Social Citizen

Can you imagine giving up your voice to make a statement?  That’s exactly what @silentclark has done through his Social Media Experiment to silence cancer and raise money and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society - and he's certainly got a lot of people talking.  After reading about his story in Mashable yesterday, I caught up with him via Twitter, and sat down with him this morning (via facebook chat of course),  to learn more about his month long journey.  While Clark’s primary goal is to raise money and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, as a social citizen, his secondary goals are just as intriguing: to see if it’s feasible to get through an entire month successfully without changing any social, leisure and professional habits; to see what situations work and don’t work for Social Media; to see how not talking affects his life.

What are the rules, you ask? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flikr, and Google Chat are allowed, but email, talking, writing, text messaging and use of sign language are not. (Simple yes/no questions can be answered by nodding head).

So, in our first ever “silent interview,” on Social Citizens hear what SilentClark has to say….

@SOCIALCITIZEN:You started off with a simple question: Is it possible in today’s world of social media to more effectively raise money and create awareness for a cause online versus traditional methods? What have you found out?

@silentclark: All indicators at this point are very promising.  I have yet to seek out my direct connections and actually ask for money, it has all been very passive.  The awareness, support and money have come from all over the globe, opposed to a very small radius when I did more traditional mail campaigns four years ago. With that said, the donation levels are still very low, but the point was to "leverage" social media - which I'm still crafting a plan to do just that. No doubt about it, awareness is the first step and creating a program or group that people can relate to will be the next step.

@SOCIALCITIZEN: You’ve hit the halfway point of your month long journey – what’s been the biggest surprise or challenge about giving up your voice to make a statement?

@silentclark: It was the slow realization that I have lost something.  I've lost my normal life and gained a new dependency.  I now depend on devices (phone, computer) every time I want to speak.  It's something so natural that I took for granted. I also can see it catching up with my wife, who simply wants to hear her husband's voice again. I set out to gain insights about the challenges that cancer patients face and in some way I am starting to get a feeling for that.

My brother's ongoing battle with cancer makes what I am doing look like a walk in the park. When things get hard, I think about the pain he's learned to live with and the loss of use of his dominant hand.  And somehow he is still the same fun, hilarious, individual he was before.  I think of my mother too and want to make her proud. This endeavor makes me feel closer to her.

@SOCIALCITIZEN:Our generation is targeted as being so "dependent" on our technology...but you've really upped the ante on that one! 

@silentclark: Very true, I was dependent before on email, and staying connected, but now I am dependent out of need not convenience.

@SOCIALCITIZEN:We seem to be turning to social media more and more to make statements, raise money, and raise awareness – what is your greatest hope for this campaign?

@silentclark: I hope that this experiment will help me connect with people who share my vision for silencing cancer. I want to establish a core group of people that can turn this into something more than just a one month experiment. The Social Media Experiment has inspired me to do more, and take this further. It is only the first step in hopefully a long path.

Along those lines, I asked what the Social Citizen community could do to help give voice to Clark’s campaign – here are the steps he suggests:

1) Spread the word about what I am doing here: The Social Media Experiment

2) Become of a Fan of our Silence Cancer page on facebook

3) Follow @silentclark on twitter and use the hashtag #silencecancer

4) Donate if you are able by heading over to the Ways to Help section of the website and click the “Donate Now” button to add your contribution

5) Be ready to participate in whatever online "event" we dream up to help leverage social media and hit our goal. Details to follow.

@SOCIALCITIZEN:And a final question I’m sure everyone wants to know...have you thought about the first thing you’re going to say when you break your silence?? (other than tell your wife just how much you love her and her patience!!)

@silentclark: Well that is indeed what keeps coming to my mind. She's made the biggest sacrifice here, and I respect her immensely for that.  I don't know what I will say, I guess like everyone else you will have to tune in Monday the 31st at midnight to find out ;-x

We’ll be tuning in as SilentClark breaks his silence on May 31^st, and will be watching with great interest as his efforts evolve.  Is there a cause you could go "silent" for?

This interview is part of our "Social Citizen Sightings" series, in which we highlight how people are using their creativity, idealism, and digital fluency to support their causes every day.

Name: Daniel Kaufman

Organization where you spend a lot of your time: One Percent Foundation

Describe yourself in one tweet…or at least give it your best shot:  I am building a broad-based movement around next gen philanthropy by engaging Millennials+ in collective giving. #kindofcrazybutitworks

What’s currently uploaded to your kindle or on your nightstand?

Better by Atul Gawande and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Really enjoying both of them.

What was your inspiration for creating the One Percent Foundation, and what are you hoping to achieve?

I created the One Percent Foundation with a good friend after we realized that despite being socially conscious and engaged, we had never really thought about what we wanted to achieve with our own philanthropy. We started talking to our friends and heard the same three responses over and over:

• I don't give because I can't afford it.
• I don't know which organizations to support. There are so many out there--how am I supposed to distinguish between them?
• Whatever I give will be so small that it will be meaningless for the organization I give to.

We created the One Percent Foundation to solve these problems.

First, we ask people to make a baseline commitment of giving at least 1% of their annual income to philanthropic causes each year, half of which we ask to be given through OPF. We encourage monthly recurring donations to ease any financial burden and make it easier to budget. Giving $30/month is a lot easier than writing a $360 check in December for someone making $36,000 year that is paying rent and has student and credit card debt.

All money given through OPF is placed in a grant pool that is given out to nonprofits selected through a participatory grantmaking process. Everyone that makes the 1% Commitment (joins OPF) is invited to nominate, assess, and help select grant recipients. The process is entirely bottom up so grant recipients reflect the will of the community.

Finally, because we give out a limited number of large grants, participants are able to be part of making large grants to organizations. This means that they are making a substantial impact on the grant recipients. Ultimately, OPF is trying to create the infrastructure to support and engage Millennials in meaningful giving. This is a $16 billion market, an amount that dwarfs even the largest foundations. To put that in perspective, the Gates Foundation gave $3 billion last year. We believe that by democratizing philanthropy, we can empower our generation to be a powerful funding source, supporting innovative, creative, and exciting ideas, people, and organizations.

Is the Millennial Generation responding to this new form of collective philanthropy? How can people participate?

Definitely. Millennials, more than any other generation, seem to emphasize integrating good into everything they do and are comfortable with collective action, especially through leveraging their social networks. There is always a moment when I speak to Millennials when it clicks: "Wait a second, you mean I can give that little and have that big of an impact?" Becoming part of the One Percent Community is easy. You can check out the OPF website here and you can join here. We would love to have the Social Citizens community join us.

What do you see as the role of social media in enhancing opportunities for people to give back? Is it making it easier, or are people overwhelmed with choices?

From the perspective of the One Percent Foundation, social media makes possible large scale implementation. Collective giving requires a sense of community and social media enables bridging the gap created through online organizing. It is critical that our participants realize that they are part of a larger movement and we have found social media to be an important tool in making that happen.

From a broader perspective, I do think that there is a bit of information overload created by social media, making it hard for organizations to really stand out. However, the ease of communicating and giving more than makes up for any overload. With one click, one text, one tweet, or one status update, you can spread the word to thousands of networks and leverage the power of small donors.

You just launched a new campaign in time for March Madness. Tell us a bit about it and how can our readers get involved?

OPF just launched Grant Madness, a March Madness pool with a philanthropic twist. Run just like an NCAA office pool, OPF is hosting a pool where participants can make a $10 donation (the entry fee) and enter a bracket into the tournament. Instead of playing for money, the Grant Madness winner will win the right to select a nonprofit organization to receive a grant funded by the entry fees.

Grant Madness is a fun take on March Madness and gives people an opportunity to direct their pool money to good (instead of a new flat screen TV for the IT guy who sits down the hall). We'd love for the Social Citizens community to get involved.

To learn more about the One Percent Foundation, you can follow them on Twitter, check out their blog or find them on Facebook.

Armed with just $45, a laptop, and a small hand-held camera, Mark Horvath set out on a journey that will forever change the face of homelessness in America.  I had the opportunity to catch up with Mark this afternoon as he made his way back to California following a cross country road trip that documented stories of the homeless through a series of powerful, raw, and unedited videos -- all of which can be seen on his vlog, InvisiblePeople.tv.

So, how do you raise awareness about a cause you are so passionate about with no money and no consistent resources to lean on? You put faith in the kindness of others, you leave a lot to chance encounters, and you leverage social media in ways that you never thought possible.

People often ask me, "what exactly is a social citizen?" it's Mark Horvath. Mark's work and his use of social media is extremely innovative, but it's more than that - he is the real deal. Perhaps there is no other individual that does a better job of explaining the plight of the homeless to the general public.  About fifteen years ago, Mark found himself on the streets of Hollywood and the purpose of his vlog is simple: to make the invisible visible.

I had the opportunity to turn the camera on Mark today, as he shared his thoughts about the power of social media to bring attention to homelessness.  But, recognizing we all have our individual passions, Mark encourages everyone to remember this, "people are listening, and you do have influence." It's what you choose to do with this influence that is truly powerful, and social media gives you the tools you need to take action and tell stories.

While Mark's Road Trip U.S.A. may be coming to an end, he will continue to share stories on Invisiblepeople.tv. For more ways you can get involved in addressing homelessness in your community, here are 10 actions you can take from Change.org.

Guest blogger Emily Garrett is a junior at Northwestern University and a summer intern with the Case Foundation.

• Add your John Hancock to an online petition. Go to The Petition Site or Petition Online and sign a petition or start your own. Gather the masses to make change! Add the link to your Twitter or Facebook page to raise your numbers awareness even further.
• Get out of the house (or office) and do some hands on volunteering. There are many web sites to help you find a cool project in your area. Check out the White House’s Summer of Service site, VolunteerMatch, or Idealist to find something that fits your interests and benefits your neighborhood.
• Treat yourself to a Flip video camera and start shooting videos. Find things that are politically or social interesting and post your video on YouTube to raise awareness. Or if you’re already a whiz at video storytelling? Help nonprofits out. Join Youtube’s Video Volunteers and put your skills to good use.
• You’ve donated online, but have you joined a mobile giving campaign? Consult the Mobile Giving Foundation or mGive for a list of current campaigns and how to get involved. There are tons of ongoing campaigns including Doctors Without Borders, Invisible Children, Chicago 2016, and Malaria No More. Choose your favorite, and text to give.
• Miss the days of summer reading? Grab a book to expand your social citizen knowledge. Britt Bravo has a great list of “do gooder books” to keep you busy. Social by Social is also a great book on social media and social impact, and my personal favorite, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood should get you inspired to make some changes in your community.
• You’re clicking around on YouTube anyway, so check out this video lecture by college professor Michael Wesch: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.
• Have a summer birthday? Donate it to your favorite cause. Go to Causes on Facebook, and tell your friends to donate to the cause instead of giving you a birthday gift. What easier way to raise money for your favorite organization then having Facebook solicit the donations for you? And besides do you really need another sweater from your mom?
• If you’re mass emailing resumes this summer, you’re not alone. Worried about finding a job in this economy and paying off your student loans or credit card debt? Join the 80 Million Strong Coalition to discuss the problems and find solutions to get the Millennial Generation fully employed.
• Are you obsessed with Twitter? Put that obsession to good use by pitching in to plan, or at least attend a Twestival local event in September to meet other Tweeters in your area and to raise money and awareness.

From Mumbai to Massachusetts, the 2009 Class of Echoing Green Fellows announced today, represents a diverse group of 17 social entrepreneurs, many of whom are honing their skills as social citizens and leveraging technology for social change. With 1,000 applicants the competition was intense, but the fourteen projects announced today, represent some of the most innovative ideas in areas from civil and human rights to education and public service.  That’s why we’ll be watching with great interest as these leaders carry their work forward.

We join in congratulating the newest members of Echoing Green’s network of social entrepreneurs who work each day to solve social, economic and environmental problems throughout the world. To see a complete list of the 2009 Fellows, and learn more about their projects, visit Echoing Green.

Also, we know there are plenty of Echoing Green Fellows in the making, and we’d like to feature some of these bright faces and ideas in our new series “Social Citizen Sightings.”  Please fill out this quick form if you have a group or individual you'd like to nominate for the new series.

Next up in our Social Citizens Makeover series is Lauren Schwartz, 23, of Macungie, Penn.

This time last year we were reading drafts of the Social Citizens paper and wondering whether it was sea worthy, meaning would the findings and assumptions hold up over the course of a few stormy tosses and turns. And now we know the answer: mostly yes. Of course, we missed one big thing coming on the horizon, more than a storm, an economic tsunami really, but, then again, so did everone else! 

In preparation for the WeMedia conference taking place this week in Miami, I wrote a short reflection piece on the Social Citizens paper a year later.  Here is a quick summary of that paper.

Certainly the intensity of interest in social causes, and the rapdity of growth of individual causes and cause events, has continued and perhaps even quickened because of social media. Twitter, the fastest growing social networking site, has spawned events like Tweetsgiving and Twestival, raising thousands of dollars to build schools in Africa and buy drinking wells and filters for clean water worldwide.

But the construct of Social Citizens has also changed throughout the year. One issue in particular that we wrestled with throughout the year was whether Social Citizens are by definition Millennials (ages 15-29). And I think that the answer is, naturally, more complicated at second glance than at first. Not all Millennials are Social Citizens, and not all Social Citizens are Millennials.  But there is more movement on the later idea than the former, particularly when you see the data that the Pew Foundation recently released showing that older people are coming online faster than any other segment of the population.  And old in this instance isn't me (regardless of what my kids say) it means over 75!  Your grandparents are on email, your parents are on Facebook, and you're on Twitter, and we're all pinging and poking and tweeting about causes. Increasingly, we're all social citizens.

That's the good news. Unfortunately the bad news is really bad, the fast sinking economy is the first economic crisis young people have ever faced. Sagging beneath a pile of credit card and student loan debt, unable to find jobs, unwilling to live at home, the patina of effortessness that had clung to Millennials all their lives is beginning to wear off. How this will affect causes is uncertain at this point, but it's difficult to imagine that the cup of coffee grown on an organize farm by an entrepreneurial native family will do as well today as it would have last year against the less expensive one.

One very interesting issue to watch moving forward this year is the growth of the public sector as the stimulus money begins to move through the system. Certainly the early signals are that Millennials who were very involved in the presidential campaign are not as drawn to the messy reality of governing. However, if the only growth area for jobs in the next year or two is the public sector, that may change the wariness and distance that young people have had from the public sector as a whole.

We'll continue to watch from our perch here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter and whatever the new Twitter is and continue to learn how people engage with one another for causes and how those causes affect our relationships and our communities.

As part of our series of "before" profiles in our Social Citizens Makeover, today we would like you to meet Emily Waugh, 30, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Emily loves spending time with animals, so when she saw a local rescue group at her local PetSmart, she jumped on the opportunity to volunteer with them. That was 2000. Nine years later, she is still active in promoting the wellbeing of animals and finding homes for the thousands of healthy, adoptable animals that die in Oklahoma City shelters each year.

Emily has been working with various rescue groups since that day in the PetSmart, but she was excited to be a part of an umbrella organization, like the Central Oklahoma Humane Society (OK Humane), that has the ability to bring small groups together to pool their resources and make a greater impact. In addition to enjoying working with the other passionate volunteers and the staff at OK Humane, Emily says her volunteer work there is extremely satisfying because she can already see how her time and social media skills are directly affecting the treatment of animals in her community.

 Emily and the humane society already use diverse methods to reach their audiences. To supplement the OK Humane website, which shares organizational information and opportunities to get involved, Emily maintains the OK Humane blog, which gets lots of traffic because of the topical and controversial issues discussed. An active Twitter user, Emily says she has been able to use it to exchange ideas, recruit new volunteers, and promote animals for adoption. She recognizes, however, that the majority of OK Humane’s volunteer and donor base is not on Twitter, so she needs other social media tools to effectively reach all her constituents. She also maintains Facebook and MySpace pages for the humane society, but finds that both of the sites have limitations.

She writes a monthly email newsletter which goes out to all adopters, donors, and other constituents. Weekly local television appearances and regular adoption events are also in their communications arsenal. “I'm a huge fan of social media, but I believe you can't forget the ‘traditional’ ways of meeting and connecting with people, either!” says Emily.

With all the different ways she communicates with people, Emily knows her message is being heard by some – around 6,000 website visitors per month and about 400 Twitter followers, to name a few. But Emily is not satisfied. She says, “Considering that I encounter people every single day in this city who have no idea we exist…my work is far from done; I'm not reaching nearly as many as I'd like to.” One of her biggest challenges is managing all these forms of communication herself, on top of her full-time job, so she could use the Social Actions consultant to help her learn to invest her limited time for the most significant results.

Like any good makeover contest, we want to share a little about our five makeover winners before they are transformed into model (social) citizens. Starting today, we will profile each of our winners to give you the “before” picture. In a few months, we will report back with “after” stories to reveal how each of them has been impacted by the process.

Chuck Warpehoski, 30, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Chuck was initially drawn to the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice (ICPJ) by its ability to make the connection between faith and social justice. “Traditionally, faith has been part of social justice movements, from abolition to labor to peace,” says Chuck. “In the last few decades, the voice of religion in social life has been the voice of the religious right. ICPJ gives me a space to say ‘the religious right doesn't speak for me; I can be spiritual AND progressive. I can follow the examples of Dr. King, Dorothy Day, and the Berrigan brothers.’”

Chuck, who has now been involved with ICPJ for six years and now serves as its Director, is still passionate about the organization, whose programs include work on issues ranging from hunger to Middle East peace, because of the amazing community of volunteers, who give generously of their time, energy and resources to support the Council’s work. “It's really something special,” he says, “and I’m lucky to be part of it.”

Chuck is already using social media as well as traditional communication methods to reach constituents and potential partners and encourage them to attend events, participate in advocacy actions, and donate. ICPJ’s largest communication is a printed newsletter, sent five times a year to a list of about 1,800, but he would like to cut back on the newsletter list to save both trees and cash. ICPJ also sends weekly email newsletters and maintains a Facebook page and WordPress site.

He hopes the Social Citizens Makeover expert from Social Actions will help him learn to effectively use Facebook to connect with new people without overdoing it or turning people off. Chuck is also interested in learning to coordinate ICPJ’s different communications efforts to increase efficiency and to engage all of the organization’s contacts as active partners.

Finding your inner "social citizen" is something that we think takes a combination of time, patience and of course, the right social networking tools.  Today we're pleased to announce the five finalists of our first ever Social Citizens Makeover Contest.  We'll be showcasing the "before" and "after" stories of each of our finalists individually, but as an introduction, we thought we would share their 250 character statement on why they (or their organization) are deserving of a 21st century makeover.

Finalists will receive a flip video camera, a $100 Apple gift certificate, a WordPress PremiumAccount, and a Flickr ProAccount.  Plus, we're pleased to announce that each finalist will have two hours of individual consulting time with Peter Deitz and the social media experts he has assembled at Social Actions.

And now, introducing our finalists...in no particular order: