The amazing story of It Gets Better

It Gets Better is a grassroots campaign in America launched by sex columnist Dan Savage in response to a horrific spate of teenagers killing themselves after being victimized for being (or being perceived to be) gay. There were 5 suicides in September alone. After another one of these tragedies Savage wrote in his column that he wished “I could have talked to that kid for 5 minutes and been able to tell them it gets better.”

In that same column, on September 15, he announced he was setting up a YouTube channel for those who were bullied but survived to tell their story, to tell those going through hard times that it gets better. Since then the channel has had more than 1.8 million views and 21,000 subscribers, making it the fastest-growing channel on YouTube right now.

Here’s Dan’s original video with his husband Terry:

On MSNBC last week I saw Joel Burns, a member of the Fort Worth Council in Texas, share his story, a story he told us he had never told anyone before, in a speech before the council. It’s a speech unlike many you will ever hear from a politician. It’s raw, personal and courageous and had me in tears.

It Gets Better is another inspiring example of the possibilities of social media to aggregate individual actions, share otherwise-unheard stories and to connect us across borders, classes and generations. This campaign wasn’t cooked up in a strategy session and launched with fanfare by a national gay rights organization. It wasn’t backed with millions of dollars in funding. It didn’t even require its own website. It was one person’s idea, a single video uploaded online, and an invitation to participate.

Now, yes, this particular person had a mainstream media platform from which to promote his idea, but without the enabling environment of the internet he would simply have expressed his sadness and, presumably, moved on. Thousands of readers would have nodded in agreement but then what? Now, instead of just an expression of grief there was a call to action, an invitation to participate in something, and a simple, humble, personal video to get things started, and show how it could be done.

As Dan said in his column:

“Gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

“Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.”

He’s right. Thanks to social media, we can.

Six weeks later the videos continue to roll in and the conversation around the issue continues. Employees at Google and Facebook have contributed videos, as have Project Runway’s Tim Gunn, American Idol’s Adam Lambert and Star Trek’s Zachary Quinto. Videos have come in from Muslims and Mormons, gays and straights, teenagers, parents and grandparents. And hundreds of thousands of teenagers have found out that whatever their situation they are not alone, that others went through difficult times and survived and that they need to stick around and give their lives a chance.

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Why I’m supporting the Global Lives Project

San Francisco is a place full of energy, overrun by people with big dreams working hard to make amazing things happen. One person who fits this description that I was lucky enough to meet upon moving to San Francisco is David Harris, the founder and Executive Director of the Global Lives Project. He has spent the past five years driving this art/social change/education hybrid project, coordinating 500 volunteers who together have completed shoots in ten countries and staged numerous exhibitions. As he explained the project to me I was inspired by its vision, intrigued by its potential scope and very impressed by the way it had been executed. I knew I wanted to help.

Global Lives Project aims to “collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.”

Global Lives is a series of 10 (so far) 24-hour continuous shoots of the lives of ten diverse people from ten countries around the world. The content is moving in its simple humanity, showing how despite our geographic and cultural differences we have so much more in common, we are one people.

Global Lives Project has mounted exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and elsewhere, allowing people to wander from room-to-room catching glimpses of these diverse lives. Sometimes they all begin together, at the same time in each day. Sometimes they are played according to their time zones, so 5pm in San Francisco is 8am in China and so on.

Here’s David’s Artist Statement from their Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Exhibit:

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

I’ve seen longer reels of film than that featured in the video above but I can fully appreciate how much more impactful this footage can be when situated alongside each other, when people can wander in and out, getting a window into another person’s world. Their opening night event and exhibition at Yerba Buena got rave reviews:

It’s the immediacy of this live viewing, the context of the ten films played alongside each other, that I believe would give the most powerful sense of looking through a window into the world of another. I would love to experience this, would love to see Global Lives Project being able to mount more events and exhibitions and organize new shoots to continue to build their library of human experiences. When I needed to choose a nonprofit to fundraise on behalf of as part of Razoo‘s ‘zooGooders Council, I immediately thought of Global Lives Project.

Between now and the end of the year I’d love to be able to make a contribution to the expansion of GLP’s activities next year, supporting them to hold new exhibitions, develop educations programs around their content and grow the library itself. My main motivation in supporting GLP is to help get this great content before more people.

Please consider supporting my fundraiser. My fundraising widget is here. Every bit makes a difference. Anything that gives people a window into the lives of another, that increases our understanding and empathy of other lives, helps create a more peaceful, more just world.

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Blog Action Day 2010

Artwork by Rose Fyson, made available by Oxfam International on a Creative Commons License.

Yesterday was Blog Action Day, an inspiring example of the power of coordination and generosity on the internet. Blog Action Day was founded by three bloggers in 2007 and asks bloggers to write about a single topic on a specific day. Last year Change.org took over management of the event. This year’s topic was Water, following on from the environment, poverty and climate change over the past three years. You can see my contribution here.

Blogs are one of the the greatest example of how free time is now focused creatively and expressively, rather than passively, in the digital world. The cognitive surplus this produces is fueling the web2.0 world, driving innovations in  politics, media, arts and play. In everything. The internet has opened up so many options for our active participation in cultural production and community formation. But the thing that makes it really powerful is its capacity for coordination.

Blog Action Day is an example of generosity online, as over ten thousand bloggers, the vast majority volunteers, contribute the content which makes the day what it is. But it’s the coordinated publishing of these blogs on a specific day that amplifies into more than a random collection of voices but rather becomes an event. Something worth paying attention to, worth the White House, Mashable, The Huffington Post, Official Google Blog, BlogHer, StumbleUpon and thousands of other blogs large and small, contributing to.

Water is a great choice of issue. How we share and manage water resources is going to be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. As climate change affects rainfall patterns conflict over water will grow, and new approaches will be required for human habitation to continue in many parts of the world, including areas of the United States and Australia.

Water is a local issue, intensely felt by the 1 billion worldwide who lack access to clean water, and to farming communities where the rain no longer comes, or the snow melt isn’t what it used to be. But it’s also a regional issue, as countries will increasingly squabble over shared resources with wars over water the likely outcome. And it’s a global issue, a leading symptom of our changing climate, a warning that we need to do things differently.As the UNDP has written “water is the medium through which climate change expresses itself.”

The universality of this experience (we all interact with water, and therefore water issues, every single day) makes it perfect for an event like Blog Action Day. We can each speak locally but together we express a global perspective: that the time for change is now.

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Surviving on the driest continent on earth

Today is Blog Action Day. This year’s theme is water.

Australia is the place which is being hit hardest, first, by climate change. It is the canary in the coal mine. Parts of Southern Australia have been in drought for 12 years, a drought without historical equivalent. At what point do we stop calling it a drought and just accept that the climate has simply changed? Tim Flannery has predicted that Perth, Western Australia, my home town (ish – Fremantle really), could “become the world’s first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water.”

As a result of this however, awareness of water conservation is growing and becoming second-nature in most of Australia. For a number of years now in Melbourne each suburb is assigned certain days of the week they can water their garden. If you want to water it on other days you must use water you have collected in the house. Visiting friends in Melbourne now it’s common for them to ask us to collect our shower water in buckets, to use on the garden later. People wash their cars over the lawn. Gardens are being re-planted with drought-resistant native plants.

Dual-flush toilets are ubiquitous in Australia (seriously Americans, what’s the deal with the lack of dual-flush toilets here? They were invented in 1980 and use 67% less water) and waterless urinals are being installed in many office buildings. People make a conscious effort to use less water and there’s a growing acceptance that soon we will be recycling sewage into drinking water.

And this how it should be. Australia is a nation build atop the oldest, driest, most fragile continent on earth. Both waves of human migration to Australia altered the land indelibly. In the second wave starting in 1788 Australia was settled by a people who feared this alien landscape and fought to dominate it, to make it as close to home as possible. For 222 years we have cut down the forests, farmed the plains, irrigated the deserts, bred hard-hoofed animals, so ill-suited to the Australian environment, by the millions and reveled in our status as the world’s greatest exporter of carbon.

Australia’s first people’s found a balance with the world they re-made, a balance that preserved through 60,000 years and covered some of the harshest and most difficult to inhabit places on earth. This is the world’s oldest culture, a culture that has adapted to the unique environments of Australian, learned to read and understand its patterns, utilize its flora and fauna, adapt to its demands.

We are a people who do not adapt, we force the earth to change to suit our tastes. But we are reaching the limits of this ignorance as the world shifts in dangerous and unpredictable ways and we find the most basic resource needed for our survival, water, threatened. Australia’s changing climate is forcing us to adapt to our continent, to figure out how to make do with the resources we have and protect the habitat we have left. If we are to survive on this incredible continent we have a lot of catching up to do and so much to learn.

It begins with water.

Photo by BouncedPhoton on flickr.

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Stories of Change 3: Predictions for the Decade

Last week I launched the third in the Stories of Change eBook series I have developed at Ashoka. It’s a really interesting one – 20 social entrepreneurs ranging in age from 14 to their 60s and representing 5 continents think ahead to the year 2020 and the world they would like to see, as well as the steps they are taking this year to move us in that direction. I’ve grown fascinated by this idea of people who “live in the future” lately – people who have a vision for a different world and consciously work to shift events to bring this world into being. This book contains the words of many of these people and it was a real pleasure to gather their stories. I hope you enjoy it also.

View this document on Scribd

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Learning in Community

This most recent weekend was one filled with learning and community, leaving me feeling both smarter and more connected to Washington DC than I was before. It made me realize, or remember, that learning from one-another is one of the most vital components of community; where we are connected by our common ideas, ideals and aspirations; where we realize that all of us know so much more than any of us.

On Friday night I attended the opening night of the Social Justice Camp, an unconference bringing together the grassroots social justice community in DC and emphasizing the importance of arts in bringing about social change. Friday was an Ignite-style event, with a dozen speakers giving short presentations on their work. It was great to hear more about the work of homeless advocates, food security organizers and social change muralists. It had a nice feel to the event, as unconferences always do, of everyone being on the same level, there to share and learn, without a divide between presenters and audience.

This feeling continued on Saturday night at the first Columbia Heights Arts Salon. This was an event for local artists in the Columbia Heights area of DC, hosted in four local homes. A series of house parties combined with showcases for local talents – with houses dedicated to performance, visual art, photography and digital installations. K performed to open the evening, the first time she’s performed solo in two years. The fact that she felt encouraged and inspired to create and present a work in five days is testiment to the platform this sort of event creates. The event was put on my the newly-formed Columbia Heights Arts Foundation (CHARTS), which you can find out more about here. K and I are going to try and get involved and see how we can help them as we’re really inspired by their vision of building community through the arts.

Then on Sunday it was K’s birthday which we celebrated at a tea party for about 16 at which everyone presented/taught something. The variety of things I learnt that afternoon was amazing: drama games, canvas stretching, the scale of the universe, productivity techinques, how to draw a superhero, speak Russian and wear a corset. Everyone had something to share, a passion or a skill, a professional competance or a hobby. We all have things to share, but rarely are we invited to share them. Everyone came away from the experience inspired and uplifted – having maintained our attention for almost six hours and enjoyed every moment of it. This is a really different way of learning from what we get in our institutions – peer-to-peer, relaxed, and human.

This is what community looks like. It is open, vulnerable and participatory, based on common values and able to support its members to share and grow. Experiencing community like this, inside a room, with our shared energy strong and perceptible, is like a jolt of electricity – it animates and inspires. But elements of this community are also found online, and social media has given us a platform to replicate many of these features.

The people I feel most connected to online are those I actively share with and learn from. Twitter, in particular, has given me access to a set of peers who share my values and are looking to collaboratively learn how best to use these tools to affect social change. It is only through trial and error that this learning will take place, and the more we share the faster we can learn. This is why I was part of launching the monthly #4Change twitter chats. This is what inspired the estalishment of sQuareOne (now called the Vibewire Enterprise Hub) in Sydney. The creation of spaces where peer-learning happens.

As my friend Morgan puts it, We Operate Best Together. And we learn, build and grow best together too.

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Social Media for Social Change

I put this up on Slideshare about a month ago but forgot to post it here, so here it is: the deck from the presentation I gave at the Powershift Virginia conference on using social media to affect social change. Hope you like it!

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Google’s 10^100 finally open for voting

Just over a year ago Google announced 10 to the 100th. Timed to celebrate their 10th anniversary this competition called on people to “suggest a unique idea that would help as many people as possible.” They were going to sort and prioritize the ideas and then allow people to vote on the ideas they wished to see implemented. Voting was going to start on January 27, 2009. Google would devote $10 million to the winning ideas, although not necessarily to those who submitted them. Instead they would look for the most appropriate and credible organization to implement the idea. As you could imagine people got quite excited by the open-ended nature of the challenge and the considerable financial commitment to positive social change.

Then a funny thing happened: Nothing.

The January timeline came and went and now, finally, we know why. Google were overwhelmed by over 150,000 ideas which were submitted. Apparently it ended up taking 3,000 Google staffers to vet and categorize the ideas (you’d think they could have come up with a very clever piece of code to help with this) but at last the finalists have been announced. Only instead of them being the “unique ideas” originally requested they have released a list of 16 general concepts, ranging from “Create more efficient landmine removal programs” to “Enhance science and engineering education” to “Build better banking tools for everyone.”

This makes voting an interesting exercise. You need to choose between the relatively specific (“Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists” and “Make educational content available online for free”) and the very broad (“Work towards more socially conscious tax policies”). Some of problem-focused (“Create genocide monitoring and alert system”) while others are aspirationally-oriented (“Provide quality education for African students”). The submitted ideas these 16 concepts are based on are more specific but only marginally more “unique”. This all makes it pretty hard to select amongst the ideas or to know what might really happen to an idea if it is selected. In other words, to decide what will make the greatest difference for the greatest number.

I, however, will be voting for the broadest “big idea” of them all: “Help social entrepreneurs drive change”.

To me this idea stands out from the others as social entrepreneurship is a methodology for creating change, not a specific change. This may seem kind of vague but this is why this idea has the potential to create massive change beyond what is possible for most of the others. Social entrepreneurs, properly supported, are the people who can solve all the other problems, who can accelerate the removal of landmines or the opening-up of government, alert the world to genocide or “build a real-time, user-reported news service.” In fact, they already are.

Supporting social entrepreneurs has a catalytic effect on communities. Successful social entrepreneurs are usually community-based; they are focused on addressing problems that affect them and their community and they do so in new and innovative ways. They are also experts at making small amounts of funding to a very long way, so you get bang for your buck. They inspire those around them to become changemakers, helping to not only address one problem but create an environment of adaption and innovation that is ready for the next challenge. This is the kind of world we need, a world of changemakers, and social entrepreneurs are the highly-infectious carriers of the idea virus of changemaking.

When I think about the social entrepreneurship sector it brings to mind how science was conducted in the 15th Century: brilliant innovators spread across the global, often working diligently on the same problems, regularly unaware of existing breakthroughs in their field. Smart people would lose decades of their lives working on problems for which solutions already existed, there was just a lack of opportunities to disseminate these breakthroughs. Compare this to the science sector now: a tightly inter-networked set of universities, government research institutions and corporate R&D labs with, IP not-withstanding, rapid dissemination of new knowledge and scaling of the best inventions.

Many of the problems we face are similiar across the world, from teenage pregnancy to landmines to living more sustainably. Imagine a world where we can learn from the best social innovators and apply those innovations at a scale to address these problems. Where we can stand on each others shoulders and step over some of these intractable problems.

It is easy to imagine how the technological know-how and financial resources of Google can help us support, empower and network the world’s social entrepreneurs. Ashoka, where I work, has spent the last 28 years working on this challenge, building a network of over 2,200 visionary social leaders along the way. But as impressive as this is there is so much more to do in a world full of problems, but also full of smart dedicated people working on those problems. We need to help them to drive the changes we need.

Please be sure to vote by October 8. You can also nominate an organization you think would be best placed to receive funding to carry out the idea. I think you can probably guess who I’m voting for there.

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#4change wrap-up: collaboration and social media

I’ve been meaning to write a wrap-up of the #4change chat on collaboration for the week since it happened. My apologies for the delay, I’m still getting into the routine of blogging and Burning Man preparation has completely taken over ever available hour outside of work and a necessary minimum of socializing. I’ll tell you all about it before I depart – in a week! Anyway….

Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I’d like to recommend www.printyourtwitter.com as creating by far the most digestible (and printable, naturally) twitter transcript (ht @writerpollock).

The topic of the most recent #4change chat was “How does social media open new doors for collaboration?” It was a vibrant and thought-provoking conversation, in my opinion the best #4change chat we’ve had so far.

There is no question that social media has created enormous new collaborative possibilities. Some of these are in the sharing of data, such as the Social Entrepreneurship API being developed by Social Actions and the merging of the North American green business databases of Gen Green (@gengreen) and 3^rd Whale (@3rdwhale), which was announced at the start of the chat. This was interesting and welcome news, but business alliances of this type are not uncommon. What, we wondered, where the unique collaborative capacities of social media?

@engagejoe summed up some of these possibilities as “exposing overlap, sharing resources, connecting communities, forging partnerships.” These things are not unique to social media but they are native to it – social media makes overlap and waste more transparent, speeds up information sharing and relationship-building and can increase the impact of collaborations. Messages can be shared between communities and networks both real-time and ad-hoc. And as #4change itself demonstrates conversations can be convened that were never possible before.

But how much of this is happening? And if these possibilities are not being realized what are the barriers standing in the way?

The conversation part seems easiest. It is, by definition, what social media facilitates. Making this conversations intentional, productive and constructive is harder, but we still see examples of this all around us, on forums and wiki’s, blogs and microblogs, communities closed and open. These conversations can create new insights, understanding and relationships. And these conversations can lead to concrete action, from protests to petitions, fundraising to collaborative databases.

There was a real skepticism felt by some in the conversation about whether real work was being done online. This, of course, depends on what real work is to you, but most would agree that hearts and minds are a key part of most forms of social change and so anything that brings us into contact with each other in new ways has the ability to move us in new ways. As Michael Wesch said in his presentation at Personal Democracy Forum this year, “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate.”

But to really scale-up the collaborative possibilities of social media we need to empower and lead our organizations to work together in new ways. As @ChristinasWorld said: “if we could get orgs and passionate people to start working together at a sector/issue level things will start to get exciting.” One key challenge to doing this, as @edwardharran pointed out, is that “social media is pocketed in silos.” While we might wish that this wasn’t the case it is simply a fact of human existence that we build groups at all sizes, but that our closest communities are smaller and more digestible, whether on or offline (although the scale of what’s digestible varies widely between these two states). With these distributed, frustratingly uncoordinated conversations also comes enormous space for innovation and creative thinking. However better search, aggregation and distribution is needed to reveal these conversations to each other in ways that support collaboration. We can see steps in this direction with WiserEarth groups showing related groups and Zanby which allows groups to connect while retaining their independence.

A schema began to emerge from the conversation which identified three distinct types of collaboration:

1. organization-to-organization

2. organization-to-individuals

3. individuals-to-individuals.

Again and again the majority of the examples brought up where the later two. For 2. you have organizations like the Sunlight Foundation who are harnessing the contributions of hundreds of coders to create their transparency tools and OneYoungWorld who are using social media to find 1500 leaders of tomorrow. You also have new tools which facilitate this form of collaboration in exciting new ways like The Extraordinaries. For 3. there are grassroots political fundraising campaigns and the entire open source movement.

(4. was also later suggested by @engagejoe: people-within-organizations. Any more?)

For 1. there is the previously-cited Social Actions-style data aggregation and sharing and some great examples of organizations collaborating around a social media-enabled campaign, such as the just-launched climate change campaign tcktcktck (@tcktcktc) but there was a clear feeling that much of this landscape remains to be filled out.

In discussing the barriers to better social media collaboration between non-profits people nominated time intensity vs staffing resources, fear, lack of connectivity in many parts of the world, desire to tightly control their message, geography and time zones and lack of skills as prime candidates. The need for clear strategy so as to not waste precious staff resources was also mentioned, along with the observation that many non-profits do not have the knowledge or experience to develop this strategy.

To close people were asked for their key takeaways from the conversation:

• “There is a desire to evolve toward more collaborative outputs; SM [social media] may not be enough to get there” – @ChristinasWorld
• “It’s given me ideas about the barriers NP [non-profits] face with SM” – @chilli07
• “I think #4change in itself is a great example of international collaboration” – @tashjudd
• “Main takeaway: a sense of optimism. SM is not going anywhere and collaboration is only going to continue to get bigger and better” – @edwardharran
• “SM can be chaotic but still work” – @zerostrategist
• “I now see more kinds of collaboration: people-within-org, org-to-community, community-to-community, org-to-org” – @engagejoe

And if I could be so bold as to end on my own takeaway:

• “We must learn to collaborate as individuals first, then teach our organizations how.”

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Please let us know what topics you’d like to cover in future chats!

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#4Change Twitter chat tomorrow

#4Change is a twitter-based real-time conversation about how social media can be used for change. It was an idea which bounced around for a bit before a group of friends and contacts from three countries kicked it off a couple of months ago. Tomorrow will be our third chat.

Rather than introduce the next chat I’m going to use my friend Amy‘s overview for the 4Change group blog, of which I am a part, as I couldn’t possibly do a better job.

The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

Details:

• Date: August, 13th
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
• Topic: How do social media open new doors for collaboration (especially internationally)?

Starting the Conversations

Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

Here are some questions to consider:

• has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
• have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
• what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
• what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
• how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

And here are some examples to consider:

• SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
• Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
• Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

Join the Conversation

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for “#4Change”
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

Rules for #Change Chats

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Stay cool.

Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!

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