Current Affairs: April 2004 Archives

This evening I attended a MIT Ashoka Foundation event that featured David Bornstein the author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. David has his MBA from McGill University in Montreal, has worked as a software developer, and is a journalist. He spent several years interviewing Ashoka Foundation fellows and tells the most compelling stories in his book.

How to Change the World tells the fascinating stories of these remarkable individuals—many in the United States, others in countries from Brazil to Hungary—providing an In Search of Excellence for the social sector. In America, one man, J.B. Schramm, has helped thousands of low-income high school students get into college. In South Africa, one woman, Veronica Khosa, developed a home-based care model for AIDS patients that changed government health policy. In Brazil, Fabio Rosa helped bring electricity to hundreds of thousands of remote rural residents. Another American, James Grant, is credited with saving 25 million lives by leading and “marketing” a global campaign for immunization. Yet another, Bill Drayton, created a pioneering foundation, Ashoka, that has funded and supported these social entrepreneurs and over a thousand like them, leveraging the power of their ideas across the globe.

These extraordinary stories highlight a massive transformation that is going largely unreported by the media: Around the world, the fastest-growing segment of society is the nonprofit sector, as millions of ordinary people—social entrepreneurs—are increasingly stepping in to solve the problems where governments and bureaucracies have failed. How to Change the World shows, as its title suggests, that with determination and innovation, even a single person can make a surprising difference. For anyone seeking to make a positive mark on the world, this will be both an inspiring read and an invaluable handbook. It will change the way you see the world.

Pasted from http://www.howtochangetheworld.org/text/book.html>

I highly recommend the book and if you are interested in reading more, there is an interview in changemakers.net with David about what he learned.

I put a link in the book section on the lefthand side of the page if you want to buy the book at Amazon.

I think, in fact, that it is knowledge workers who have been most effected by the current downturn in hiring. College Grads, who would become flegling knowledge workers, are competeing for jobs that could easily be outsourced. Service workers, including the recent high school grads, occupy an entirely different segment of the workforce and therefore could be hired easily at lower wages. Recent college grads need to find nitches in the knowledge economy that can not be easily outsourced and that may require more education. These grads should be playing for the higher level of intellectual value added.

Scott links to this study: Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts...and notes: "The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking - as the report says, "There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force." The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though its trends be not so steep - it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates."
What, if anything, do these statistics tell us about the needs of learners today?

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