Do Good Digest: Three Ways to Take Words into Action

John Gerzema TEDx: Empowering consumers
The recession has changed consumer behavior. While personal savings may have fallen in the past 20 years, consumer voices have risen. New methods of organizing both online and offline may give consumers power to dictate the next steps in our economy.
Good: A Design For the Rest of Us.
Good design is not [...]

Business Innovation Factory 5 Recap

Story telling is the centerpiece of building communities. Last week leaders in business, media, policy, and education gathered at BIF5, to tell stories. I had to ask myself, why would impact oriented individuals be willing to give up two days to simply tell stories. Stories are not quantifiable, they are not deliverables to file away [...]

Texting Frenzy Around the World: Communication Technology and Development

Two way communication died months ago. This weekend at the Better World by Design conference at RISD/Brown thought leaders in design, engineering, and appropriate technology collaborated on group projects and shared significant developments since convening last year. I was particularly delighted to see Ken Banks from Kiwanja / FrontlineSMS. His open software has enabled health [...]

Unlikely Allies

Lets face it, we live in an interdependent society. The greatest leaders in government, business, and non-profit sectors accomplish great tasks through teamwork, partnership, and collaboration.
This evening I arranged an event at a tea house in San Francisco with my business partners from Runa and our cultural director of the foundation. It was a gathering [...]

The Guitar That Changed The World

We are all indebted to the late Les Paul who passed last week at the age of ninety-four. A musician, inventor and entrepreneur, Paul’s legacy is definitive to American culture and the world of recorded music. As Paul said in his last interview with the New York Times, he was “born with all these things [...]

Know Your Audience – Or They Will Fight Back

There is a business motto saying ‘the customer is always right.’ That is of course unless they are left.
Whole Foods founder John Mackey recently published his personal  recommendation for health care reform in the Wall Street Journal – bad timing in a hot debate and bad economy. Not every Whole Foods consumer sides with Mackey’s [...]

Small is Beautiful: Images of Local Communities

I am excited by a recent  film release, which affirms my belief that small is beautiful, that local communities can mobilize to support each other. Last night “Home Across Lands” opened at the RI international film festival. This magnificent piece  documents the global trek from an Eritrean refugee camp in Ethiopia to an immigrant community [...]

Do Good Digest: Emotional Shoes, Charitable Deodorant, and Stalling Senators

Robert Fabricant: A Playlist For Our Feet
Brilliant ideas bubble at Pop!Tech’s yearly conference in Camden, Maine. This video of Frog Design’s Robert Fabrican’s great idea makes me want to get outside. He rightly observes that we live in a global world in which we interact digitally with media that swarms around us. But what if [...]

Grey Hair vs. Mop Tops: Generational Divide at Work

What will your desk look like… will you have one?

This evening I attended a Brown Alumni panel on generational divides in the workplace, a topic that is looming over managers in every industry. The panel comprised multiple generations of leaders from finance firms, to arms manufacturers, to tech startups . Each panelist had strong opinions [...]

Welcoming A New Author

I’m thrilled to welcome my friend Charlie Harding to take over the Do Good Well blog. Do Good Well was started as an adventure to explore what works and what doesn’t in social change, but as I’ve increasingly moved my writing to Change.org, this conversation and the community around it have laid dormant.
Charlie’s an incredible [...]