"If you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no taking care on your part."
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Your worries, your feelings, your thoughts arise in your own mind. You are totally responsible for all your feelings - how you feel, what you think, what you do…You are responsible"
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence
Please don’t divide people into creatives versus practical people
If a man has a house stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy
If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts
When people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish others we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend they are role models
"What you cannot win with guns, you can win through love. The most powerful thing in the world is love"
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Businesses Measure Profit, What Do Social Ventures Measure?
It’s becoming more and more of a necessity to find a way to measure and compare the impact of social entrepreneurship. A few companies are making new headway.
Tracking performance in the for-profit world is simple; you have, well, profits. Plus tons of metrics and measurers and lists—from the Fortune 500 to the Forbes Rich list to further enshrine top performers. Without looking, you can probably name most of the top 10% of either of those lists. But which are the top social-good organizations? Who are the most influential leaders? What organizations have the most significant impact?
Where do you even start? Lives saved? Diseases treated? Laptops distributed? Trees not cut down? Parts-per-million reductions in pollution? It’s easy to measure effort expended, but much more complex to track impact directly attributed to your efforts. Even in situations where measurement and evaluation are core to a project, they remain that task you do after you’ve completed the project to fulfill the grant contract, not inherently valuable.
Full article: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679681/businesses-measure-profit-what-do-social-ventures-measure
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that is stupid”
Albert Einstein
Freelancers and small businesses are increasingly proving themselves 21st Century economic powerhouses. Their small sizes allow them to flow with the currents of technological and cultural change in a way their larger, corporate counterparts can’t. They are cost-effective because they can keep a small core staff, bringing on specialists depending on their needs.
But where do they work? Many find themselves too big or busy to work from home, or too small to afford their own office.
For these homeless freelancers, small businesses and entrepreneurs, co-working spaces provide a great option.
Autónomas y pequeñas empresas están demostrando cada vez más ser potencias económicas del Siglo 21. Sus pequeñas dimensiones permiten que fluyan de acuerdo a las corrientes del cambio tecnológico y cultural de forma en que sus contrapartes más grandes, las empresas no pueden hacerlo.
The Temporary Tattoo Project’ Makes Socially Responsible Tatt*
Lauren Sauma and Robyn Fukumoto combined forces with six creative tattoo artists and Flying Kites, a nonprofit organization dedicated to caring for the world’s most poor and vulnerable children, to help make a worthy cause fun. Each tattoo comes from the artists’ imagination of the children’s dreams, writings and favorite things; these tattoos are limited edition and will actually have a meaningful message rather than the ‘fierce’ dragon or petty butterfly imprints seen on tattoo-loving folks.
Flying Kites strives to give children more than the minimum. The organization continues to provide each underprivileged children with additional care that will allow them to succeed in life.
*Article written by Kevin Young: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/the-temporary-tattoo-project
The difference between outcomes and impact
It’s easy to measure what you did (gave a vaccine, educated a child). It’s much harder to figure out how that affects a life after you’re gone.
Gina Klein Jorasch is the director of public management and social innovation programs at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The program is incredibly influential in the social entrepreneurship world, and often spins off real companies from its classes.
Man vs wild
“Las alegres ambulancias” is a representative band from San Basilio de Palenque, a very special place located between mountains and swamps in Bolivar, Colombia. Palenque is an African village, founded by fugitive slaves more than 300 hundred years ago. In this place, spite of the passage of time, its inhabitants live guided by African customs, traditions and rites, just as their ancestors did several centuries ago.
The translation for “Las Alegres Ambulancias” is the “happy ambulances,” because they were originally singing happy songs during funerals when a friend or a family member would die.
Palenque has it’s own language based on Spanish lexicon, but with the morpho-syntactical characteristics of the African continent’s autochthonous languages, especially Bantu.
Women from this village are called Palenqueras, and they are the image of struggle and happiness. Dressed in bright colors, with the African continent in their voice and blood, they sell fruits and sweets in the Cartagena beaches and they keep the palenque’s traditions though songs and dances.
