When you read this post,  I'll be on a plane to the facilitate the opening plenary at the Legal Services TIG Conference on Wednesday, Jan. 16th.  One of my key themes for the year is to look at failure and learning - and will also have a chance to dive into a conversation at the upcoming COF Conference with colleague Peter Sims, Author of Little Bets and founder of BLKSHP.    His book has a great summary of the research out there on what is failure. One idea particularly stuck me with -- that … [Read more...]

From November 6-8 – 2012 I will be in Florianopolis, Brazil to keynote the Social Good Brazil – The Seminar, which brings together influential minds, social entrepreneurs and innovators, and connecting people from all walks of life to share ideas and actions to make the world a better place using technology, social media and innovative thinking. This will be my first visit to South America and I could not have asked for a more joyous introduction to social good and social media in that … [Read more...]

The Case Foundation is giving away $650,000 in grants and prizes as part of its initiative, Finding Fearless, with REI & Microsoft! The first phase is to get crowdsourced nominations of  "fearless changemakers,"  people who have a social change project in the early stages and a Fearless prize could help them make the leap to scaling.    The point is that the initiative is trying to identify and support  innovative approaches to on the ground social change. Here's how they are describing … [Read more...]

I had the honored of moderating a free wheeling plenary discussion on Day #3 of NTC on "Innovation and Nonprofits."   The panelists included Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Meg Garlinghouse, Greg Baldwin, and Brian Reich. You can find the description and bios here and if you want to the video of the whole session, you can find it here.     The conversation was non-linear, insightful, and allowed for debate on different points of view from the panelists. I kicked it off with a provactive question, … [Read more...]

  Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.   … [Read more...]