Blog
GN Member Roman Tsunder Featured in "3 Steps to Sustainable Cause Marketing" Article
March 23rd, 2010 - 1:13pm
Filed under Economy
Two weeks ago I interviewed Doug Akin of Mr. Youth, but after my recent interview with Roman Tsunder (1010 Youth Nominee) I believe that the title of Mr. Youth is truly his. Roman is the Founder and President of Access 360 Media, a next generation of Out-of-Home Media platform, delivering digital content and advertising programming to engaged audiences through both digital and non-traditional media. However, in addition to his work with Access 360 Media, Roman spearheads the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) and the PTTOW! Summit. AYM is a non-profit organization dedicated to identifying, connecting, and supporting digital activists from around the world and PTTOW! is an invite only, intimate, Allen & Co type gathering focused on the young adult market (p14-34) bringing together select CEO's, CMO's, Heads of Product and Industry Icons. Emigrating from Russia to the United States when he was 5 years old, Roman understands and believes in the power of role models and mentors in youth activism and his ongoing mission is a clear depiction of that.
In this episode of mobileYouth TV, I talk with Roman on how brands can successfully incorporate social causes into their marketing initiatives.View video.
Source - Mobileyouth.org
AYM Summit: A Meetup for the World's Youth Activists
March 10th, 2010 - 4:04pm
Filed under International Security
I'm at the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) summit in London, at the Intercontinental Hotel. The two-day summit, which ends tomorrow, is an impressive gathering of youth activists from more than 18 countries, NGOs and tech giants, here to learn more about using online tools to promote their extraordinary range of social movements and promote non-violent change. You can read more about the AYM here.
At the opening reception last night, hosted at Google's headquarters, I met a smart bunch of people from organizations such as Blue State Digital (which ran Obama's online campaign), Howcast, Middle East peace activists One Voice, and the East London-based Young Foundation.
But the highlight is an A-list bunch of conference speakers at the conference today and tomorrow -- including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, Scott Heiferman of MeetUp, as well as top people from Google, YouTube and the World Bank. Other keynote speakers include Jeremy Gilley, the former actor who founded Peace One Day, and Joe Rospars, who was the new-media director for Obama for America.
There's strong representation here from Washington DC. This morning, Jared Cohen, of the US State Department, moderated a session titled Seizing the Moment: Responding to Crises and Mobilizing Around Key Events. That had speakers from Mobile Accord, Ushahidi, Mazahery Law, AccessNow and the Censorship Research Center. I'm now sitting in a session called Turning Video into Tangible Action, featuring experts such as Ramya Raghaven of YouTube, Levi Felix of Causecast, and Chris Sarette, Invisible Children.
There's much discussion of how to produce a viral video to spread the word about an urgent crisis -- a panelist who's involved in the Robin Hood Tax campaign (to promote a redistributive 0.05% tax on final transactions) is currently explaining how getting the help of director Richard Curtis helped the campaign soar.
Now a human-rights activist from Israeli NGO B'Tselem is explaining how they gave 250 cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank to document the reality of local life. Not to activists, but to ordinary families, such as a 16-year-old in Hebron whose one-minute video about her frustrations became national news and influenced official policy on law-enforcement in Hebron. It wasn't about using new media -- it was about using traditional tools to provoke established media to notice a story that had been under the radar.
It's an inspiring event, geared towards helping activists share top-level information and making connections that lead to significant change. You can sense the scale of their practical ambition from the title of some of the sessions: one is called Tech Solutions to Repressive Regimes; another is titled Effective Strategies for Mobile Content to Increase Empowerment. - Wired Magazine
Education Finalists Picked
March 9th, 2010 - 4:46pm
Filed under Economy
By NEIL KING JR. and BARBARA MARTINEZ
The Obama administration picked 15 states and the District of Columbia as finalists in a heated competition for extra federal education funds to shake up underperforming schools.
The states that made the cut in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition were Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee.
President Barack Obama visits Martin Luther King Charter School in New Orleans in October. The Race to the Top program encourages such schools.
Under the program, states stand to garner hundreds of millions of dollars each, depending on their size, at a time when many local education budgets face deep funding shortfalls.
The sheer number of finalists surprised outside observers, who had predicted the administration would impose more stringent standards. The list included a number of states whose applications were considered weak.
A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted applications in January for the first round of funding, with a second round set for summer.
The administration defended the selection of the 16 finalists, saying that all states whose applications cleared a pre-set score automatically advanced to the next round.
The Education Department promises to be tougher in winnowing the list down to the winners, which will be announced next month, and are expected to include fewer than a half-dozen states.
"Most of them will go home losers," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "We anticipate very few winners in round one."
The size of the finalist list drew fire from some quarters. "I was hoping the administration would send a clear message that you had to be absolutely great to even be in the competition," said Andrew Smarick, a former George W. Bush administration official who has supported the program. "This is a huge disappointment."
President Barack Obama has used the lure of federal grants as a way to get states and school districts to improve local education standards, even if they receive no money in the end. The idea behind the program is to reward states that show a willingness to overhaul failing schools through measures such as tough testing standards, data collection and teacher training. The administration intends to apply this competitive approach to an increasingly large share of its education budget.
The Education Department turned to a panel of outside judges to pick the finalists according to 19 criteria, including a state's track record, openness to charter schools and use of testing systems to judge teacher performance. The finalists' scores weren't made public.
Independent evaluators have given especially high marks to three states on the list-Florida, Tennessee and Louisiana-for their accountability standards and for implementing systems to track student performance. All three have also pushed to expand the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.
Observers who have dug through the applications were taken aback by other picks. Few gave New York much chance after state lawmakers failed in January to lift a cap on charter schools and allow for the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
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New York caps charter schools in the state at 200, a limit it is expected to hit this year. The failed legislation would have doubled the maximum allowable, while killing a current law that bars tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Not allowing student test scores to be tied to teacher evaluations "seemed like a clear no-no under the rules" of the competition, said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that favors charter schools and stronger teacher evaluation systems. He said the state legislature now had a short window to enact legislation that would correct New York's shortcomings.
Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City school system, the largest in the country, failed to win the legislative changes he sought in January, but cheered the announcement nonetheless. "We're within striking distance,'' he said. He wants the legislature to immediately move to lift the charter cap and change state laws regarding teacher evaluations, firings and seniority. "That's the way to win this,'' he said. "We know that these things are hurting us.''
California, which faces a $20 billion state budget crisis, failed to make the finalist list. The state had hoped to qualify for as much as $700 million at a time when many local school districts are slashing their budgets. California had also tried hard to qualify by doing things such as ramming a bill through the legislature over union objections that allowed teachers' pay to be linked to students' test scores.
Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines said Thursday he was "disappointed to learn that California is not among the Race to the Top finalists for the first round of funding." He added that "I look forward to working with the state and federal education authorities on future rounds of funding. I also hope that the Obama administration recognizes that [the Los Angeles school district] is paving its own path to success in the midst of our challenges."
Mr. Duncan and his team say they have aimed to keep the selection process as free of politics as possible. Congress, the states and the White House weren't told who made the cut until Thursday morning. Mr. Duncan said the finalists were picked solely based on the judges' scoring of their applications, and that he had no hand in the decision.
Mr. Duncan has won bipartisan support for Race to the Top, but that could change as lawmakers and governors realize only a small minority of states may emerge as winners.
The list of winners so far could stir unease for other reasons. Only five of the 16 finalists were states that went for Republican Sen. John McCain in the last presidential election. And only one of them, Colorado, was west of the Mississippi-a fact that Mr. Duncan said was "purely a coincidence." - WSJ
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Grows Into a Political Force
March 9th, 2010 - 9:28am
Filed under Economy
By Tom Hamburger
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is building a large-scale grass-roots political operation that has begun to rival those of the major political parties, funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.
The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns.
The chamber's expansion into grass-roots organizing -- coupled with a large and growing fundraising apparatus that got a lift from Supreme Court rulings -- is part of a trend in which the traditional parties are losing ground to well-financed and increasingly assertive outside groups. The chamber is certainly better positioned than ever to be a major force on the issues and elections it focuses on each year, analysts think.
The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller ( Member of Gen Next), is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat.
The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008.
What makes the initiative possible is a swelling tide of money. The chamber spent more than $144 million on lobbying and grass-roots organizing last year, a 60% increase over 2008, and well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.
The chamber is expected to substantially exceed that spending level in 2010.
The chamber's expanding influence is worrisome to top officials in the White House -- including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has expressed concern about the chamber in the past, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who tried to build direct contacts with company executives last fall when the chamber was fighting the administration's legislation to regulate carbon emissions.
Several companies, including Pacific Gas & Electric and Apple, left the chamber over its stance on climate policies, but since then many more firms have joined and made substantial contributions, chamber President Tom Donohue said.
Amassing cash
Two major factors are driving the chamber's growing success in fundraising.
First, President Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress have alarmed a widening circle of business leaders with their calls for greater government involvement in healthcare, tighter federal regulation of the financial industry and legislation to help unions organize workers, among other issues.
Second, the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to spend money to help elect or defeat candidates not only struck down a century of laws limiting such spending, but it also made many business executives feel more comfortable about using corporate money for political purposes.
Industries that are the most directly affected by Washington policies and regulations -- pharmaceuticals, for example -- have always spent lavishly on lobbying and politics. But many others have held back, deterred by concern over violating the complex laws on campaign spending and by a general sense that putting money into politics might open companies to criticism.
The Supreme Court decision appears to have allayed those concerns, according to corporate lawyers and others involved in the process.
"In the past a lot of companies and wealthy individuals stood on the sidelines," said Robert Kelner, who heads the Election and Political Law Practice Group at Covington & Burling, one of Washington's most influential corporate law firms.
"In just the last election, we had the spectacle of John McCain threatening to prosecute his own supporters if they spent their money on outside groups that ran advertising in the presidential race.
"That cloud has been lifted," he said.
Anonymity
Using trade associations such as the chamber as the vehicle for spending corporate money on politics has an extra appeal: These groups can take large contributions from companies and wealthy individuals in ways that will probably avoid public disclosure requirements.
The chamber has developed that into something of a specialty: Under a system pioneered by Donohue, corporations have contributed money to the chamber, which then produced issue ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the names of the businesses underwriting the ads.
At the chamber, officials contend that rising donations are less the result of the recent Supreme Court ruling than they are of a 5-4 decision in 2007 in which the court ruled it was unconstitutional to ban issue-related advertising close to an election.
As a result of that ruling, the chamber was able to spend $1 million on so-called issue ads in the final days of the Massachusetts Senate race in January to help elect Scott Brown, the state's first Republican senator in decades.
As ominous music played in the background of one of the ads, a moderator intoned: "Washington politicians continue to fail us. More spending and fewer jobs. Scott Brown . . . supports measures that hold spending and cut taxes. . . . Call Scott Brown. Thank him."
Powerful as the effect of such advertising could be, the chamber and its allies expect the next big expansion of influence will come in street-level organizing and voter turnout operations.
Miller, a former chief of staff to a GOP lawmaker and co-owner of a restaurant in Washington's tony Georgetown section, built up the chamber's grass-roots organization in 2008 and expanded it in 2009 with the help of consulting firms.
Studying magazine subscriptions, voter registration and consumer buying habits, the consultants built a list of potential allies in 122 key congressional districts.
Individuals were invited to join the Friends of the U.S. Chamber initiative and were promised updates and special insights on Washington. They were then "activated," asked to write letters or call Congress on a particular issue or get involved in events in the districts.
Miller said the so-called activation rate was "roughly equivalent" to the rate claimed by Organizing for America, the network known as Obama for America during the presidential campaign, which has twice as many members.
The chamber has also given its staff, especially senior leaders, incentives to push fundraising. They are now working, in effect, on a commission system: the more money they bring in, the more they are compensated.
Leaning right
Officially, the chamber is a bipartisan nonprofit organization, but over the last decade it has tilted decidedly toward the Republicans. During 2008, 86% of the spending by the chamber's political action committee went to Republicans. Far more was spent on issue ads, most supporting GOP candidates.
The chamber says it represents 3 million companies that pay dues to the national chamber or a local affiliate, though internal documents suggest the organization's treasury is filled in substantial part by contributions from a couple dozen major corporations most affected by Washington policymakers.
Tax records from 2008 show that 19 companies or individuals paid between $1 million and $15.3 million, providing a third of the chamber's total revenue that year. Because the chamber is a nonprofit, it must disclose donations, but not necessarily the identity of the donors.
The chamber insists that those donors remain anonymous.
Some labor-backed organizations, such as Working America, which has 3 million nonunion members nationwide, have also declined to release details of its donors, which suggests a rocky road for legislation to require more transparency.
tom.hamburger@ latimes.com
Kim Geiger of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times