sustainability

This week the Sustainable Endowments Initiative released their annual Green Report Card for 300 institutions in American higher education with the largest endowments.

The Report Card recognizes those colleges and universities who lead by example in their commitment to sustainability. Often, schools simply don't know enough about each others' practices; this annual report card gives every school a chance to show the rest of higher education what they are doing and how those projects might help their own institutions.

One of the other goals is to provide information to high school students who, in trying to make a decision about a college, may weigh sustainability initiatives heavily.

A bit about their methodology:

Independent evaluation

The profiles of 300 schools were created using information gathered through independent research as well as through voluntary responses from school administrators to three surveys. In total, 290 of the 300 schools (over 96 percent) responded to at least one survey.

Thorough assessment methods

Grades were determined by assessing performance across 43 indicators in nine main categories. Each school received a copy of its profile for fact checking before grades were determined. For more information on the survey process, response rates, and evaluation criteria, please see Methodology.

The Sustainable Endowments Institute is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

I've written many times about HeadCount, the voter registration organization that originated within the jam band scene (disclosure: I'm on the advisory board). I think they've put together an amazing, national organization that accomplishes real political work without sacrificing the vibe of a small, tight-knit community. If you've ever been to a HeadCount show, you know there's a real connection between the fans, the music and the politics.

Over the last four years, they've built this community with far fewer resources than other political nonprofits, and they've expanded beyond their roots in the jam band scene. Now, they're morphing once again.

Yesterday, HeadCount relaunched their website and announced that they're expanding beyond their core work - voter registration - and into the realm of issue advocacy:

Building on the momentum of registering more than 100,000 voters last year, HeadCount has launched a new campaign called “What’s Your Issue?” that encourages fans of live music to take the next steps beyond voting to become more informed, active citizens. Anyone who answers a brief issue survey – either at a concert or online at www.HeadCount.org – will be entered in a drawing to win two free VIP tickets to Outside Lands Music Festival, held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park August 28-30, 2009, plus round-trip airfare for two on Southwest Airlines from anywhere in the U.S.

The campaign will visit concert tour stops this summer by Dave Matthews Band, Phish, The Fray and NINJA (Nine Inch Nails and Janes Addiction). Festivals such as Bonnaroo, ROTHBURY, High Sierra Music Festival, All Good Music Festival, Camp Bisco and Gathering of the Vibes will also host the “What’s Your Issue?” campaign. [...]

HeadCount continues to offer voter information and registration services at its concert tables and at www.HeadCount.org. The organization also provides a wide range of resources that facilitate civic participation. The HeadCount blog (www.HeadCount.org/blog) is a one-stop online community updated daily with news on “Music, Politics and Everything In Between.” HeadCount street teams are partnering with local nonprofit organizations, such as Save the Bay, and creating joint volunteer outings. HeadCount makes it easy to write to members of Congress, with pre-printed letters available at concerts and online at www.HeadCount.org. It’s all part of an effort to give music fans the tools to be involved, active citizens, while creating a real community of fans who are bound by shared ideals.

The “What’s Your Issue?” survey serves as the gateway to the HeadCount community. It lists six issues that, according to a recent online poll, are particularly important to fans of live music. They are:

• Food and Farm Policy
• Health Care Reform
• Personal Liberty
• Gulf Coast Recovery
• Human Rights
• Sustainability and Conservation

Once someone identifies the issue most important to them, they are sent a link to an area of HeadCount.org devoted to that issue. Users will find a blog, background information, artist interviews and links to related websites. Most important, they’ll also find a “Take Action” area that enables them to volunteer for a related organization or email their Congressional representatives.

This is a great organization and a great campaign. And their new website is super clean and a cut well above their previous site. As usual, I can't recommend HeadCount highly enough. Go check them out.

In an article published Thursday, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey, "The American Teacher," which found that a majority of today's faculty place an emphasis on becoming a change agent when teaching college students as opposed to teaching them the classic works of Western civilization.

The UCLA education professor who directs the institute believes the results point to a burgeoning gap in higher education between the abstract and the practical.

Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the research institute, said the gap between those who value teaching Western civilization and those who value teaching students to be social activists reflects a shift in emphasis from the abstract to the practical. "The notion of a liberal education as a set of essential intellectual skills is in transition," she says. "It's also about social and personal responsibility, thinking about one's role in society, and creating change."

Across the board, more faculty admitted to paying attention to the liberal arts while teaching.

The survey found other evidence that professors are increasingly interested in helping students develop morals and in helping them get a well-rounded education and form a commitment to their communities. In particular, 72.8 percent of professors think it is important to instill in students an appreciation for the liberal arts—nearly 15 percentage points more than said so three years ago. About 56 percent say it is important to instill an appreciation for community service—a nearly 20 percentage-point increase—and 71.8 percent say it is important to enhance students' "self understanding." About 70 percent say it is important to help students develop "moral character," 13 percentage points more than said so three years earlier.

Those are pretty big jumps for three years in between surveys. I would undoubtedly think that the success of Obama's change-based campaign and the high interest in the presidential election has something to do with these numbers.

Others argue that faculty are beginning to pay increased attention to the non-classroom side of the student, as incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings of April 2007 and others involving campus violence have occurred.

Whatever the cause, I'm encouraged by these findings, and I'm hopeful that the kind of education seen here -- multidisciplinary, focused on empowerment and citizenship -- continues to grow in the future.

An ostensibly unrelated commentary piece by a Middlebury College economics professor (subscription req. - sorry!), also published in The Chronicle this week, argued that economics at a liberal arts college is the best major for college graduates to have in a depressed job market following graduation, and as a result, it's popularity is surging.

Like many liberal-arts institutions, Middlebury College, where I teach, has a problem: Too many students want to be economics majors. Economics enrollments keep growing, and adding more faculty members to the department seems to only increase the demand. The rumor on the campus is that if the college actually provided enough professors to meet the demand for economics courses, it would have to change its name to the Middlebury School of Economics.

Professors at other liberal-arts colleges confirm that the phenomenon is widespread and has been for some time.

[...]

Companies like to hire economics majors from liberal-arts colleges not because the students have been trained in business, but because they have a solid background in the liberal arts. What I hear from businesspeople is that they don't care what a job candidate has majored in. They want students who can think, communicate orally, write, and solve problems, and who are comfortable with quantitative analysis. They do not expect colleges to provide students with specific training in business skills.

If the economics major's popularity is not due to its intellectual dynamism or connection to business, to what is it due? I suspect a mundane explanation: It is the "just right" major. By "just right" I mean that the economics major provides the appropriate middle ground of skill preparation, analytic rigor, and intellectual excitement that students look for in a major, and that employers look for when hiring students.

Both of these stories are interesting to me because of the "intellectual pragmatism" link involved in both. In one, students are in the classroom developing practical skills, learning to engage the government through their citizenship in order to create positive change. In the other, students are in the classroom, many already possessing these practical quantitative skills, seeking the liberal arts approach to economics and business, adding intellectual heft by learning to write and think creatively.

I'm in the middle of writing another post discussing the increasing number of recent college grads majoring in environmental studies who have gone on to work in institutions (especially higher education). These young professionals advise administration officials on sustainability practice -- more intellectual pragmatism.

And finally, I'd be willing to go out on a limb and argue that the intellectual pragmatism Barack Obama flaunted on the way to the White House wasn't too poorly received by Millennials.

Any feedback? If you share my opinion that we're seeing an appreciation for this melding of intellect and practice among Millennials, how might this help us to continue developing a future majority?

Yesterday, Mazhira Black -- Young People For Fellow and Living Liberally intern -- posted about starting off your school year on the left foot.

It got us thinking: it's not just the annual tradition of buying new gear, books and attire that deserves a how-to guide with a sustainable slant and lefty lean. There are dozens of events in the calendar year (holidays, Election Day) and in the human life (rites of passage) that would be well marked with a scoop of social consciousness.

So we're kicking off a Liberal Lifecycle Series...and we'd love your help. Whether it's bringing a baby into the world or wishing dearly departed farewell, we hope you'll send us suggestions for those life moments that could use a liberal lilt.

And here's the post that got us thinking this direction...(good luck back in Waco, Mazhira!):

Are you concerned that your free-thinking tyke will forget his liberal roots this fall in the classroom? Why not equip her with all of the essential back to school items that a liberal pupil needs? When you're bombarded with ads telling you what type of parent you are if you don't shop at Walmart to buy your kid the newest Hannah Montana threads or what sugary fruit drink you should pack in their lunch it can be easy to get lost in the crowd.

Update: Matt B-H writes to note that the results of the competition are still subject to verification and will not be final for about a month.

Matt Browner-Hamlin reminds me that on Friday the FaceBook Giving Challenge came to a close, with Love Without Boundaries securing the $50,000 grand prize. The competition raised thousands of dollars for over a dozen different non-profit organizations and pioneered a new best practice for Foundations looking to assist a wide range of organizations with more than a one-time cash infusion.

Sponsored by what looks to be a $250,000 grant from the Case Foundation, and administered by the company responsible for building the "Causes" application, the contest created a highly competitive environment that encouraged small non-profit organizations to raise money and build a large, small-dollar donor lists. The Giving Challenge accomplished this through a two-stage structure.

The first stage was a series of daily contests beginning on December 14th and ending on February 1st. Each day, all participating non-profits engaged in a 24 hour competition to raise not the most money from their members, but rather to raise money from the largest number of unique donors. An organization with 100 donors would beat an organization with 90 donors for that 24 hour time period regardless of the total dollar amount raised. The winner for each 24 hour period received a $1000 prize.

This structure spurred many organizations to pick specific days and use them as rallying points for their memberships. The Case Foundation distributed $50,000 in this first stage of the competition.

The second stage looked at the total amount of donors for the full 50 days of the competition. The organization with the largest unique donor list won the $50,000 grand prize. The second and third place organizations each received $25,000. The next 10 highest each received $10,000.

The contest is significant for a number of reasons, but most exciting is the way that it is spurring many small non-profits to build a donor network. It accomplished this by creating an environment in which organizations had a chance to win a not-insignificant chunk of their yearly budget, and by keeping the threshold for meaningful participation very low (a $10 dollar donation helps just as much as a $100 donation, democratizing the process).

Matt Browner-Hamlin, who used to work for Students for a Free Tibet, one of the runners-up, explains:

The Tibetan Freedom Movement, SFT’s cause for the giving challenge, has over 4,750 members. 2,190 of those members have donated at least once, and counting. Since I took the screen cap five minutes ago, 150 more people have donated in support of Tibetan freedom. That is one of the highest members to donors conversation rates on Facebook causes. Over the last 49 days, SFT has raised over $60,000 through the challenge, including enough individual donations in 24 hour periods to win nine days.

Students for a Free Tibet is not a big organization. When I worked there, only four other people were on staff in the New York headquarters (now there are six staffers in HQ). In my years, the annual budget was around $350,000; it was closer to $400,000 this year. If SFT wins out in the challenge, they will likely have raised over 25% of their budget in 50 days, a truly incredible output for such a small organization. By contrast, LWB had a budget of $1.2 million last year, four times larger than SFT.

Matt also notes that the contest spurred a lot of creativity on the part of SFT in how they engaged their members, including happy hour events with WiFi and laptops set up, and members pushing the competition out to their family and social networks.

He also correctly notes that only two organizations made a highly-committed and serious run at the grand prize - SFT and Love Without Borders, both of which amassed over 4,500 donors. I'm not so quick, however, to dismiss the other participants and the impact this competition had on their own bottom lines.

The League of Young Voters, for instance, made a push only a few times to win the daily prize. They managed to capture that title twice, netting $2000, and their efforts earned them a spot in the $10,000 prize range. In addition, they raised $13,696 from 786 members. So all told, they raised just over $25,000. That's not an insignificant number for them, and that is in addition to the list they built, which they may can tap again in the future with targeted fundraising campaigns (i.e. "we need to raise X amount in X weeks to fund a staffer in Ohio for 2008).

I'm not privy to the budgets of the other participating organizations, but I imagine that this competition provided both valuable funds and list-building to all of them. The Case Foundation, it appears, has discovered a highly efficient structure to provide what amounts to a de facto matching grant to at least a dozen organizations at once. More incredibly, it created a system that moves all of those organizations closer to sustainability. That's a significant achievement, and one that begins to make good on the promise that many young people and poli-tech enthusiasts saw in the FaceBook Causes application when it first launched.

Most pertinent to youth organizers, this contest and any future iterations provides a model for organizational development that can at least begin overcome one of the most significant hurdles to sustainable youth organizing - building a donor base out of a young membership with huge amounts of disposable income, but very little willingness to spend it on political/activist causes. Very impressive all around, and certainly something to watch in the future.