America Forward?

[Raffi Aftandelian]

Curious if anyone has heard of or has worked with the America Forward
initiative, subject of a New York Times op-ed piece.

Possible valuable connections with OS/OST?

best,
raffi

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 21, 2008

Fashions in goodness change, just like fashions in anything else, and these
days some of the very noblest people have assumed the manners of the
business world — even though they don’t aim for profit. They call themselves
social entrepreneurs, and you can find them in the neediest places on earth.


David Brooks


The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling.
Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford
and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who
follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with
Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked
for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business
to help the less fortunate.

Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding
restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be
like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture
capital.

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk
like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the
occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly
crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t
devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider
excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Next to them, Barack Obama looks like Abbie Hoffman.

It also means that they are not that interested in working for big, sluggish
bureaucracies. They are not hostile to the alphabet-soup agencies that grew
out of the New Deal and the Great Society; they just aren’t inspired by them.

J.B. Schramm created a fantastic organization called College Summit that
provides students with practical guidance through the college admissions
process. Gerald Chertavian, a former software entrepreneur, created Year Up,
which helps low-income students get apprenticeships in corporations and
packages its fund-raising literature in the form of an I.P.O. prospectus.

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are
almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even
before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and
accountability-oriented. They’re always showing you multivariate regressions
or explaining why some promising idea “didn’t pencil out.” The highest
status symbol in their circle is a Rand study showing that their program
yields statistically significant results.

Bill Gates, who fits neatly into this world, came to dinner with journalists
in Washington last week. He looked utterly bored as the conversation drifted
to presidential campaign gossip. But when asked about which programs produce
higher reading scores, the guy lit up and became a fountain of facts and
findings.

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a
problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big
building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past
decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe
government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups
have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate
successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national
difference?

America Forward, a consortium of these entrepreneurs, wants government to do
domestic policy in a new way. It wants Washington to expand national service
(to produce more social entrepreneurs) and to create a network of semipublic
social investment funds. These funds would be administered locally to invest
in community-run programs that produce proven results. The government would
not operate these social welfare programs, but it would, in essence, create
a network of semipublic Gates Foundations that would pick winners based on
stiff competition.

There’s obviously a danger in getting government involved with these
entrepreneurs. Government agencies are natural interferers, averse to
remorseless competition and quick policy shifts. Nonetheless, these funds
are worth a try.

The funds would head us toward this new policy model, in which government
sets certain accountability standards but gives networks of local
organizations the freedom to choose how to meet them. President Bush’s
faith-based initiative was a step in this direction, but this would be broader.

Furthermore, we might as well take advantage of this explosion of social
entrepreneurship. These are some of the smartest and most creative people in
the country. Even if we don’t know how to reduce poverty, it’s probably
worth investing in these people and letting them figure it out.

They won’t stop bugging us until we do.

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