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Social Entrepreneurship

Why Empathy Is Important

Empathy increases understanding, productivity, and drives innovative solutions to various problems in the workplace, economy, and society. Developing socially conscious solutions requires the ability to discover issues and deal with those issues from multicultural perspectives. Empathy is crucial to understanding the motivations that drive others to act the way they do.

Empathy ≠ Sympathy

It is important to note that empathy and sympathy are not synonymous. Sympathy is the feeling of sorrow for somebody else’s misfortune. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person’s feelings. Those feelings can be happy, sad, or something altogether different.

Why Empathy Is Important

We are often quick to make judgments of others’ actions. We often assume that poor decisions are a result of a person’s irresponsibility or their individual lack of intelligence, willpower, etc. Many times this is the case. However, many times poor decisions are a result of poor available choices. Sometimes a child is obese because they simply eat too much. Sometimes they’re obese because there exists no safe place for them play. “Last school year, 258 public school students were shot in Chicago, 32 fatally, on their way to or from school, traveling through gang-infested territory and narcotics wars on the South and West Sides,” states an article from the NY Times. Do you think these students are concerned more about choosing organic products at the local grocery store, or making it home alive? For these kids, there is a lack of positive choices, which leads them to make undesirable decisions. Youth Advocates Programs, Inc. recruits, educates, and trains advocates from within the community to help create safer environments for these kids and others, which lead to better options from which to choose. These advocates are well-equipped to empathize with those who need help because they’ve been there themselves.

When we take empathy into account, we start to uncover some of the root issues that cause larger scale problems, which, in turn, lead to more sustainable solutions. I’d like to hear your opinions and stories of empathy. What issues would you like to bring to light? How do you feel the use (or lack of use) of empathy will work (or not work) in evaluating decisions and coming up with viable solutions to issues?

What's the Future for Print Magazines?

I love print media, and there has been much discussion surrounding the print media space. Is there a future for it? The following article was originally published on Jen Angel’s personal blog Aid & Abet.

If you’ve ever been involved in a print magazine, you’re probably sick of people asking you what is going to happen to print magazines, what with people reading all their content on the internet and  new fangled technology like the iPad/Kindle/Whatever.

That, of course, is the 10 million dollar question. On Saturday, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel for “National Magazine Day,” hosted by San Francisco’s great Booksmith store on Haight. The panel was coordinated by Kevin Smokler of BookTour.com, and also featured Jeremy Adam Smith from Shareable.net, Andrew Leland of The Believer, and Derek Powazek of Fray.

The great and wide-ranging conversation covered everything from the ethics and economy of using unpaid interns to create work,what it means to truly engage a reader, the changing role of editors (I have way more to say on that one later!) and lots of recommendations for publications that are really doing it right like Panorama, The Sun, and The Baffler. Here are two of my favorite parts of the conversation:

 

  • When talking about the tension between online & print publications, and discussing the idea that print is becoming a “boutique” or “luxury” item, Derek brought up the idea that if you lived in a world where the Internet had come before print (or they had been invented at the same time), you would think about this question really differently. News (like, there’s an earthquake in Chile or what Congress is doing), really makes sense on the web. What makes sense for print are things that are evergreen (i.e. long lasting), should be documented for future posterity, etc. Huh. I guess I never really thought about it that way – what really *deserves* to be in print? If we go that model, we still need to figure out how to fund news organizations who exist primarily on the Internet.
  • Jeremy, editor of Shareable.net, talked about the difference between editing for the web (his current life) and for print (his past life). With print, he said, you agonize over every word. With web, you don’t – and it’s even been known for editors or writers to change posts or articles once they’ve been “published” online. He said he felt like his job was less to focus on every minute detail than it was to create an environment in his site with which to attract a certain kind of person – those who are interested in sharing, generosity, and community building. He described it like a “habitat garden” – where the focus is less on individual plants and more on creating a garden environment that attracts certain kinds of wildlife. Great analogy!

I really enjoyed meeting Christin and Praveen, who have owned Booksmith since 2007. The store is looking great, and I *love* their Bookswap event – the next one is March 6!

In other magazine news, congratulations to Steve Katz and Madeleine Buckingham who were just named Publisher and CEO of Mother Jones. I’m looking forward to their leadership! And finally, Utne Reader has launched a celebration of all of our favorite magazines of the past, called the Dead Magazine Club.  Um, yeah. I have mixed feelings about that. But there are already some great posts up there, for mags like Body Play and Practical Anarchy – I remember them!

For more information, please visit Jen Angels blog and check out the wisdom she has to offer.

Use The Economic Downturn to Find the Work You Like

In their book, Social Entrepreneurship, David Bornstein and Susan Davis mention that students who attended Harvard’s Social Enterprise Conference 2009 indicated that the lack of high-paying jobs made it easier to choose work they cared about. To me, that signifies that we reside in a culture where what we value and how we assign value are disconnected. For whatever reason, whether they be societal pressures, the need to provide for our families, the desire to be respected among our communities, or otherwise, we tend to be willing to sacrifice our values (and happiness) in order to accept higher wages.

This makes it difficult for underfunded social entrepreneurs in great need of competent business leadership to recruit talented managers, executives, and other workers. We often lack our most innovative thinkers where innovation is critical for survival. Pay cuts in the traditional corporate sector and the rising (although slightly) wages in social entrepreneurship have bridged the financial gap somewhat, but not enough to entice many would-be converts make the switch.

If you aren’t excited to wake up every morning to do what you do for a living, it might be time to reevaluate what gets you going. We know about Monster, CareerBuilder, and other popular job posting sites, but here are some alternatives worth a try. They all focus on socially conscious jobs.

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