to get your target audience involved (form my humble perspective) next year, and in which I would have been 1000% more likely to participate in the Earth Day Expo:

1. Put all that pretty brochure stuff on a Facebook page and invite me to like your page using a catchy teaser in the “add a message” box.

2. Offer free bus tickets to the first 15 fans who can tell you whether an empty latex paint can is recyclable.

3. Allow me to take a Virtual Tour of the new (and totally cool) Rapid Ride, with a digital voice-over pointing out the free WiFi, three-door access to avoid bus lines, and totally awesome pre-paid Orca card swipe that allows me to prepay before I even get ON the bus – and don’t have to fiddle with my wallet while the lady gets testy behind me.

In #3, there could be a time limit as to getting on and through the bus, and if I don’t load my Orca card fast enough a Virtual Grandma swats me over the head with her purse for making her wait.  Hahaha, that would definitely remind me to take advantage of all the new tools King County Metro is offering to improve efficiency and convenience of public transit.

Yeah, not a flier.  Snore….

Anyway, if I was a social media specialist for King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks, or the Tweet Czar for @KCnews, I would have aimed to attract the most publicity possible and the least cost by BUILDING AN ONLINE MOVEMENT.  This is the golden nugget that is too often forgotten (or unknown) by government PR staff, but the forefront of corporate marketing minds.

For example, to begin building a movement around the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day and King County’s role in it, I would have:

1. Built list of all the Earth Day-related hash tags and highly influential Tweeters around Earth Day (using free online tools like Twinfluence) at least a month in advance, to ensure that all the cool stuff King County was doing around Earth Day and its more long-term sustainability efforts were unfolding within Twitter feeds, and being viewed by highly concentrated audiences of environmental activists and interested parties.

2. Created a subsidiary Facebook Page devoted entirely to the event, and ramped up my Fan Base to ensure maximum visibility of my Wall Posts about the event and related content in people’s Facebook news feeds.

3. Promoted a YouTube contest among say, King County public high school students, to create the coolest 1 minute “Why Recycling Rocks” video that would be displayed on a King County YouTube page and unfold front and center on the King County homepage during Earth Week.

The list can go on and on, really.  What’s remarkable about 2010 is how PAINLESS and relatively COSTLESS building a public movement around something like Earth Day can be.  Connections are instantaneous and free on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  The network effect of each connection has bold and extraordinary potential.

But most importantly, this is how to be seen by those who know, and those who care.  And with those two audiences, you’ve got the foundation for a movement, and the potential to truly make an impact across the greater community.

This has been the humble offerings of a pop culture -obsessed cyclist who appreciates knowing what is recyclable in addition to instant access to her Facebook and Twitter page.

Good luck!