This past week, I have continued to read Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner. After talking about innovators from our generation that created businesses and for-profit inventions and services, he now switched to show how social innovators are helping lead the non-profit world to innovation and social entrepreneurship. One part of the book that was really interesting and resonated with me was when he discusses how Tulane University has changed its beliefs to focus on community service applications to help New Orleans. After Katrina, the city was in disrepair, and Tulane took a new approach to service and social justice. One of the reasons I applied to Tulane was that I enjoyed Tulane's message of service. It is one of the few schools in the country that have a necessary community service credit to graduate. According to the book I am not alone; the number of applications has doubled since they added this requirement, and the school is receiving more highly-qualified teachers than ever before. Although Katrina was a decade ago, New Orleans still has a lot of problems and I know there are hundreds of opportunities for social innovation.
Wagner also talked about a couple students that have created different programs and non-profits to help the communities which they live in. One of the girls was a high-school drop-out, but because she could connect with the students she worked with, she was able to use their thinking and culture to take them off the streets. I think this is a really interesting way of looking at community service. Wagner mentions that the person understands what is "cool", and this allowed her to make safe, legal activities "cool" too. Another idea that Wagner continues to mention is how these leaders reached the place they are now. While the earlier examples were members of the upper-middle class, these non-profit starters were sometimes growing up in the ghettos of New York and Chicago. Wagner argues that it is all about having someone older or with more knowledge telling you too take a risk, or giving you permission to try. This all connects with this idea of failure, and how schools are teaching failure is not allowed. What schools really should be teaching is that failure is good, and should be accepted, as long as you learn from your failures and can figure out why you failed. If students were taught to try and fail and try again, more students would grow up as social innovators or just be more successful in general. This is avery interesting idea that Wagner argues and I believe there is a lot of truth behind it. The hard part is implementing it. It would be an entire change in the culture of American education; something that would take decades to change.
Decades? Who could possibly wait this long? This type of reform is already going on in small pockets of schools all across the country. We MUST find a way to make this change sooner rather than later. In fact, this is very much the ethos behind this course (C4E). We're trying to find ways to get you all to take MORE risks, in fact.
ReplyDeleteI, too, think that social entrepreneurship has a great deal of promise.