Eyes to the Future at the GA
>>Wed Nov 11, 2009
PresenTense goes to Boston
>>Sat Aug 1, 2009
Got a social venture idea that will engage and leverage Boston's Jewish community? Then the PresenTense/CJP Boston Social Entrepreneur Fellowship is for you.
As the Boston Globe is now reporting, PresenTense, in partnership with Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, is taking its successful fellowship training program to Beantown. What that means is that we're taking the best of our summer Institute program and applying it over five months in the Boston area, to a select number of social innovators who are looking for a way to accelerate their ideas into ventures.
Learn more on our mini-site, BostonFellowship.com.
Global Launch Night 2010 Live!
>>Thu Jul 22, 2010
Want to see Launch Night but far from Zion? See it streamed at www.presentense.org/live Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone
Only minutes to go before the Boston Fellowship Launch
>>Thu May 27, 2010
The Double Bottom Line
>>Wed Apr 21, 2010
Over the past few weeks there's been a fly buzzing around my head -- not a literal fly, although there are some of those too -- but rather the pesky question of why most of the ventures that come through PresenTense are fundamentally limited in terms of their financial scalability. Over the course of our entrepreneurship training fellowship program we try to develop additional angles to the ventures, and help grow the earned-income side of the operations. But for the most part the primary challenge of our ventures are that they are originally conceived as traditional nonprofits in so far as they expect donors to pay for the benefit of a third-party participant.
And then I come across a blog post like this one, on how Cows on Treadmills Could Produce Six Percent of World's Power. What a brilliant idea: take a resource that is currently under-utilized, frame it in a new way, and address two pressing challenges at once: energy-production and raising healthy cattle. Notice, the value proposition at this point has nothing to do with the positive externality (reduction of green house gas) and also notice that the second-order benefit of collecting cattle dung for additional energy and heating benefit isn't mentioned.
In other words, while we have some brilliant fellows who are doing some world changing things (and who are getting recognized for doing so, as Eli Winkelman recently did by Joshua Venture), I'd like to see more social businesses come through PresenTense which recognize currently underutilized resources within our community, combine them with profit-making impulse, and produce social good. Anyone out there with ideas of how to attract these folks to a program rooted and devoted to the Jewish community?
@simihinden presenting at the @presentense quarterly reports
>>Wed Apr 14, 2010
One a quarter, @presentense gets staff together to learn what happened in the last quarter, and what we can learn from our metrics. Here's Simi, presenting on the technical sides of our online work.
How PresenTense Prepares Coaches to Work with Fellows
>>Thu Apr 8, 2010
Road Warrioring for Social Enterprise
>>Wed Mar 24, 2010
How do social entrepreneurs judge the success or failure of a road trip? Benchmarking trips, and thinking of tips to pass on, has been on my mind a lot recently.
Talking about a generation
>>Wed Feb 24, 2010
When the people came to the prophet Shmuel and begged him for a king, he thought they were crazy. “A King you want? But he’ll ruin your lives,” he told them, and insisted that the system of Judges that the people lived under for centuries was better suited for their lives. The judges gave them freedom. Unlike a king, who ruled them all, Judges would only arise when external threat created a need. The rest of the time the people would live in their tribes, each to their own, handling their internal affairs and going about their daily lives. No taxation for projects far from their own, and beyond the upkeep of the tribe of Levi who did not have land of their own but instead served as priests among the People, they kept what they grew and the flocks they tended. But we want a king, like all the other nations, they demanded. And Shmuel, unable to hold back their interest any longer, gave in. A king they wanted, a king they’d have.
In the course of human history, our societies change in accordance with the opportunity horizon afforded to them. Mainly, our purpose is to protect those close to us, and provide for them as much as possible the creature comforts in life. As the range of possibilities for such comforts increases, our trade routes expand. As our trade routes expand, we need to secure the merchants who bring us our comforts from across the world. And as our need to secure our trade grows, so too grows the reach of our government. As Robert Wright shows in Nonzero, societies and their governments are limited by the communication and commerce technologies afforded to them. Genghis Khan, whose empire stretched half way across the world, developed the passport in order to provide some sense of coordination between his provinces, developed a rapid communication system consisting of men ready on fast horses, and appointed family members who ruled rather autonomously because passing orders across the empire was a month by month affair. The Inca Empire stretched almost as long, and set up a series of base stations and roads across it so runners could pass messages one to the other in a country-wide relay race as power was extended. In the fifteenth century, as ships came unto their own, the local kingdoms of Europe became vast empires, projecting strength as far as they could transport troops and commands to those troops.
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