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CHARLIE HARDING: All right, thanks everyone for coming.
I'm Charlie Harding.
I'm a partnerships manager at google.org.
And it's my pleasure to introduce Beverly Schwartz.
Beverly is the author of "Rippling:
How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation
Throughout the World."
And she is also the vice president
of global marketing for Ashoka, where she currently
leads a program and a partnership with The MasterCard
Foundation to help fund innovative solutions
to youth empowerment in Africa.
It's really exciting to host Bev and Ashoka at Google,
because we've had a long-standing relationship
with Ashoka.
Ashoka, if you don't know, was founded in 1980,
and they support about 3,000 leading social entrepreneurs
around the world and have the mission to make everybody
a changemaker.
Google supported Ashoka in 2010 with a $1 million
grant to help support their News & Knowledge programs.
And Googlers today can continue to volunteer
on a part-time basis through the GooglersGive program.
So you can go to GooglersGive, and you can actually
volunteer your time to work with Ashoka.
So I believe there's a dozen programs
or so that we've helped work on through GooglersGive.
As a bit more background on Bev, by discipline, Beverly
is an entrepreneurial behavioral scientist
and has made her career in the field of social change
marketing over the past 30 years.
She has a background in advertising and communications
and has an extensive career in marketing, especially
in the field of social change, working in private, nonprofit,
and public sectors on issues from drug prevention
and smoking prevention to gender equity and education.
About the book, "Rippling" is described as a blueprint
for visionary thinking about how to tackle the world's biggest
social and environmental challenges.
She draws on examples of empathy, innovation,
creativity, passion, and persistence
to make real change in the world and pulls case studies
from Ashoka Fellows to exemplify these characteristics.
"Rippling" has won two big awards,
including the 2013 Nautilus Award and the 2013 "Inc.
Magazine"-sponsored Axiom Business Book Award.
Thank you all for joining us this afternoon.
I would like to have you join me in welcoming Bev to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: So I'll hand-hold this right?
OK, great.
Thanks, Charlie.
I really appreciate it.
First, I really want to thank you for coming,
but also Kat Welch, who is a Google volunteer that
has chosen Ashoka as her organization of choice.
And she actually suggested this and put this whole thing
together.
And if anybody's interested afterward,
Radhika Shah is here.
And she is starting an Ashoka chapter in Silicon Valley
so that we sort of can have people connected
to us right here where you live.
CHARLIE HARDING: Bev, I forgot to plug your book.
It's available outside.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Oh, yeah.
Thank you, Charlie.
That was my hand.
And if you're interested, and if you are inspired,
and you have one extra second a week to read,
because I know they work you pretty hard here,
the book is outside.
Actually, I have to say, I'm a little bit in awe
of being here, not because it's a well-known place
but because you actually live very close to the Ashoka
vision.
And Charlie was kind enough to take me on a tour today.
And I realized as we were walking around
that your culture is really what needs to happen--
and I will expound on that a little later--
in the rest of the world.
But what I wanted to do today was
talk about, not so much innovation entrepreneurs,
which I think you live and breathe,
but another type of entrepreneur,
which is a social entrepreneur.
I also find it interesting that, out
of all of the audiences that I've spoken to,
you actually understand what entrepreneurship is.
And so that sort of makes this a much easier talk.
And so you actually get it from the get go.
So today I just wanted to talk a bit about what the differences
are between a business or, what I'm
going to call today, an innovation
entrepreneur, and a social entrepreneur.
And I want to give you sort of the touch
and the feel and the essence.
It sort of sounds like that cotton advertisement
on TV, the touch and feel of cotton.
But I really want to give you some concrete examples
of what they do in the world and why what they do
is as important as it is.
And then I want to tell you a little bit
about why I wrote the book.
And as Charlie said, I'm a behavioral scientist
by discipline.
And that means that I investigate
human behavior and the dynamics of groups.
I'm rather fascinated by it.
And I always want to understand why
there are some people in this world that can take what is
and what if and turn it into what can be.
And I try to see, well, how do we replicate these people,
how do we clone these people?
You might have been able to tell from my accent,
I am from New York, born and bred in New York City.
And I'm slowing down my speech on purpose.
But remember, because I'm from New York,
I have extreme license to mispronounce anything I want.
So if I mispronounce it, go with me.
So many years ago, there was a citizen protection group,
unarmed, that started in 1978, called the Guardian Angels.
Does anybody remember what a Guardian Angel-- Thanks,
people around my age here.
And I'm actually sad that you don't know.
It was a group.
And they wore red berets and red jackets.
And they started to patrol the New York City subway system,
because they felt that it was getting dangerous
and people were unprotected there.
There weren't enough police.
And they decided as a citizens group to do something about it.
They have now spread to 15 countries and 144 cities
in the world.
And they started in the New York City subways.
I was fascinated by this as a young girl,
because who were these people that went out of the box?
They stood out from the norm.
They actually did something about subway violence
that nobody else was willing to do.
And with that example, now you sort of know what fascinates me
and what makes me tick.
So that when I found out about Ashoka, I thought,
wow, here are people that go out of the norm.
Here are people that do something for others.
They totally change their life from what they know,
and they do something completely different.
Many times they give up a profession, a fair amount
of money, because there's something
that makes them tick differently.
And now you know part of why I wrote
"Rippling" was because I needed to analyze that.
I needed to research it.
I needed to understand that.
So another thing about Ashoka that you should know,
because it'll come up later, is I describe Ashoka
as a mini MacArthur grant to people.
So we find the leading people around the world
doing things in social innovation.
They're doing something totally different
in a country that ever was there before.
Case in point and not in the book, a woman in Egypt
who has started the home health care business.
Now, you know, no big deal, right?
We have it here.
But in Egypt, you don't allow a non-related woman
into your house to take care of you.
So to change the whole system of elderly care in Egypt
was a huge deal, and we felt it was a big enough innovation
to elect her as an Ashoka Fellow.
And what we do with an Ashoka Fellow is
we give them three years of a living wage stipend
so that they can say, wow, I don't
have to worry about feeding my kids,
I don't have to worry about paying my house rent.
I could actually turn my attention to my innovation
and build my organization.
So we have now 3,000, maybe a little more,
of these people around the world, all of which
have gone through this three-year period of building
their organizations and growing it.
So by the time the stipend is over,
they're kind of on their way into an established
and a sustainable idea and organization.
So what makes people tick?
Why do people stand out from the norm?
This is something that I've looked at now--
and I have interviewed about 150 Fellows--
and came down to 18 of them in the book.
And I'll explain some of that and the criteria
for it a little bit later.
But a picture like this may not be abnormal to you--
which, by the way, you realize that everybody in this room
is really not normal, because you
live in a bit of an abnormal world, not so much
as Google, not so much in Silicon Valley,
but-- because I lived here in California for 10 years,
I can say this-- you live in one of the more progressive--
probably, let's face it, the most progressive state
in the country.
And you have a whole different culture
and a whole different idea.
I mean, even today we were at lunch,
and it took me about five minutes
to figure out where I put my food bowls,
in compost and here and there.
I mean, it's very different.
And so a picture like this wouldn't be a big deal for you.
But, do you know, I've shown this picture before
at different speeches, and it actually
makes people downright uncomfortable
to be out of the norm.
But that upside-down person is exactly what
a social entrepreneur is.
Does anybody here know who coined
the phrase "entrepreneur?"
OK, it was one of our French neighbors,
in 1800, Jean-Baptiste Say, who was
a French businessmen and economist, coined
the phrase "entrepreneur."
And he said, it's someone who shifts an economic resource
from an area of lower to higher productivity with greater
yield.
And the only difference between an innovation entrepreneur
and a social entrepreneur is a different resource being used
and a different outcome on the yield.
And 100 years later, another economist, who, by the way,
was not French but an Austrian-American, Joseph
Schumpeter added something to the definition which I think
is very important.
He said, an entrepreneur is the source
of creative destruction essential to the economy.
That one I like a lot, because when you're an innovation
entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur,
you're a disrupter.
And we are all disrupters.
Somebody reminded me that a lot of what you work in here
is around product entrepreneurship
and around a service surrounding a product.
What you don't work in is a change in human systems
development, right?
So that's the big deal between these two ends.
What we're disrupting is human system development
for the betterment of society.
But again, you've got to disrupt in order
to recreate and rebuild.
So keep it in mind that you're all
disrupters, right here, right now.
So let's have a little fun with this and go into a brain scan.
And this is a phrenology model.
And I don't know if you're familiar with it,
but it shows personality and characteristics--
and this is a mouthful-- of the proportion
of a person's propensities.
In other words, it looks at what proportion
do your character and your personality have
and where they are in the brain.
So I did not create this.
Because frankly, I'm not good enough to do this on a graphic
or on a PowerPoint.
But I loved it when I saw it.
And it has nine centers.
And can you read it?
Everybody can read this?
Look how small the trust area is.
Now this, again, is an entrepreneur, an innovation
entrepreneur and not a social entrepreneur.
There's going to be a big difference coming up.
The trust area is small, because around product development
there is an issue called competition.
And you really don't want to trust a lot of people
and tell them your idea, because somebody will swoop right
in and create it before you've got it on the market.
Also be aware of this very small area called patience.
Does that remind you of anybody you know?
AUDIENCE: Uh, huh.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Uh, huh.
And so an entrepreneur, an innovation entrepreneur,
because of this whole competitive bubble,
also has very little patience.
They need to get their idea out.
They need to implement it.
And there is really not a lot of time that they want to waste,
OK?
But all of them, all of the entrepreneurs I know,
both social and innovation, espouse to my favorite Marcel
Proust quote, another Frenchman, who
said, "the real voyage of discovery
is not in seeking new landscapes,
but it's in seeing with new eyes."
So therefore, every entrepreneur sees
something slightly different that no one else has
seen before, and that's called their innovation.
But here's where we start to diverge from an innovation
entrepreneur to a social entrepreneur.
Because the social entrepreneurs come from all walks of life,
really phenomenal.
And they start out someplace where they never
thought they'd end up.
So in the book, I have a truck driver.
I have a veterinary surgeon who now builds rickshaws in India--
here is where I go from New York--
AUDIENCE: Ergonomics.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: --ergonomics, thank you,
ergonomic rickshaws-- and has a whole system
around making a rickshaw driver feel more
like a part of society, have health insurance,
have accident insurance.
And if you ever have been in a rickshaw in India,
that's quite an accomplishment.
But he was a veterinary surgeon.
I've got a PhD biomedical engineer.
I've got another engineer who grew up
in the jungles of the Amazon.
I've got somebody so self-labeled as a housewife.
So they started here.
And something happened on their path.
What happened?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Nothing.
Just go on.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: I didn't do it, right?
FEMALE SPEAKER: No.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: OK, thank you.
Something happened on their path that absolutely changed
the trajectory of their lives.
OK, maybe it was this slide.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yes.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: So one of the things
that really separates a social entrepreneur is
their proclivity towards empathy,
sharing and understanding the feelings of others.
And in every single person I interviewed for the book,
this was one of the things that really hit me.
They really felt the pain of other people.
And I was pretty shocked by that.
That comes to play a little bit later.
So let's look about the phrenology
of a social entrepreneur and how it's a little different.
And of course, this one I added in.
Look at the trust area.
It grows all the way, because social entrepreneurs actually
don't have competition in mind.
And actually what they do is they almost open source
their innovation to actually have
it improved by other people.
We do this all the time with Ashoka Fellows.
We put them together from different disciplines
in a room to hash out ideas.
And everybody loves everybody else's ideas.
And all they have to do is try to improve them.
And nobody seems to have a problem with that.
Then look at things like the degree of empathy.
And they dream about a more equitable society.
Not that innovation entrepreneurs don't, but it's
not their primary motivation.
In a social entrepreneur, the primary motivation
comes first, the innovation second.
It's a little bit different in an innovation entrepreneur.
They think in systems change.
And I'm going to demonstrate that in a little bit.
And they're willing to invest in human capacity and value
because they do believe that everyone
but everyone, no exception, had the ability
to change their lives for the better.
So one of the visions of Ashoka is
that everybody has the power to be a changemaker
and that you have the ability, with a little help,
to change your lives.
And if you are a changemaker, you
are empowered to change your life.
So a little vignette here about me.
I don't think I ever would have written
my book without having worked at Ashoka.
And at the time I wrote the book,
it was a little over six years that I was there.
Because we really walk the talk.
As we talk about the rest of the world changing,
Ashoka doesn't hire people that they
don't think are changemakers.
And then you are encouraged, in fact, it's
more than encouraged-- and I have
a feeling this is a bit like Google-- you are expected
to make change within Ashoka.
Now, this drives me a little chaotic sometimes,
a little bazoo, because as the global marketing director,
marketing does have sort of rules
that we call branding and other rules like that,
that if you're an entrepreneur at Ashoka, a changemaker,
the rules don't mean a whole lot there.
You're always recreating a rule.
You're always recreating a system.
But it is an actual fascinating environment to work with.
And then, I had a publisher come to me,
had read something else I wrote, and he said,
would you like to write a book about social entrepreneurship,
because we really don't have one in our category line?
And this is a big publisher.
This is Wiley, actually, based in San Francisco.
And I made up some-- I'm good at this--
I made up some answer in my office
because I didn't know how to answer it,
but I always wanted to write a book, always.
And it was in the back of my mind.
And so I said something.
I said, you know, let me think about it.
I went home, and I said, wait a second.
The hardest part of publishing a book is getting a publisher.
And I just got a publisher and a big one.
So why do I not empower myself to write a book?
And that's sort of what a changemaker does
and the essence of it.
You empower yourself to make change.
And once that happens, change is inevitable.
So I don't want to just talk about changemakers.
I want to show you a three-minute clip about Albina
Ruiz who is a Peruvian engineer who grew up
in the jungles of the Amazon.
And luckily for us, the Amazon doesn't have a university.
So she was forced to move to Lima in order
to pursue her degree.
And she wanted to be an engineer really badly, really
wanted to be an engineer.
So Albina moved to Lima and was pretty poor,
so she moved into a really poor, dangerous area
in the slums of Lima.
And she was so excited about moving to Lima,
because it's a big city, and she comes from the jungle,
and this is big time.
And she gets there.
And she is totally disappointed.
Because all she can see and all she could smell
is garbage, heaps and piles of garbage
all around the slums of Lima.
Because no one was picking up the trash.
Now there are reasons for this.
But basically one of the things that she
was told when she asked about it was
that the poor don't mind being dirty.
They don't care.
But in fact, the poor do mind being dirty,
and nobody likes to be dirty.
And she decided to do her master's thesis,
her engineering degree, around figuring out
a system of collecting garbage in the slums.
I'm making it sound easy, but it's not.
The slums are usually the favelas in Brazil,
the slums in any country, they're normally
out of the central city, and they're usually
located on hills and narrow roads, not paved, gutted.
Very hard to get garbage trucks up there.
Very hard to collect garbage.
What do you do with the garbage?
At that time in Lima, believe this or not, they
were dumping the garbage in the rivers,
because that was encouraged and that was the only place
to dump the garbage.
So she figured this out.
And she started an organization called Healthy City.
And at the end of her interview--
and by the way, this is filmed by me on my Mac,
so it's not professional-- the videographer said, why don't we
put a little tag in this that says filmed on location
so people will know I didn't do it, which was the videographer,
I didn't do this.
But she gave me such a fabulous answer
about what she has learned along the way and her journey
with changemakers.
If you indulge me, there's a three-minute clip
I'd love to play for you.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-The big lesson for me is we never finish to learning.
I learning every day, not in the academic
only, not in the big meetings.
It's incredible.
I learning every day in the landfill,
in the streets, when I talk with the waste pickers,
when I talk with the public worker, with the mayors
or in the market.
When I met with the women in the supermarket
and I explained why she don't need to use the plastic bag,
I explain, please, you use the basket
or you use the healthy bag.
Because you don't pollution there,
you don't pollution the world.
And she say, oh my goodness, I can.
Yeah, but this is your responsibility,
because we don't expecting the mayors or the ministers
changing, you changing.
Because if every time we talk with the children,
with the women, with the men, and say, you need changing.
You change first and after that you talking with other changes.
In Ciudad Saludable, we can use the slogan,
we learning from Ashoka, everyone can change the world.
This slogan we put in our strategic plan,
yeah, because it's very important for us.
We don't need to accumulate the things, the money.
We need have a good life.
And I am happy with a children's smile, with the women's smile,
when they have a good job, when they can improve the house,
when the children go to school.
This is the small things is so important.
This is very important.
This is millions of dollars for me,
this smile, this good house for the poor family.
This is the best salary for me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: So here is the thing
that I found that I didn't see anywhere else-- putting
it all together-- empathy coupled
with a stickiness of the past experience triggered
by an incident.
So what do I mean by that?
So if you don't know who the Guardian Angels were,
you would not know who Nikita Khrushchev was,
who is the premier of Russia, would you?
OK, Willa, thank you.
I happen to know Willa, met her at a meeting
before she worked at Google, so I know her name.
So Willa knows.
Thank you, Willa.
I knew there was a reason for you to be here.
I had my Khrushchev moment, my stickiness of past experience.
So when I was a kid, I was listening to the radio,
washing the dishes one night.
Now, Nikita Khrushchev was premier when John F. Kennedy
was our president of the United States.
Because not everybody here is from the United States.
And there was something called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And it was really heavy duty scary.
And Nikita Khrushchev was threatening a nuclear war.
And I have to tell you, it was a scary time.
Some of us remember it, like me, very scary.
Little kid, young.
And I was washing the dishes, and I was daydreaming.
And I was going to be the American girl who
wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev.
And because of my letter, he was going
to realize that nuclear war was not going to happen,
and peace was going to reign over the world.
And that was my dream.
I was a kid.
I was like-- well, I'm not going to tell you
how old I was-- but this was, you know, a kid's dream.
I was really empowered.
I went to sleep.
I got up the next morning.
I did absolutely nothing about this, absolutely nothing.
And I think that has stayed in my brain for a long, long time.
That is a stickiness of past experience,
that when the publisher walked into my office and asked,
do you want to write a book about social entrepreneurship,
it triggered my incident and allowed
me to go back to my past, to be thinking
about what was in front of me, and to do a future action
that I don't really think I would have done
without understanding how sad it made me
not to have done anything many years ago
around a social situation that I believed deeply in.
Again, a difference in a social entrepreneur,
I'd say 90% of the social entrepreneurs
I interviewed had a stickiness of past experience
that, when something triggered it, they couldn't turn away
and they actually turned their entire life upside down
to figure out how to solve the problem.
So Isaac, Nigerian, one of those people
who had a stickiness of past.
And he was a security guard.
I didn't even mention that before.
So he is a security guard, college educated by the way,
but a security guard, goes out of Nigeria to go to college,
comes back to Nigeria and becomes a security guard
and realizes that the whole issue around toileting
was very different in his country.
So as a security guard of high-end politicians
and wealthy people, he wore a suit, drove in a suit,
wore a suit, waited outside the car in a suit.
And he had to relieve himself in the bushes.
He is, by the way, six foot seven.
So as he said to me, it was very upsetting to me
to have to go into the bushes because there
was no tree or bush big enough to hide me.
And it's hard.
I mean, if you have traveled, a lot of you,
to developing countries.
And you know, people just go wherever they can.
There's not a lot of running water in Lagos.
In restaurants, they don't do bathrooms.
And so you go outside to relieve yourself, and you come back in.
It really bothered him.
And then one day, he was planning
a wedding for 10,000 people, which I have come to know
is not unusual for a rich person in Nigeria.
Everybody is invited from all over the country.
And he said, oh my god, what a security
risk this is going to be.
Everybody is going to go to the bushes
to relieve themselves during the wedding.
I can't control this.
So he scours Nigeria for portable toilets,
because he learned that when he went outside Nigeria.
15, that's all he can find, 15.
This is a wedding for 10,000 people.
So it was right then and there he
decided he was going to bring the portable toilet
industry to Nigeria.
But he didn't do it in a normal fashion,
because then he wouldn't have been a social entrepreneur.
So he hires at-risk youth and homeless
men to build the toilets.
And he franchises them to single,
head of household women.
Stickiness point, his mother was a single,
head of household woman.
So this whole project that he came up with in his mind
was all about giving single, head of household women
the ability to make a living.
Eventually, it's 60/40 split, 60 to the women, 40 to Isaac.
And he takes off 10% of every payment on the franchise.
And when he has enough money, the woman
owns the actual toilet.
And if he inculcates toileting into the culture of Nigeria,
this will be a sustainable income
source for years and years and years to come.
So that's what I mean by triggering
and what I call a virtuous cycle.
From inception, all the way around,
every single stage of the innovation
benefits somebody's life in a socially sustainable way.
So very quickly, there are five sections to the book.
And every single entrepreneur I've ever met,
social entrepreneur, falls into one
of these categories of work.
And very quickly, restructuring industry norms.
Ursula Sladek, a German woman-- I got really,
really riled at the last time I said she was just a housewife,
and people said, how could you do that-- labels herself
as just a housewife, 50 years old.
When Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant in Russia,
exploded many years ago, the radiation
wafted all through Europe, and everybody
was told to stay indoors for quite a while.
And children shouldn't play.
Because it did land on grass and forests and trees, and people
were really worried about how this affected their children.
Well, at 50 years old, she's watching the kids play outside.
And she said, I just can't go through this again.
And I am going to work towards the end of nuclear power,
anything nuclear power, in Germany.
And by God, she started to learn how to use a computer.
She started an organization which
is now the largest supplier of solar, wind,
and water energy in Germany.
She exports power to other European countries.
The people in her town-- she comes from the Black Forest--
are all people who now have bought into it.
They're shareholders.
They're owners of the company.
They all have generators.
The excess energy they create gets fed back
into the large scheme of things.
And she is now-- and the news reports all
say it-- the primary influence for Angela Merkel,
saying that by 2020, Germany will
be nondependent on nuclear power.
So that's making an entire industry change.
That is restructuring an entire industry.
Mary Gordon-- and I think you're going
to love this one-- Mary was an educator who was really
tired of seeing kids bullied in school.
Now you know this is a huge problem, not only in the United
States but in a lot of places.
And she didn't know what to do about it.
So she came up with an amazing project.
And basically it's around making emotional literacy
a part of school curriculum.
And what Mary does, which is a blow away,
is she has a nine-month program where
she brings a small child and the mother into class.
And through the child, the kids start
understanding the behavior of a child.
So they thought, why does the baby cry?
What do you think the baby's feeling when it smiles?
What do you think the baby wants?
And the kids start talking about the feelings
of the baby, a very neutral, safe space.
And all of a sudden, it opens up the whole discussion around,
and so how do you think your neighbor feels
when you steal his hat?
How do you think Sarah feels when you pull her hair?
And even the most sort of tough kids, when they hold the baby,
they soften.
And there's a whole another part of them that comes out.
And this is what she uses in her emotional literacy class
to get kids to understand the effects of bullying
and aggression.
And by the way, this has spread like wildfire
throughout schools in not only the United States
but in quite a few countries around the world.
And very quickly, advancing full citizenship, which
is a lot about taking people who are differently
abled-- and notice, I am not using the word disabled,
I am using the word differently abled-- because everybody's
got a skill, and everybody's got something
that they can do that makes them special and unique.
So Thorkil Sonne, Danish, had a son,
at three diagnosed with autism.
And he said, what will happen to my son
when my wife and I are no longer here?
How will he take care of himself?
How will he earn a living?
He was, very close to your heart, a software engineer.
And he realized that the skills of an autistic child
are focus, persistence, and actually,
in a lot of ways, patience.
So he said, why can't I trained people with autism
to be software checkers, right?
It takes a lot of focus.
It takes a lot of persistence.
So he set up a program.
And he uses LEGO, by the way, to train them on how things work
and patience and frustration and all of that.
And IBM's probably one of his biggest clients.
And they set up a little bit different sort of scenario.
Because what he said to me is, people with autism
don't like open space.
That's very threatening to them.
So the client makes some adjustments.
He trains the people with autism.
And they go to work as consultants, have a job.
And one of the IBM managers has actually
said that they actually make better employees.
They show up on time.
They're always there.
They never take breaks.
They just keep on working.
And they're wonderful employees.
So he has developed an employment agency for people
with autism.
And it's pretty awesome.
And he just opened his first non-Danish office,
and it's in Delaware.
So he's now come into the United States.
And the last one is using market forces for social business.
That's Albina.
And by the way, as an engineer, this
is the three-legged trash pickup that
goes up the curvy, small, narrow hills to the slums
and picks up the trash.
It's a social enterprise.
It's a business.
It's fee for service.
And now the municipalities pay her
to recycle and pick up trash.
So she creates millions of jobs, helps the environment,
helps the sanitation and health of people who no longer have
to be trash pickers with their kids, cleans up the smells,
cleans up the bugs.
It's an amazing enterprise, and it
uses market forces to change social business.
And the last one on this is Greg Van Kirk.
And he takes a market which is known as consignment.
Everybody here knows what consignment is.
You know, people sell things on consignment.
You give them something, and they sell it.
Well, the way it goes in the developing world
is that people buy a product, and they go out and sell it.
But what happens if they can't afford to buy the first tranche
product, right?
Nothing.
They can't do it.
So he has an organization that does micro reverse microcredit,
which means he buys the first tranche product, which
are reading glasses, things that are helpful, solar lights,
and he sends people-- changemakers-- up
to the rural communities-- started in Guatemala,
now it's all over Latin America-- and they sell this.
And when they make the money on the products,
they take a little bit of amount.
They pay him back-- and then they have enough money
to buy another tranche-- until they pay him back
for the first tranche products.
So by taking an industry norm and twisting
it to make it innovative and to make
it implementable in the developing world,
he creates a whole new market based on a reverse model.
So last one, and only because he's local,
he's in the East Bay, it's Paul Rice.
Now, has anybody here heard of fair trade?
I know.
It's not Nikita Khrushchev, guys.
You're in California.
Everybody has heard of fair trade.
Paul is the person who brought fair trade to the United States
from Nicaragua, where he was working
with the Nicaraguan farmers.
So of interest is his stickiness,
what I found out at the end of the interview, was
he grew up on a farm in the Midwest,
and his mother was a single, head of household.
And so he went, after college, to work,
when there was a rebellion in Nicaragua,
and he was all liberal and was going to help the farmers
and help the people of Nicaragua,
and he ended up helping the Nicaraguan coffee farmers.
And he realized how to bring that model to Nicaragua
and then how to bring it to the United States.
So every time you walk into Whole Foods or Trader Joe's
and you see fair trade.
And even lately-- and we helped him with this
a few years ago with Starbucks-- he bucked Starbucks.
And he went head-to-head with why
they weren't serving fair trade coffee.
And to this day, what do you see when you go to Starbucks?
You see fair trade coffee now.
So these are the kind of people that inspire me every day.
And what does the future look like
of social entrepreneurship?
Well, it's apparent that for social disruption to continue,
social entrepreneurs need to be able to attract and retain
changemakers, right?
And we have to have a whole different social architecture
in our minds that work towards this vision of in everyone
a changemaker world.
We really have to take a lot of the stuff that's
happening at Google and turn it outwards
and help other corporations.
And this isn't only individuals.
There are changemaker corporations, as well.
So right now I'm working with one
that is giving me intense joy, because they
are looking at every single system.
And they are a big player in the pharmaceutical field.
They are looking at every single internal system
and seeing how they could dismantle it and rebuild
it to create employees who think in innovative ways
and are creative enough.
And their goal-- a couple of them, one of which is I'm
working with them in Africa, as well-- but one of them
is that this is going to be their key to staying ahead
of the competition, right?
So they are what we call changemaker corporations.
And I want to leave you with a statement.
Remember, I mentioned somebody was a truck driver turned
social entrepreneur?
Well, he's French, and he works in Calais
on the northern part of France.
And I spent a day with him.
And at the end of the interview, he
said to me that really made my heart beat faster.
And I want to share it with you.
And he said to me, when we invest in human behavior,
in human value, in human capacity, there are no taxes.
We invest.
We don't have to pay a tax.
And we are always richer no matter what happens.
He said, when you speak from your soul,
it's a universal language that everyone can understand
and everybody could commit to.
So my wish for today is that when you read "Rippling"
and you close the book, you're inspired
the way I am speaking to Francois and to all
of the other social entrepreneurs.
And this is the joy that I get from working at Ashoka.
Because I get surrounded by these people every day.
And they inspire me.
So I hope you'll be inspired, as well.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: So what's the correlation with profitability?
You know, we have an economy with basically very
profit-driven companies.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Right.
AUDIENCE: And I think that the future
is where profit can be aligned with social.
And I'm just wondering, for all the examples
that you gave, how competitive are these solutions,
compared with other solutions in the market that are really
focused on trying to make money and to reduce costs, et cetera?
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: They're not going
to be competitive in the respect of cornering
the market for a certain service.
But I have to tell you, profit is not a dirty word
here at all.
And there is correlation.
Because what you try to do is make
your innovation and your organization sustainable.
And part of the thing we always know is that depending on donor
dollars isn't always the wisest way to go, because donors
have trends that they fund.
So Isaac, Albina, Greg, they're all social enterprises.
And they have a fee for service.
And they keep themselves sustainable that way.
But they'll never be billionaires.
And they won't have the shareholders.
And they're not working to make money for shareholders.
They're really working to make money
for ordinary people, actually poor people for the most part.
So there's a correlation for sure.
But the correlation is always going
to be a lot lower on the profit than it
will be for a dot-com or a profit-making organization.
There's no doubt about that.
You don't go into this to be rich.
You go into this for emotional fulfillment.
AUDIENCE: My question, you mentioned that there was, like,
a pattern between all of the people you interviewed,
about a stickiness point.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Right.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious if you saw any patterns as sort
of like what pushed them over the edge to take action?
Because I think probably a lot of people in the room
share a similar empathy and desire to do something.
But what's that moment where you really go out and do it?
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: You know, I wish I could quantify that.
And I wish I had a formula to tell you that.
But what I can say is how strong is the triggering incident,
and where our their minds?
And so Greg Van Kirk was a corporate banker,
a really successful corporate banker.
And you know what he did?
He quit, and he went to the Peace Corps.
And that's kind of his pathway.
And that's how he understood what
was needed in the rural communities in Guatemala.
I can't quantify that.
But I can say if the stickiness is as strong as the triggering
incident, it flips a switch.
And if I knew what that switch was,
we'd be having a very different talk.
AUDIENCE: Can you tell more about what are some
of the efforts that you have right
now to expand the reach of Ashoka?
I mean, do you need more money?
I mean, how is the funding?
Because you do pay the stipends to all of the entrepreneurs.
So I was just wondering if money is the question that
is going to help you reach more of those entrepreneurs,
or what are some of the alternatives
that you're working with?
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Well, obviously,
I cannot say no to money.
But that's obvious.
In fact, Google has been generous in some ways.
It's very funny, a lot of people that
really have an affinity for Ashoka
are technology entrepreneurs.
But that's part of it.
But it's something like Radhika is doing now.
She has gotten totally immersed in the Ashoka culture
and got excited about it.
And she said, can I start a chapter in Silicon Valley?
And part of that is to get people understanding
the changemaker mentality set-- you know,
I have to be honest-- as well as funding.
So yes, every use social entrepreneur
takes a certain amount of funding.
And it's funny.
We're just opening an office in Greece.
In fact, as we speak, our staff person is moving there.
And we only open an office when we have three years of funding
in the bank, because we fund three years of stipends.
And we just got it.
And Greece, of course, now is very interesting to us,
what's going on economically there.
It's a hot bed to look for innovations
that impact the economy in a social way.
So am I leaving anything out, Radhika,
that you'd like to say on this?
RADHIKA SHAH: Well, that's perfect.
But we are also looking at people actively engaging
with social entrepreneurs.
So many of us here, including myself,
we like to also be engaged and be more active for the causes.
And so even if you're in that category, come chat.
And we are looking at the ways of them getting deeply
with Ashoka Fellows doing amazing stuff based
on whichever cause you care about,
with also possibly funding and also actively engaging them.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Yeah, so it's not only funding for us.
It's like getting involved, understanding
what a social entrepreneur does.
I cannot tell you how exciting it is when we elect somebody
as an Ashoka Fellow.
And you know what they say?
Oh my god, I'm not crazy.
Everybody thinks I'm crazy.
Like Albina, they thought she was crazy, first in a class.
Why was she dealing with garbage?
Why was she caring about these poor people?
Oh, I'm not crazy.
There is a field called social entrepreneurs.
We're a social entrepreneur, and you have given us credibility.
That's sort of what we're trying to do, as well.
AUDIENCE: Do you go after funding from governments,
local governments, or, like, philanthropists?
Because I just wanted to understand more.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Great question.
We take no money from the government, none.
It's one of the reasons I was attracted to Ashoka.
Shh, don't say anything.
And we also don't take any money from quasi-governmental banks,
no World Bank money, no IDB money, nothing.
So we are solely funded by mostly private individuals
and corporations and foundations.
Yep.
So we don't have many strings attached.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Apart from finding funding,
as you talked about being a disrupter,
there is an intense interest.
So obviously in the product space, we have businesses.
And a lot of these stories you tell us,
the government, things with corruption, the Mafia,
you know, things that could even provide a physical or financial
risk to a lot of the people, and organizations
are associated with those people.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Probably.
AUDIENCE: So how do you deal with that
from both helping them and providing
political and business leverage to cover?
And how do you protect Ashoka's brand
from maybe some of the attacks you might get?
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Yeah, that's a fabulous question.
I have to say, when we open a new office in a place,
we look very much at the civil society there.
So we've been encouraged in China and Russia.
And it's too much risk for us.
And there are certain countries in Africa
we can't go to either.
We have a Belgian funder who wants us to go into the Congo.
And we just won't do it yet.
It's too unsafe.
However, the countries we're in, it happens.
We have a security program, and it's funded.
And we actually take Fellows and their families
and fly them out.
It's sort of like a new life kind of thing.
And we recently had to do that in Nigeria.
Just a few months ago, one of our Fellows in Pakistan
was killed.
Because as a disrupter, when you disrupt government
or the system, the culture, you're a target.
So we work really carefully with our offices.
When there's a threat, and we think there's a threat,
we have a fund that gets Fellows and their families out
of the country.
And they don't return until it's safe.
It's a very, very tough problem.
We worry about it.
I'm doing a workshop in Africa, in Nairobi, in February.
And a whole day is committed.
It's a security workshop for the African Fellows.
So what do you do?
How do you do it?
And what we do is we have all the Fellows
act as support to each other.
So we actually have buddies they call
if they think they're threatened.
And it's almost like a chain, sort of like an electric wire,
and they rally around the Fellow and we figure out
what to do as a group.
But it is a tough problem, because when you disrupt,
you're a target.
AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering if we
can do something else to empower social entrepreneurs
with new technologies or disruptive technologies,
more or less use of the internet cloud and things like that?
I think this can be of interest to Googlers like me.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: No, no, no, you're absolutely right.
You know, it's funny.
I just did a webinar.
And we live streamed it from a conference.
And we were trying to live stream three people from Africa
in.
Two out of the three had no connectivity that day.
And we had rehearsed.
And we did a dry run the day before.
And on that day, no connectivity.
So part of it is, yes, that would be great.
And part of it is no, because the infrastructure
in a lot of places isn't even close to there.
But absolutely willing to listen to any ideas.
Because our Fellows eat up the technology.
And if we can train them to be more efficient,
that's part of the issue that's really helpful.
So if you can think of anything, willing to listen.
We love it.
I was chatting with Charlie who is
doing a big project in Africa, as well.
And he was talking about wireless.
And I said to him, let's talk afterward.
You never know where there's a sweet spot between technology
and social entrepreneurship in Africa.
So yes, thank you.
CHARLIE HARDING: Thank you so much, Bev, for your talk.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Thank you.
This is great.
Thanks, everybody.
CHARLIE HARDING: And books are available outside.
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
BEVERLY SCHWARTZ: Great.
Thank you.
Thank you.