WASHINGTON, DC - September 9, 2013 — This week on BIZ+ SOCIAL, we bring you the best from the New Global Citizen, The Guardian, HBR, and more.

GLOBAL PRO BONO

Corporate Volunteerism Boosts Skills Development, Employee Retention

Angel Cabrera, president of George Mason University, argues in his 2012 book titled ‘Being Global’, that the challenges of global engagement require leaders at the helm who can craft solutions by seamlessly bringing together people and resources across national, cultural, and organizational lines. That means companies can’t just act global. They need to be global. Companies with these aspirations understand the need for a workforce that can operate globally, not just in theory, but in practice. They actively seek out leaders who can effectively create value with individuals and organizations across borders, whether in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, or Russia. Read More…

IMPACT & INNOVATION

Philanthropists and Aid Donors Must Join Forces in These Straitened Times

Behind the consensual language of partnership lies an uneasy relationship between state and private organisations based on very different attitudes and cultures. The worlds of philanthropic foundations and official donors have been evolving in parallel, and there is often misunderstanding of each other’s methods as well as a tendency to keep one another at arm’s length. Less than a decade ago, philanthropy was seen as a sideshow in global development. When I left the Department for International Development (DfID) in early 2007 to write Philanthrocapitalism, most of my colleagues wondered why I was interested in such a marginal issue. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005, for example, made no reference to philanthropy. Why should it? Pledges of extra aid money made at the G8 summit in Gleneagles that year meant signatories had little need to partner with private donors. Read More…

LEADERSHIP

Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers

Many CEOs who make gender diversity a priority—by setting aspirational goals for the proportion of women in leadership roles, insisting on diverse slates of candidates for senior positions, and developing mentoring and training programs—are frustrated. They and their companies spend time, money, and good intentions on efforts to build a more robust pipeline of upwardly mobile women, and then not much happens.The problem with these leaders’ approaches is that they don’t address the often fragile process of coming to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as a leader. Becoming a leader involves much more than being put in a leadership role, acquiring new skills, and adapting one’s style to the requirements of that role. It involves a fundamental identity shift. Organizations inadvertently undermine this process when they advise women to proactively seek leadership roles without also addressing policies and practices that communicate a mismatch between how women are seen and the qualities and experiences people tend to associate with leaders.  Read More…

CITIZEN DIPLOMACY

America’s Unofficial Ambassadors Use School-2-School Exchange to Facilitate Mutual Understanding

School started this week, and Hannah D’Apice and Sam Schindler returned to their classrooms in Dallas, Texas and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At some point, they’ll look at their students and ask themselves, “How in the world do I explain what I did over the summer?” Hannah is a 6th grade teacher at T.W. Browne Middle School, and Sam is a high school teacher at Lancaster Country Day School. Through Creative Learning’s School-2-School program, they served as unofficial ambassadors to the Muslim World this summer. While they taught and dispelled stereotypes, they also learned more than they ever could have imagined. Creative Learning has been running School-2-School for almost a decade. The program brings together an American school with a school in a developing country for a virtual exchange. At the same time, the American school raises money for needed school supplies like books or computers. In 2012, we incorporated an “unofficial ambassador” component to the program where the lead educator from an American school travels to a partner school to volunteer for 2-4 weeks. Read more…

ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT

Bringing Business Acumen and Humor to Agribusiness Development in Morocco

Have you ever had a terrible day, and somehow somebody or something gets you to crack a smile and maybe emit a chuckle?  Have you noticed how much better you feel afterwards?  It’s amazing, isn’t it?  Laughter contributes to happiness, and happiness begets more happiness.  Conversely, misery and anger breed more of the same. I’m not sure why people insist on heaping sadness on top of sadness. Even in times of terrible loss, I have used laughter as an antidote for grief. I remember the day of my father’s funeral. I’m 9-years-old, waiting at home with my family to pile into cars to drive to the cemetery.  It’s an appropriately dark, grey, drizzly day and everyone is correspondingly somber.  Somebody says or does something funny—maybe an impression of how my father would have had a conniption over the rings forming from coaster-less cups on the furniture—whatever it is, I burst into giggles. I feel a release—finally, some relief from the past three days of sadness.  Read More…

More

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