From Berkeley to Bangkok: Finalists in the Global Social Venture Competition

By Edmund L. Andrews

The 2016 Global Social Venture Competition is now in the final stretch. After reviewing new business ideas from almost 500 start-up social ventures in 50 nations, judging panels from nine regional partners across the globe have selected 17 social venture teams that will travel to Bangkok, Thailand, for the final round of competition on April 1 and 2.   They will be competing for $50,000 in prize money.

This is the first time in the competition’s 17-year history that the Global Finals will be held in Asia.

Among the many innovations: an e-reader for the blind that produces pages of text in braille; a library-in-a-box for students with limited access to the Internet; a low-cost system to remove pathogens from sewage water; a networking platform that allows tiny neighborhood shops to aggregate food purchases and lower their costs.

The top-performing nations this year, in terms of first-round entries, were Italy, China, the United States, France and India. Morocco and Nigeria put in strong showings as well.

All told, 178 universities were involved, and 13 countries will be represented at the Global Finals, including first-time appearances from Cameroon, Colombia and Turkey.

Five of the finalists have focused on education:

Dost, founded by UC Berkeley graduate students Sneha Sheth (Haas MBA ’16) and Sindhuja Jeyabal (I-School ‘16), has developed a mobile platform to help mothers in impoverished economies break the cycle of illiteracy. The Dost platform sends mothers pre-recorded voice messages with tips on learning activities and child development. It also collects data on the users’ demographic profiles and goals in order to customize the content.

Community Partner Spotlight – Project Open Hand

Founded in 1985, Project Open Hand  is a nonprofit organization that provides meals with love to critically ill neighbors and seniors to fulfill their mission to nourish and engage their community.

Every day, more than 125 Project Open Hand volunteers prepare 2,500 nutritious meals and provide 200 bags of healthy groceries to help sustain their clients, as they battle serious illnesses, isolation, or the health challenges of old age in San Francisco and Alameda Counties.

For Seniors and Adults with Disabilities: The organization provides warm, nutritious lunch to seniors (age 60+) and adults with disabilities (age 18-59) at locations throughout San Francisco.

Courtesy of Project Open Hand

For People Living with Critical Illness: Through Project Open Hand’s Wellness Programs, they provide nutritious, medically-tailored meals and groceries for pick up in San Francisco and Alameda Counties. Home-delivered meals for clients who are homebound are offered as well. Registered dietitians support and counsel clients to help them feel better by eating right.

Involvement with the Center

“As we have expanded our services over the past several years, Nora Silver, Ben Mangan, and Jay Stowsky have served as strategic thought partners and an invaluable source of guidance,” said Hannah Levinson, a Development Officer for Project Open Hand. “We look forward to continuing our involvement on a larger scale through Social Sector Solutions!”

Community Partner Spotlight – Cal Shakes

California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes) is a 41-year-old nonprofit theater company with programming on stage, in classrooms, and with communities throughout the East Bay.

Cal Shakes attracts 45,000 audience members annually to its season of 100+ performances of Shakespeare, other classics, and new plays offered May through October at its outdoor amphitheater located in Orinda.

Through its bold, contemporary productions, and casual outdoor environment, Cal Shakes strives to defy preconceptions of Shakespeare and theater.

Community Partner Spotlight – Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco

Episcopal Community Services (ECS) of San Francisco is the city’s largest provider of emergency shelter and shelter behavioral health services. For 30 years, it has helped homeless and very low-income people every day and every night obtain the housing, jobs, shelter and essential services that each person needs to prevent and end homelessness. It assists over 8,300 homeless and low-income people annually.

Community Partner Spotlight – San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment

The San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment (SF OFE) helps the city’s lower-income residents gain greater financial security and enter the “financial mainstream.” A private-public partnership housed within the Office of City and County Treasurer José Cisneros, the SF OFE uses the strength and influence of the City Hall as well as of its nonprofit partners to help the City’s underserved communities access financial education and counseling, low-cost checking and savings accounts, college savings accounts, electronic pay solutions, responsible payday loans, and more.

Give today to amplify Haas impact in our communities

Talented, passionate leaders choose the Haas School of Business to get their MBAs and to learn to use their skills to solve our toughest social problems.

The Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership (CNPL) at Berkeley-Haas prepares students to have social impact across sectors and throughout their lives. Each year, hundreds of Haas MBAs participate on community boards, consult to nonprofit organizations, and get the training they need to solve the kinds of vexing challenges we’ve yet to conquer. Expert faculty – like Paul Jansen, who founded McKinsey & Company’s social sector consulting practice – are in the classroom and in the field to prepare Haas leaders to change the world.

Destiny Arts Center, in Oakland, has benefited from the work of Berkeley-Haas students through eight years in the Berkeley Board Fellows program. Destiny Arts Center uses dance, theater and martial arts to help youth counter very tough realities – like rape and gang violence. The enclosed picture shows the vitality and optimism that Destiny Arts fosters through their work.

You can ensure our ability to serve organizations like Destiny Arts by making a gift to support CNPL and Berkeley-Haas today. CNPL is 100% self supported – through earned revenue and gifts like yours.

• A gift of $250 will support one nonprofit in the Berkeley Board Fellows program.
• A gift of $500 will help us train a student to serve as a Berkeley Board Fellow.
• A gift of $1,000 will help us assess the impact of a Berkeley Board Fellows project.

Imagine the breakthroughs our community can achieve if we leverage the power of a Berkeley-Haas education. Your gift today can make this change happen.

 

 

Community Partner Spotlight – YMCA of San Francisco

YMCA of San Francisco
http://www.ymcasf.org/

With a focus on youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility, the YMCA of San Francisco strives to nurture the potential of every youth, improves the bay area’s health and well-being, and provides opportunities to give back and support neighbors.  The YMCA of SF builds strong kids, strong families and strong communities by enriching the lives of all people in spirit, mind and body.

To achieve their mission, The YMCA of SF has embarked on reaching an ambitious Vision and in order to do so they knew that they needed an external analysis of both partnership and defined structure around what it means to be healthy.  They sought the expertise The Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership and worked with two of the Center’s signature programs, Berkeley Board Fellows (BBF) and Social Sector Solutions (S3).

What is the YMCA of SF’s 2020 Vision?

“The healthiest children in America will live in the Bay Area, building the skills and habits for a healthy life, being empowered to reach their highest potential and make valuable contributions to society through the strength of the communities the YMCA of SF serves.”  Read more about the YMCA’s Vision as well as their 2014-2017 Strategic Plan.

Involvement with the Center

“We were fortunate enough to have two projects with the Center.  Both projects [were] very different but both heavily impacting the future of our work and future impact on the communities we serve”, states Marketing and Communications Executive, Jane Packer.

The Social Sector Solutions (S3) project also contributed to the Y’s strategic planning process by assisting the organization perform high level diagnostics of child health in the Bay Area, as well as identify priority areas for improvement. Because the YMCA is a complex organization with many partnership throughout the organization, its branch structure leads to local and city-wide partnerships which sometimes can overlap. The S3 analyzed this partnership landscape, which in turn led the YMCA of SF to a pilot collective impact initiative with its focus on “An Early Start to the Healthiest Self.” Through this initiative, the YMCA of SF could examine current and future partnerships to determine their fit. The S3 project, in creating the initiative, helped the organization understand the landscape of effort already underway in the Bay Area and that in order to be successful in collective impact, complementary partnerships are key.

“The work of S3 has helped us to leverage a network approach through identifying stakeholders and common need in communities we serve,”  says Chuck Collins, President and CEO, YMCA of San Francisco.

The Berkeley Board Fellows (BBF) program assisted the YMCA of SF in defining the key dimensions of physical, social-emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being that characterize the “healthiest children” – an integral piece of the strategic planning process. Working with the organization’s staff, the BBF team developed a logic model to help the organization determine how to clarify its intended impact and the relationships between inputs, activities and desired outputs, and outcomes.   This logic model has since served as the guidepost when thinking about existing and future YMCA programs.

 

Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project publishes photo essay in The Diplomat

Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project, a project within the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership, published in The Diplomat a photo essay titled “Punjab: Civil Society and Conflict Transformation,” which depicts the lives of the survivors of the 1984-1995 conflict in Punjab. Focusing on internal armed conflict and mass social violence, the Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project examines the cultural, economic, and legal factors that cause violence, the long-term consequences for the victims, and how the effects are addressed. The presentation, which includes additional photos that were not included in The Diplomat article, can be viewed below.

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Tackling Stigma and Brainstorming on Strategy for Nonprofit Aiming to Prevent Deadly Virus

By Katherine Murtha

On November 3, six alums of the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business proved they are students always. Gathering on campus, the group of alumni volunteered to help a startup online health education nonprofit at a Solutions Lab organized by the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership.

The nonprofit client, HPVANDME.ORG, creates easy-to-understand videos educating people about human papillomavirus (HPV). Its mission is to become the premier hub of information on the treatment and prevention of HPV and HPV-related head and neck cancers. HPV is a prevalent disease: each year, more than 14 million people are infected, and 26,000 are affected by the cancers it causes – cancers that are preventable. HPV has a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control recommend all people ages 11-21 (up to 26 for women) receive the vaccine, which targets three of the most common strains of the virus. But as HPV is a sexually transmitted infection, efforts to educate the public about it must overcome a social stigma that stifles conversations about sex.

Volunteer alums Alice and Dave brainstorm ideas on sticky notes for HPVANDME, a client of the Solutions Lab.

The approachable style and high production value of HPVANDME’s content have drawn the attention of the Centers for Disease Control, the Farrah Fawcett Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, and other potential partners. During the Solutions Lab, the alumni volunteers brainstormed ways for HPVANDME to partner with these organizations to help it achieve its goal. Alums drew on a diversity of experiences in online content creation, technology startups, and health care. The opportunity to give back through business skills piqued the interest of one volunteer, who said activities like Solutions Lab keep his “brain from turning to mush.”

“This is our ‘continuing education,’” another Haas volunteer said of Solutions Lab, “and it feels good.”

That continuing education included a quick overview of a Problem Framing Problem Solving brainstorm technique, diverging and converging. After ideating individually on sticky notes, volunteers paired up to cluster their ideas by category and refined a pitch. They presented their top ideas to the client and, via video conference, to representatives of two prospective partner organizations for HPVANDME. In the process, alums learned about the disease and the discourse within the medical community on prevention and treatment for HPV-positive cancers.

In addition to approaches to partnership, the ideas for HPVANDME also included business practices that the startup nonprofit could implement to help it grow.

The Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership has hosted four sessions of Solutions Lab, a unique opportunity for Haas alumni to lend their business acumen to assist nonprofit clients. You can read more about past sessions here.

Playworks wins $100K grant from Packard Foundation

Playworks was announced last week as one of the six winners of Building Vibrant Communities: Activating Empathy to Create Social Change. This Northern California competition, held by Ashoka Changemakers and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, searched for local initiatives that cultivated empathy skills to strengthen communities and motivate young people to become leaders of change. Each winner received a $100,000 prize.

Playworks, which is in its second year in the BBF program, is a nonprofit organization that, through playtime activities organized by recess coaches, strives to create school or youth group playgrounds into positive environments for students to practice leadership and teamwork. It plans to use the grant to expand its program to more schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties and to train other schools that are interested in implementing the same model in their own playgrounds.

Other winners included San Jose State University’s Collaborative for Reaching and Teaching the Whole Child, Soul Shoppe, The First Tee of Monterey County, The Respect Institute, and Rising International.

Read more about the competition in the August 11 post “In the Bay Area, Entities in Each Sector Are Incubating Positive Social Change” by Katherine Murtha.