The Realist Idealist

I just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin this weekend, and without knowing exactly how to say this, I’ll simply say that I was completely inspired.  “Inspired” is quite an understatement actually.  I found myself at times with chills running through my body as Isaacson described the various successes and challenges Franklin faced throughout [...]

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Making good things (actually) happen is hard.
On any large scale, trying to make the world a bit better place is messy and complicated and almost always full of the same back-room shenanigans chronicled throughout the political, business, and tech sectors, but with one not-so-small difference: everyone involved acts like it’s not, and almost no one [...]

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Anyone I’ve talked to recently knows that I’ve been touting the virtues of Current Media’s new website and their citizen journalism through the “pods” on their TV station (now in 51 million households!) I don’t believe there is any other company that is (intentionally) democratizing media in the same way - and the potential [...]

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That David Brooks would write an article about social entrepreneurship and more or less delineate the exact path that many of my friends have taken in recent years (graduate from top 20 US university –> Year of Service program like TfA –> grad school –> software/business/corporation –> launch social enterprise) was surprising to me.
NYT: Thoroughly [...]

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My friend Henry recently applied to JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Deutsche Bank for a spot in each of their summer internship programs. Henry was asked back for interviews and successfully made it into the final round with a handful of other applicants at each of the banks. After all of the [...]

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My great friend Marissa and I were talking on Wednesday about how actually accomplishing many of the best things we want to see in the world will probably mean a lot of – for lack of a better term – “suckiness” and time to get there.
Earlier in the day I was at an event [...]

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I’m a cyclist.
Stick with me here; this is relevant.
One of the things I’ve always loved about cycling is that if you care enough about the sport you can have access to the exact same equipment or tools that the best riders in the world use. That is to say, I can [...]

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Getting people engaged in their communities is something I’ve been working on for quite a while - or at least it seems like quite a while to me. From using alternative spring breaks as a catalyst to Active Citizenship with college students to working with company networks to increase corporate volunteerism to doubling the [...]

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Original post on HuffPo - jake brewer
“…Our organization offers innovative and competent services to empower communities and organizations aimed at stimulating collaborative initiatives; while simultaneously developing harmonious relations which leverage…”
I can’t finish.
Last week I got an email that used that line to describe a company’s socially responsible work. This email follows hundreds of others this [...]

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They’ve been talking about it behind the scenes for a few weeks now, but unlike those companies who just talk (and trust me, a lot of companies do), Chad, Steve and all the folks at YouTube have actually delivered.
The YouTube Nonprofit Program - announced in a commitment the company made at the Clinton Global Initiative [...]

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