 Hi, my name is Stacy Murphy. I'm the founder of BK Farm Yards. We grow and sell fresh, affordable food for low-income communities in Brooklyn. It started BK Farm Yards about three years ago when I didn't have any food in my refrigerator and I couldn't find any in my neighborhood. And I had to go about 20 minutes by bike to find some food that was expensive because it's organic. And so myself, like many other people in my community, are looking for access to good food that we want to eat and also things that are culturally appropriate. So in my community, there's a lot of West Indian communities that really want Kalalu. They don't know where to get that, so we grow it. So one of the things that we're doing to solve this issue is that we're transforming underutilized land in Brooklyn communities, low-income communities. And we're training farmers so that they can start their own ventures. So we have about five farms and we're growing about 30,000 pounds of produce yearly, serving 165 customers per week. And we believe that everyone has a role to play in our food system. And so I'm really excited to be introducing this panel because we leverage volunteers as well as what we call food citizens to really boost our business. And what I mean by that is that we're creating roles or deepening roles for people to get engaged and to really be co-producers of our food scape. And so as you can imagine, we have a lot of volunteers on the farm. That's pretty easy to imagine, hands in the dirt. But we also use them for fundraising. We used to have them host dinner parties to help us raise money for the farm. So I'm excited to be here and interested to hear questions about how to keep volunteers engaged long-term and also what kinds of activities are really great for volunteers. So I'll hand it back over to you, Roth. Thank you. Great, thanks so much. Well, this panel was born really out of demand rather than supply. I mean, if I run an organization called Village Capital and we run programs around the world for early stage, social ventures and we see thousands of entrepreneurs every year and if I had to say, being in a position that we're in, we see consistent themes around social change and one of them and probably the most consistent theme we've seen in the last three years is solutions that leverage people to drive change. So this could be everything from crowdfunding to collaborative consumption to volunteers and platforms to, hey, I've got this Indiegogo Kickstarter-like platform that has this specific application. It's probably the most consistent thing we see and what we realize is that people out there are hungry to engage their friends, their neighbors, their community to make change in the world and that's probably the biggest theme I've seen in this sector. So we, typically our programs are location focused but we partnered this year with Points of Light and Michelle will talk about what Points of Light does to do a sector-focused program around these kinds of civic ventures and the most important thing to realize about this is that this is not new. Ben Retray of change.org runs probably the most successful social enterprise that is incredibly on the radar about being a social enterprise, they're just an enterprise. They engage people across the country to do things like change government policy on human rights abuses and end ATM fees for those of you like me who bank with Bank of America. So I thank you specifically, Ben, for that one. I'm expecting a little bit of money. Five dollars is what they're charging. Kyle Acevedo leverages collaborative consumption to build better and more sustainable communities through his enterprise via cycle and Michelle runs probably the largest volunteer and based organization on Earth. I don't know about Mars, but on Earth we know you're the biggest. But what's consistent is that people are hungry to use platforms, companies, organizations to drive change and we've got some unbelievable change makers here who make a living off of engaging regular ordinary people who wanna make their community better and that's really where I see the biggest potential and the whole social capital market's going. So what we're going to do in the spirit of civic engagement is these three folks are gonna introduce themselves about five minutes each and what they do and specifically how they think through and if you can get intellectual psychological for it, like how you think through engaging people to take responsibility over their own communities. That would be how I'd love for you to introduce yourself. And in the meantime, in the spirit of putting people to the center for change, we want the rest of the panel to be determined by you. So how many of you, you all have business cards, right? Or most of you do or scraps of paper or something while they're introducing themselves, I am going to stand to the side out of the lights and collect questions that you'd like to have either can either be specifically directed at one of these folks or generally around the topic and the rest of the panel will be determined by what you guys wanna talk about because it's late in the day, we're standing in between you and happy hour and it's gonna be more fun if we talk about what you wanna hear about. So this is gonna be a completely people driven panel and we're gonna practice what we preach. So without further ado, I'm gonna step off stage, write down questions and bring them to me and we're gonna have Ben, Michelle and Kyle, thank you so much for your time. I think this is three of the most impressive people in the world working on social enterprise and I'm really, really lucky to be on a panel with all three of you. So introduce yourself. Talk about how you think through people driving change. Can I hear myself? Oh, this is awesome, this is an echo. It reminds me of the eighth grade when I was in my first play, first and last play. And it sounded a lot like this but lower or higher in voice. So my name is Ben Ratchray, founder and CEO of change.org. So we started about five years ago and systemically failed for about three and a half years which wasn't very fun. Subsequent to which we finally found a model that was fairly successful, ripped everything else out and they've been optimizing on that ever since. It's a very simple thing. So anyone anywhere can start a campaign or any issue they care about, pretty straightforward. About 20,000 people a month start campaigns. About 20 million people a month taking action, about two million new members a month. And I think we're now winning or people are winning on the platform about a half a dozen times a day. And everything for very, very local things, saving a local park. It's around stopping foreclosure in a local community to helping women in Saudi Arabia fight for the right to drive, ending corrective rape in South Africa. So really the massive gamut. In fact, my favorite campaign over the past two weeks was helping a very famous baseball player who in 2005 had his first and only at bat. He was hit in the head first pitch, knocked out Vertigo out for a year, tried to get back to the big leagues, wasn't able to do so for a long time as a campaign that started on the site about three months ago and after massive overwhelming support, huge and ESPN, another place is he was given his first official at bat in major league baseball yesterday. And he struck out in three pitches actually. That's a sad side of the story. You're not supposed to tell that part. I guess the important here is this wide range, just an open platform for anyone to start campaigns. And we think that's a hugely important part of a broad swath of people getting involved in social change. And so I wanna talk about I guess two things broadly to kick off. One is the opportunity, what's really exciting. And the second is the challenges that people face. As far as the opportunities that Ross mentioned, there has just been one of the systemic difficulties barriers to effective social movements is the expense of collective action. It's very expensive in time and resources and by virtue of that there's fairly limited local rapid response collective action. It's oftentimes through very large national nonprofits. In increasingly in America over the past 40 years, there's been sort of representation by proxy where people give money to citizen sort of driven organizations nominally but not actually participate substantively because organizations are representing them in Congress at a national level almost always. And for us we just see this sort of largely disengaged and people aren't apathetic by nature but are born to be that over time when it's time and again demonstrated that they actually have very marginal impact. And what we're trying to do is to demonstrate that there's been no tool ever invented in all of history at more effective and overcoming collective action costs than the internet in general and social media in particular. So it's not like a small change, not like it's twice as effective or easy not five times, not 10 times but hundreds of times easier to mobilize people in rapid response. And the consequence of this is not just having more campaigns but different types of campaigns. So there's campaigns at a national level that creates sort of a lot of skepticism by the effectiveness of online petitions, of online campaigns, things like asking President Obama to stop climate change or asking Congress to sort of change the banking system. It's actually quite local. And when anyone can start a movement, when anybody can start a campaign, you get these very specific objects of mobilization that are much more winnable, right? Much more amenable to victory and you start going from one victory on foreclosure to 10 to 100 to thousands of campaigns on the site, fighting against very clear unjust foreclosures. And the interesting sort of impact of this is it starts to change the structural incentives of people that make decisions in power. So we hear this on a regular basis where companies that are being lobbied on a regular basis from sort of citizen activists will start to, when they're sitting around a boardroom and making decisions in previous obscurity, now recognize that any decision they make both is going to be transparent and could easily spawn a rap response lobbying group through Twitter, through Facebook, and then on change.org and by virtue that changes the incentive structure they face. So really exciting. So I think this is sort of the opportunity that's a bit about how we approach it but how to mobilize people's voices in ways like rapidity and sort of regularity that was never before possible with sort of the kind of the mobilization that goes from small to sort of big. The second thing I just know, I think is really important to recognize is that this stuff is really difficult. So we fail for three and a half years and as is often commented in the consumer internet, you have to be both good and lucky, right? And like we're pretty good but we are damn lucky. And this is really rare. It's just not often the case. You have a binary existence in consumer internet properties where you have for any given vertical the massive outlying huge power law distribution where it was like 5,000 video sites on the web but video is YouTube and in auctions is eBay and books is Amazon and searches, Google and social change. There's no analogous platform but it's noteworthy that hundreds of millions of dollars have been thrown into these and all but one are almost always a failure. And so I just think it's worth noting that this is really difficult that the fact that many fail isn't an indication of a broken system, right? It's also not necessarily an indication that we're getting things right but you tend to have these strong outliers like what we're saying right now on Change.org which is a function certainly of competence but also of happening at the right object at the right time and doubling down when you see it. And in the spirit of civic ventures the entire panel's questions are going to be generated by you. So if you have a business card or a scrap of paper with a question wave your hand and I'll collect it. If you haven't, please come up with a question because we would love to hear from you. Michelle, CEO of Points of Light. So Ben, one of my favorite of the challenges or movements of late has been was pointing out that we haven't had a woman moderator for the debates, presidential debates for 20 years. So I'm wondering how many folks do you know how many have signed that petition? There's about 170,000 people started by three 16-year-old girls in New Jersey who rocked it in two weeks afterwards the first female moderator presidential debate announced after 20 years. Rock stars, young kids are just killing it on the site. So very exciting. I think it points to what Ben has experienced is this extraordinary capacity for people to create change at a scale and at a pace that's truly remarkable. And so I think that's what I wanna talk about. For the last 20 years, seeing the power of people to create change, I might just, I'll tell you just a little bit about my own story, which started after college, a group of us got together and said we need to find new ways to engage people in our community in Atlanta. And we had, we gathered at the local tavern, manuals tavern, everybody put in $50 into the beer mug and we started to send out postcards. This gives you a sense of how much things have changed. To people to invite them to come out to service projects. And we started out with a half a dozen service projects. And that effort has grown to what is now about 235,000 projects that are happening every year, over 5 million people that are serving and volunteering. And along the way, I've met all these extraordinary people like the 16 year olds that mobilized through change.org. But activating a lot of them on a local level. So Stuart Evans, who was a computer programmer who realized that there were people that couldn't leave their homes because they didn't have wheelchair ramps. And he started working with a local disability organization and figured out how do you build a wheelchair ramp and how do you get other people to help you build a wheelchair ramp. And Richard Goldsmith, who is a plumbing executive who read an article about a failing school in Atlanta and went to meet with the principal and said, what can I do to help? And he said, we need more adults in the after school time, in the out of school time. And so Richard started coming on Saturdays. And the first day that he came, wondering if there would be any kids that would show up, there were 120 kids waiting for the principal to open the door. And Richard and 20 volunteers started, it's what they called the Discovery Program. And Richard has been volunteering there pretty much every Saturday for the last 20 years. And so these are the kinds of experiences that I've seen that I think are manifestations of a huge hunger for people to find meaning, to create meaningful solutions to tough challenges in our communities and to operate in a different scale. I think there's new capacities for people to create change more so now than ever before when we were sending out our postcards and putting in our $50 in the beer mugs. And so points of light is all about how do we inspire? How do we equip? How do we mobilize people to create change? How do we put people at the center of change? One of the newest endeavors and ways that we're thinking about this, which partly brings us here to this conference, is a partnership with Village Capital, with Ross and his team to create a Civic Accelerator. And we know, I know that y'all are familiar with the Accelerator model, but it's a little bit new to the nonprofit sector. And the focus that we have is to create a national accelerator that calls upon Civic Ventures, whether they be for-profit or non-profit. And that means basically that involve people and putting people together to create change in that framework. And we started actually, we just launched a call to folks to see if there were any folks out there that would be interested in this program. It's a 12-week program. It'll start in November. It's supported by Starbucks and PWC Foundation. And we had 168 applicants for the 10 slots. So really great, innovative, creative ideas for how everything from seniors can Skype with kids and do tutoring and reading that way. Seniors that are in elder senior homes to something called Turbo Voting, which helps people figure out how and where to vote no matter where they move and how they go geographically. And so, I guess my reflections are that we have really significant challenges and the only inexhaustible resource that we have is human capital. And it's more powerful than it ever has been before and that there's a way of infusing that in all of our ventures in some form or fashion and a really exciting conversation to be had around the power of people. And I just wanna point out, I have Aisha Khanna and Jay Crammon who are the sort of startup entrepreneurs to relaunching the Civic Accelerator and excited to be in conversation with folks around the table. Thanks, Michelle. So one of, you know, putting people at the center of change, Village Capital, the organization around that's partnering with Michelle and the Civic Accelerator, we are an investment fund. We practice what we preach on being a civic venture because all of our investments around the world are actually decided by the entrepreneurs who go through our programs. So we say, look, you know, analysts, experts, stock pickers, they're not the people who can determine who the most successful entrepreneurs are. It's entrepreneurs peers. It's communities of entrepreneurs. They lift up the folks who are the most successful. So Kyle Azevedo is one of these folks. He came through our most recent concluded program in Atlanta. He and his team, ViaCycle, they do bike sharing and Kyle will tell you more about that. But we found that ventures that engage communities tend to do really well when put into communities of entrepreneurs. So I think Kyle's story is not unique. And the business model is amazing. What's amazing is the potential in America as a community. So Kyle, introduce yourself. Sure, yeah. So yeah, my name is Kyle Azevedo. I'm the co-founder and CEO of ViaCycle. And essentially what we aim to be is on the surface, it's a zip car for bicycles. We create a technology platform that lets us set up networks of bikes in a neighborhood or on a university campus, really in any community. And we let people find and use them or rent them using only their cell phone. And so some of you are probably familiar with existing bike sharing programs around the world. There are huge initiatives in Paris, London, Washington DC, soon to be New York and they've been very successful. And we essentially are trying to bring that to more places by, and the way we do that is with mobile technology. We make it less expensive and require less infrastructure to set up a collaborative consumption platform like a fleet of shared bicycles. So I am definitely the young in of this panel and so my resume is not nearly as impressive as Michelle or Ben's, I guess by my watch I'm about two years and two, Ben's three and a half years of failure. And, but we've been very fortunate and hopefully are on a great trajectory. I think we are. But for us, we are not a civic platform in the traditional sense of the word. I don't think, and normally when you talk about that term it's often about activism or volunteers. But I think the interesting thing about our model and what we're trying to do is we're really focused on creating business models that help our customers become the agents of change within the community. And so in the case of bike sharing, it turns out that the sort of car only culture in the United States is not because people don't, not because people don't care or because people don't think that bicycles or other alternative forms of transportation are not a viable options. It's fundamentally an access problem that people are not conditioned to have a bike around or to use a bicycle. And so if you give them access to one, they're very inclined to use it. And I think some surveys that have been done say that over 70% of Americans would ride a bike more often if they had one available. Because most of the time the only bike you have is sitting in your basement and it's two sizes too small for you because you last used it when you were 10 years old. So really what we're working towards is creating a model where you can provide the sustainable service and actually make it a profitable service and bring people together through that. So we can take Boston as an example. Boston five years ago was ranked as the worst city in America for bicycling. People would talk about it as a death sentence if you were trying to get around by bicycle. And they decided to put the hubway system in which they started with 600 bikes and they just sort of threw it on the ground. And five years later they're now in the top five cities in America to cycle. And as a side effect not only do you have more bicyclists on the road but you have more people outside. You have more people engaged with local shopping centers. You have more people using public transit. And so it just goes to show you that you can cause a lot of cascading changes by implementing really what is a business model. It doesn't have to be a large philanthropic project or be throwing a lot of money away. And this summer we've been out in the Bay Area. We were participating in the Y Combinator Accelerator Program and I had the opportunity to listen to Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb Speak. And one of the things that really struck me was that he spoke about the origins of Airbnb and the thing that got him most excited was not that they were gobbling up the hotel industry or making money hand over fist and they're doing both of those things. But what got him most excited was that they were enabling all these new experiences and interactions between people. And simply by using these resources that are already there and just sort of connecting the dots with their own technology platform, they were creating new friendships and allowing people to connect in a way that they never had before. And that to him was really the secret of their product and their success. They don't tell that to the Silicon Valley investors who are giving them hundreds of millions of dollars because that's not what they wanna hear. They wanna hear that it's a vacation rental platform and part of this big travel market. But that is fundamentally what has driven their success and I think there's so much potential, both for us and for other ventures, whether they be for-profit or non-profit, to utilize existing resources and bring people together with elements of their community that are already in place, just finding out how to make them accessible. Great, thank you, thank you all. So we have some questions from the audience and if you didn't give me a sheet of paper, it's probably too late. I think we've decided what these guys are gonna dig into. That's not very civic venturi but if you have a burning question, you can leave something here on the stage. But I wanna dig into some things because you guys have some really, really insightful points to dig into. So I'm gonna start with Ben. Ben, Sarah would like to know, this is great volunteerism, et cetera, but whether it's non-profit or for-profit, the social capital markets piece of this is how do we pay the bills? So what is change.org's revenue stream? Yep, hi, Sarah. So the way we make money is we send an advertising platform for social issues. So there's 20 million people coming onto the site every month taking action on everything from environmental issues to human rights to women's issues and based on that we map people's interests and then we work with several hundred of the largest non-profits in the world who are looking for people who care about those issues and we recommend campaigns like sponsored links on Google, sponsored videos on YouTube, we have sponsored petitions and so it'll be groups like Oxfam or Amnesty International, Sierra Club and then we recommend those campaigns to users that they take action, they then engage further with that non-profit. So it's really sort of a marketplace for social issues between people that wanna make a difference in organizations that need their support. Ben, I'm gonna ask a follow-up question. So when you got the idea for change.org, typically the volunteerism or collective action world is a non-profit or a political action committee structure. Why a for-profit company? So we started, when I started the organization really in 2006 as a non-profit, like we wanna advance change, naturally we should be a non-profit. I came back to the valley at the school at Stanford so a bunch of my friends were there and I said, look, this is what we're planning and everyone I talked about too was like, well, you should do this as a social venture and I was like, well, why? And the biggest thing for us is sort of flexibility. One thing, you know, in the political landscape, it's actually the case that you're legally prohibited from sort of being involved in too much express advocacy if you're a non-profit and it's also the sort of the tenor of the valley. We very much see ourselves not as an activist organization using technology but as an internet platform enabling activism or sort of collective action. And it's really a deep identity that we have as an organization. You have a lot in the high tech sector and the startup community frankly some amount of skepticism if you're all about sort of social change but you don't think you have a robust enough business model to sustain a company. And so we are all about the non-profit sector, all about building power but we think that there's just a hugely exciting landscape right now of sustainable, scalable, flexible businesses in technology for social change whether they're for profit or non-profit but the company way that we found is the most effective way of building a massive sort of staff of outstanding technologists. So Michelle, I'll ask a follow-up question to that. When we decided to do the Civic Accelerator together we've decided on half non-profits and half for profits. You run one of the most recognizable non-profits in the world. Speaking from an enterprise standpoint what is the role of non-profits alongside for profits? We're not talking about traditional non-profits like churches and soup kitchens. From an enterprise standpoint what's the role of non-profit social enterprises alongside for profit social enterprises? So we are a traditional non-profit and we partner a lot with businesses but we have earned income streams but we are reliant by and large still upon film-profit dollars so we'd love to change that equation a little bit more towards our income but I do think that there are different enterprises demand different models and that you have to be mindful of what is your purpose and what is the best structure that's gonna facilitate that. So one of the things that we contemplated when we did the Civic Venture was is it appropriate for us as a non-profit to support for profit enterprises? And I think one of the evolutions that you're seeing in the non-profit community is there is a way in which non-profits and for profits can work side by side and in fact we can advance our social mission and probably will be best served to advance our social mission by electing to support not only non-profit ventures but for profit ventures like the ones that we've heard about today in the next, whatever that next iteration of those might be and so I think we're seeing the blurring of lines here but I personally believe that there is still a rationale for both and that there are not always going to be market revenue based ways of supporting non-profit community activity in every circumstance and that we have to, I mean we've seen non-profits over the last 30 years we have 1.9 million non-profits in the country they've doubled over the last 30 years so we're seeing a growing industry it's 10% of our employment so I think we have a vibrant non-profit sector that can be supplemented and complimented by social enterprise and private sector and by cross-sector learning and so I think there's complementary ways of working together. Let me ask you a follow-up question so assume that there is a philanthropist either in the audience or watching us on simulcast or reading us on Twitter and they say okay I really buy into this civic ventures thing I do want to use philanthropic money but I want the highest, I want to hit a very high leverage point for people driving better communities and I would say we should join us in supporting the civic accelerator but you're not allowed to say that he says okay I get that or she says okay I get that what's the second best option what are some leverage points for philanthropy that you've seen really effective in building better communities? In civic ventures. In civic ventures specifically. Yeah. So since I'm not allowed to say investing in the civic accelerator. Well we know that's the best option. Yes of course. So I think that there are a lot of catalytic entrepreneurial organizations that are supporting civic ventures along with other kinds of ventures whether it be Ashoka or whether it be Echoing Green so I think if people want to be in that sort of generative formative supporting new ideas that there are plenty of pipelines for that but I also would point out that I think that there's a huge number of nonprofits at least that are operating at what I would call subscale that need additional funding to go fully to scale and there are organizations like New Profit that are helping some of these organizations that have proven models that the Social Innovation Fund the Corporation for National and Community Services running is attracting and engaging investors in that work. So I think there's both startup capacity for philanthropy but also what we lack in the sector more than anything I think is the capital markets to support scale and to try and to reach the kind of scale that Ben's reached with change.org and that very few nonprofits can reach in a very short period of time so I think there's a real opportunity for leverage there for philanthropists to think about that. Excellent. So Kyle, I have a question for you from Lindsay. So there's DC bike share and whatever they have in London and Paris which are like cities have decided people you will do this, you will share bikes. Here's as much more people driven. And if you can speak out via cycle or just more generally how do people power movements, ventures fit in or bump up against more structural top down ventures? So I think that in our case individually and actually in general as well anytime that you can create a market solution or a ground up solution that empowers people at an individual level it's much, much easier to implement than something that's top down and we've actually seen this in our own business activities. I mean we started out selling our solution in the same way that the London program and the DC program and the companies behind those systems sell and we would sell it as a package to these various organizations and well you basically have to convince them to decree from on high that yes, we will put a bike sharing program in and we'll invest all this money and we will make this happen and then you still have to worry about getting all of these people engaged that are gonna use it. So you almost give yourself twice the work. You have two customers, you have to sell the program and then you still have to sell to all of the individuals and get them to make that change. Whereas what we're starting to look at as we continue to bring our costs down and continue to make our system easier to implement and build a platform is that we can bring this to communities on a very granular individual level. We can deliver five of these bikes to an individual apartment complex and in our case we can even start to finance them ourselves in some cases and just get permission to put bikes in and bring them directly to the consumer. And so in that case you bring it down just to the individual's decision to use the program or not. And that's a much simpler model. And so I think in our own experiences we found that if you give people access to a good product and a good way to create change in our case by using a bicycle instead of taking a car but for all of these collaborative consumption platforms it's a different value proposition but if you make it easy enough for people they not only will use it but they'll become passionate advocates for your brand. I mean we have people tell us all the time that they want to help out, they want to spread the word and that's fantastic to see. That's excellent. Michelle, a question from Stacy. How do you keep volunteers engaged especially in non-glamorous tasks? Well I think people continue to serve when they feel like they are creating impact and or through relationships. And so I think the main driver for people to build upon their commitment is a sense of the efficacy of their work. And then there are all sorts of other reinforcers. I mean people volunteer for community and connection and relationships and so forth. So I think it's connecting even those things that might seem mundane to the larger cause that is being affected. And I would just also add that I think that the nonprofit sector is getting better and better around finding really meaningful tasks for people to participate in. That it doesn't have to, you don't have to be relegated to mundane tasks. There are always some mundane tasks to be done but that we're doing a much better job of tapping people's skills, tapping people's passions and capacities to create change at a much higher level. There's a, we've been a part of and housing and initiative called a billion and change which is trying to get companies to commit to pro bono work to get their skill-based volunteers engaged rather than just painting a mural to actually be consultants and financial or technological or whatever it might be. And we've gotten, we just reached the $1.9 billion mark of commitments in less than a year. And so- $1.9 billion? $1.9 billion worth of commitment. So I think there's a way in which we're seeing an evolution around how we're utilizing people in more and more effective and empowering ways. I wanna, so one point, that's unbelievable. Very nice work, by the way. Congratulations. Thanks guys. I just wanna say, I mean, I think about the scale of the civic engagement world in the US. I went to Points of Light's annual conference in June and there were 6,000 people there and it was like an average annual conference for these guys. And they were regular folks from across America who cared about making their communities better. And we think that SoCAP is a zoo with 1,400 people, like 6,000 is the average. And I'm gonna bet that every single one of those people at that conference would be interested in the things going on here. And so if we really care about expanding social enterprise, there are entire pockets of America that our social entrepreneurs every day that have never heard of the term social entrepreneurship have never heard of this conference, et cetera. I met hundreds of them at your conference. So I'd say that if we say civic ventures, there are a lot more people for whom that resonates every day than people for whom the term social enterprise resonates every day. I think there's a lot of cross-fertilization. So it would be great to figure out how to do that more effectively. I mean, how many of the 500,000 people who sign every big petition you do would be jazzed to be here this week? Yeah, I was gonna make a comment about, your comment about sort of addiction through efficacy. We see this on a regular basis. It's predicated on like people, again, are disenchanted largely out of demonstrated incapacity to make a difference. And when you deliver sort of the sort of experience, first we deliver victories. That's a commitment to people. It's, you know, they're not born apathetic. They're bred to be that way over time with demonstrated ineffectiveness. And if you change that, you breathe the kind of addiction that we want, addiction for good. It's been follow-up question. So that's what you do now and you do it great. Thank you again every time I use my ATM card, love it. Why did change.org fail in the early years, as you said? And what did you learn from it? So I didn't understand the internet, which is a problem if you're running an internet company. I think that there are two things. One is the assumption that many people wake up every day and say, I wanna make a difference, which is not what most people do. Maybe people in this room, but not most people. And the second is more of a mechanical part of the consumer internet, which is giving people too many options for what to do and not demonstrating they're effective. So we had literally these communities around issues around advanced gay rights and stop global warming. There's very big groupings of cause areas and you can do everything from skills-based volunteerism to social fundraising and a virtual political action committee. It was a disaster and people would come and they wouldn't know what to do and they get confused or whatnot. And so what we did is we ripped everything away. And actually it's literally, we had probably five to 10 times more features the day we launched with a single engineer, a co-founder than we do today. And so I think that's sort of like deeply understanding what people wanna do. How big is your team now? About 150, well staff around the world, not engineers I wish, we are on that path. But yeah, giving both people sort of a sense of, not just wake up every day and I wanna make a difference but actually compelling content on a regular basis. It's a viral that makes people wanna participate, not just because they want in the abstract to advance change. They see something in their Facebook news feed, they see something in the Twitter. It's compelling content they want to take action on and they're making it simple enough for that to be effective. Excellent. So Michelle, the interest among young people today for lives that integrate making a living and making a difference is exploding. What's the most important thing we can do to catalyze this enthusiasm? Well, I think per our conversation earlier is to show people the efficacy of their and their capacity to make a difference. We've seen in the last 20 years an explosion of young people who are interested in volunteering. It's literally doubled the number of people that are volunteering at a young age. But at the same time, we've seen some apathy around voting and political engagement. And I think that is because people aren't feeling a sense of their own power to affect change through that process. So I think, how do we build, building out the capacity for people to see how they can make a difference through their time, through their talent, through their voice, through their philanthropy, through their consumer choices. And then I would also say, I do think that part of this is instilling in a culture of service. And that goes to everything from service learning at a young age and giving people an opportunity to participate through a lifetime of service. And literally starting young, we know that kids that start serving and voting and being involved civically when they see their parents vote, et cetera, are twice as likely to go on to be active citizens. And so I think it's continuing to give people the pathways for creating change and then also continuing to build a culture of service that's going to engender that next generation of great citizens. That's great. There's a follow-up question here that I promise was generated by the crowd. It's a perfect follow-up question. So you didn't sign your name to this, but it's a great follow-up question. So Ben, what happens when a petition gets a lot of support and does not become an actionable next step? Do people get disillusioned when a popular petition doesn't actually drive change? We ignored and pretended never happened. No, so what's notable, never that we've done it before, didn't work very well, what's notable is that it's almost always a case of the kind of campaigns that take off or the kind of campaigns that have a strong, what we call theory of change. It's a very actually core concept in citizen mobilization is what is the theory by which the action you take will result in the change you seek. So signing a petition, ask Congress to end global poverty. It doesn't have a very strong theory of change asking a local mayor to extend the hours of soup kitchens when they're shutting down at four o'clock before lots of people are able to sort of go from lunch to dinner. That's actually a pretty strong theory of change. It really is a case that it's quite rare that a campaign takes off with no real potential for impact. Now, not all win, but it's rarely the case that they don't at least change, often times the incentives of actors, you often times won't win campaigns. I'll actually give you an example. This is a hilarious example, but it kind of demonstrates this point where there's a campaign that went viral. I don't know if you guys know this really heinous band called Nickelback, and it's a widely hated band. And they're like a boy band wannabe. It's like the worst thing. They're like a wannabe boy band. Double whammy, and they're from Canada, which no offense to Canadians, but it isn't the most popular. And Detroit, Michigan, because they were gonna play for the Thanksgiving Day game for Detroit Lions. And a bunch of fans in Detroit see this, like this is a ridiculous Canadian band that's like wretched, started a petition, goes viral, 50,000 people joined to call the NFL the stop Nickelback from playing. So it's a good example. The campaign tragically did not win. However, I'm talking to one of the guys on our team at the time, and I was like, it's like do you think this is gonna win? He's like, I don't think so. But I sure as hell bet you that the NBA is not gonna ask them to play the halftime game for the All-Star game, right? So you have this idea where you actually, by having massively explosive campaigns, it may not win on a regular basis, but it changes incentives for targets and decision makers who recognize more and more that's an issue that people care about, and will change their decision-making incentives in the future. I'm sorry if you like Nickelback. No. For you. Actually. Well done. Well done, you. So this is a question, I have two questions. I'll just say one thing about that. Did you like Nickelback? I love them. No, sorry. I think one thing that's interesting and that's hard, I think we all have to challenge ourselves around is how do we engage people, and it gets to the question of how do we continue to encourage young people, but how do we engage people over the long-term around sustainable change? And so, for instance, not getting defeated on a single victory if Nickelback still plays, but what's the long-term change? And if you think about the great social movements, they're built over not just necessarily decades, but over generations in some instances. And so I think there's an interesting, I mean in all of the work that we're doing, how do we help people get a sense of the immediacy of their change to build upon that, but also keep in mind the much broader, how are we gonna end global poverty over the decades? And so, and how do we connect the individual actions to those larger goals? And Martin Luther King talked about building cathedrals and how people who build cathedrals don't actually ever see the end game. They are, their sons and daughters and so forth may still be working on the cathedrals over time, but I just think that's an important thing for us to sort of grapple with. And particular, I mean, and this actually leads into the next question, but particularly in the social enterprise world, because the promise of social enterprise is really interesting, right? You're like, you can build businesses that are either non-profits that are sustainable or for-profits that make you a bunch of money, you can also do a bunch of good. That's a really compelling promise. It is very, very hard to build a good business that doesn't care about social value. It is 10 times harder trying to build a good business that does care about social value. So we have a lot of people coming in that think this will be easy and get pretty disillusioned very quickly. I don't know if there are any people in this room, but I think it's a really important message to say this is very, very hard work, but it's going to create intergenerational value in a way that some forms of mainstream business don't. So that's, I think that that's a really, really good message here. Just a pile on there is, and we hear this on a regular basis, sort of younger people starting social enterprises. And actually, if you look at Y Combinator, which is sort of the program that Kyle was involved with, which spawned in part Airbnb and Dropbox and Reddit and lots of other awesome sort of consumer internet properties. Paul Graham runs that program, talks about the primary determinant of the success of a consumer internet property or entrepreneurship in general is the relentless determination to do whatever necessary to succeed. Like we've failed so many times, like we just didn't stop. And it doesn't guarantee you're gonna win, but you're guaranteed to fail if you don't do that. And one of the problems you have, this is an entrepreneurship in general, but the outlier effect, all the organizations you see are successful by definition, because that's why you see them. You don't see the failures, which are like an order of magnitude greater in numbers. And that sense that there's a lot of conversation in the nonprofit sector about burnout. You never hear that. In the for-profit sector. Like you are not allowed to burn out. And to some extent, it seems harsh and demanding. Like if you wanna build something amazing, you have to crush it every single day. And that relentless aggressive determination is the primary factor, I think, of success and failure. And we see a lot of, I think, failure in institutions because there's not that aggressiveness. I think that's a great point. So we've time for probably two more questions. I'm gonna ask both to the whole panel. And I mean, this is very hard work. So that brings true with me, I know. And I'm sure many people in the room are vigorously nodding at what you just said. Number one is from Matt. We'll ask all of you. I'd love your very brief answer to this. I know many mid-career professionals that are highly interested in becoming more involved with social change. Both through volunteerism and through career changes that could be more full-time work. We feel lost in knowing where to start. What advice or resources do you have? I think I'm the closest to mid-career here, so I don't know. Actually, there's a great set of organizations. There's one here called Civic Ventures. It's based in San Francisco that is really recreating this whole idea of encore careers and how people can get their second or third act lived out and through social change. Whether that is volunteering, entrepreneurship, they run something called the Purpose Prize, which is all about entrepreneurs who are over 50 or 55 who are creating amazing transformational ventures. We also know there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are actually middle-aged and that are starting organizations and some of the most successful ones. I think there's increasingly, I think there's some infrastructure around this and also some resources. I would start with Civic Ventures, but be encouraged because I think there's a lot of great role models. Any other ideas, Collin? Sure, yeah. Ben talked earlier about how, if you're doing any kind of venture, it takes an incredible amount of hard work and it also takes and usually an incredible amount of luck if you're going to be very successful. And so I think one of the primary aims of all of these accelerator programs that have been developing is to reduce the amount of luck required. Basically, to give you the essential toolkit that you need to at least maximize your chances of success, even though you'll never be able to approach 100%. So for us, we certainly are, we're very reliant on people who knew more than we did when we first started the journey. And so if people are looking to get started in the space, I would say, find either an accelerator program or a local entrepreneurial support network. In Atlanta, we have the ATDC, the Invest Technology Development Center. There are programs like Village Capital that rely on community mentors, hub ventures here in the Bay Area. And they're always looking for people who are knowledgeable, not necessarily about just the social aspect, but about running a good business or running a good organization. And that can be invaluable for the entrepreneurs coming through the program. So that would be my suggestion. Great. We're taking applications. Looking for a COO. So the one quick note I'd make here is that there's a lot of concern from people that are mid-career and for-profit ventures that they have to have lots of experience in the nonprofit sector to be considered. Like not at all. Often I am just depending on the position, more advantageous to come over, which is also sort of perverse, but that is not at all barrier. Great. All right, we got five minutes. Last question. We'll start with Kyle and work our way this way. What is, this is from Ginny Yancey. What is most meaningful for you in dedicating your time and talents to your enterprise? In other words, why do you personally do this work and what meaning do you get from the work that you do? That's a great question. And I might add one bit, Ginny. I'd say what, I mean, all of you are engaging with lots of people all the time. So if you can answer this through the lens of what's most meaningful about this massive, massive individual engagement aspect of the work too. Sure. So the things that are most meaningful for me, you know, I'm an engineer by training. So I think naturally technology is my tool for enacting change, but what we're trying to do with VIA Cycle is use technology to touch people's lives in a very real and physical way. And so when I see the actual change that we create and someone riding on one of our bikes instead of taking their car out of the parking garage, and when I can talk to people about how we're providing a service that's changed their habits and slowly, brick by brick and trip by trip is changing the communities in which we operate. I think that's the most rewarding thing. And really what we are trying to do is create tools that help people leverage their own small actions. Ben talked about collecting these small actions and the fact that people don't wake up thinking about what they can do to change the world. But if you can figure out how to harness the times that they do and build it into something bigger, that is a really, really cool thing. And that's what gets me up in the morning. So what gets you up in the morning? You know, I think I believe that people are in search of meaning and community and that giving folks the opportunity to be of service is a way of tapping into that. And I find that for myself. And so the experience of being involved in this work is hugely fulfilling and gratifying. And obviously I think all of us are trying to figure out how do we make a difference in the world and how we do that. I think I see manifest all the time how people can create extraordinary change. And that's hugely, hugely inspiring. I went on a cross country trip this summer and met with folks literally across the country. And one of my favorite volunteers was a guy who's a GE executive who started a clinic to serve the needs of homeless individuals and to, it's a foot care ministry. And so for three days a week, for 20 years, he's been cutting the toenails of homeless individuals, giving them new shoes, new socks, and giving them, and bathing their feet. And you know, I mean, he said the best thank you he's ever gotten was not a paycheck but it's the thousand thank yous that he gets every year from those homeless individuals. And those are the kinds of interactions that are happening every single day that are giving meaning and purpose and creating impact. Thanks a lot. Ben, you wanna send us home? Yeah, so I'll illustrate why I do what I do by many means of example. And this is an amazing sort of case that happened on the site about a little over a year ago. There's a woman that was walking down the street in Cape Town, South Africa. And she was grabbed and thrown into a shack and raped and almost killed. The reason is she's a lesbian woman and the man was trying to turn her straight. It's a thing called corrective rape in South Africa happens about 10 times a week alone in Cape Town. It's awful, awful practice. And in response, instead of doing nothing, a good friend of hers, whose partner had this happen to her as well, who sees a campaign Uganda around gay rights, goes to a shanty town internet cafe in Cape Town and starts a petition asking the government to for the first time recognize this issue and take action. No semblance of potential hope. And the next week she gets 170,000 people from 150 countries take action. The internet's an amazing place sometimes. And I get this call on my cell phone on a Sunday from the Minister of Justice Chief of Staff in South Africa saying, you have to stop. I was like, why? I said, we can't email anybody. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, email servers are down because all the messages that are being sent in. So what happens when you sign a petition and make a comment? And I said, well, look, these women want a meeting. Are you going to give them a meeting? He's like, no. I said, well, then we're going to go to the press. We'll help people with the press. And the next 24 hours, it was covered by the BBC and Al Jazeera English and the biggest newspaper in South Africa, the biggest radio station. And the Minister of Justice is brought on to national television and interrogated for lack of response. And he finally agrees to a meeting. And the way the story goes is they then have a meeting. We help them organize an offline protest. And after about a month of campaigning, the parliament, after entirely ignoring the issue for decades, or decades, passes a national task force to investigate and to stop the incidents of corrective rape in that country. All because seemingly the least powerful person in that country, a poor black woman in the middle of a Cape Town shanty town whose friend had been raped, decided to stand up. And so when I found out this had won, I literally, I'm like not a crier at all, as you can probably estimate. But I wapped. I was like, this is an amazing demonstration of people power and sort of we're in the fortune circumstance of being in the position to empower that around the world every day. Thanks so much. And thanks to the three of you. And there are millions of people in this country and billions of people in the world who have the opportunity to change their city, change their country, no matter what voice there is because of the ventures that you guys are building. So it's an honor to be on the same stage with you. Thank you very much. Thank you.