DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized four young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants--and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week.
Seven years ago, a 17-year-old kid from Boulder, Colorado, boarded a plane bound for a refugee camp in Uganda. He'd seen pictures of Ugandan refugees--dusty, shirtless children loitering in front of straw huts--and he'd read about their lives--the food shortages, sweltering heat, disease and fear that ravage the camps. He had started the Amnesty International club at his high school, and felt as if he should do something more to help those poor people, though, in typical high-school fashion, he wasn't sure what.
So Eric Glustrom (left) decided to make a documentary film about Kyangwali Refugee Settlement. File this in the "seemed like a good idea at the time" category: He had no idea what to expect. He had never been to Africa. He had never made a movie. He certainly didn't expect Uganda to become his home, his office, his inspiration, and his motivation for Educate!, a social enterprise that breeds social enterprises and has so far helped educate hundreds of young, poor Ugandans.
For the first weeks Glustrom was there, he still didn't have a firm idea of what to do to help the people in the camp--a movie was nice, but how would it really change their lives? Then a student named Benson Olivier, Glustrom's friend and the subject of his documentary, told Glustrom that African students needed one thing to change their own world: Education.
When Glustrom returned to the U.S. he raised money so Olivier could go to a better school. "We just did whatever it took," Glustrom says. Then he cobbled together enough money for 22 other students and began a program of leadership seminars, coaching, and mentoring, which grew into Educate! The goal: to help those scholarship recipients start social programs in their communities. "It wasn't an education as an end in itself, but an education as a means to leadership," he says. "We want to help you get an education so you can lead change in your community."
The Educate! youths have already started an antiviolence group for women, a microfinance project and an orphanage. The construction of the orphanage is an object lesson in how Educate! and its students manage to do much with little beyond chutzpah and resourcefulness. The students went to the government with their idea and asked it to donate a six-acre plot of land to the cause. Of course they had no money to build, so they farmed that land, saving $10,000, which they then used to build the orphanage.
Today, Educate!, which began with one clear-eyed Colorado kid staying up late in his Amherst dorm room, is working with 415 students at 24 partner schools across Uganda. He wants to see Educate!'s programming implemented throughout the Ugandan education system--an investment that he believes is justified by the eventual payoff. It costs around $600 to send one student through the program, and Educate! aims for a tenfold return on that investment through the student's social enterprise. Glustrom says that "tangible return" is important to convince the Ugandan government and schools to incorporate Educate!'s curriculum into the education system.
Glustrom sees Educate! as a pilot light for schooling and social enterprise--it's meant to build a model, not a bureaucracy, and once the curriculum is well-established in a country, Glustrom says, "then we can move on to the next country. We aren't sure where it is going to be, but it would be great if it could be in the United States. Then once we have it proven the Educate! model can work in the United States and Uganda, that's great proof it can be done anywhere." And everywhere.
In the past year, 6 million people joined the ranks of the unemployed. Meanwhile, Twitter's monthly traffic more than doubled. One out-of-work 23-year-old saw the door of opportunity open and launched twittershouldhireme.com, an attempt to catch Twitter's eye and land a job there. Twittershouldhireme.com links to Jamie Varon's personal blog, resume and references. And she streams her tweets, of course.
"I want to be hired for who I am," Varon says. "So I have to be more open about that." That meant using her social media finesse to tweet her way into a job at Twitter.
Twitter didn't hire Varon, but the experience inspired her to start her own Web design and consulting company. Other job-seekers might not launch such public campaigns, but they're wondering if social media and job hunting with services like Twitter will work.
Of course, for every 140 characters that herald a dream desk, there are at least 140 characters of vicious job bashing. Searching for tweets that mention a company's name can offer a glimpse of what it would be like to work there (or who your coworkers would be). ConnectTweet (still in alpha) allows employees to add a #tag to company-relevant tweets then posts them to a firm's Twitter account.
When it comes to looking for work through Twitter, there are plenty of Twitter users, like @newmediahire, devoted to job postings. Twellow, the Twitter Yellow Pages, categorizes Twitter users and makes them searchable by location, industry, position or topic. In May, a London-based search engine tech company started TwitterJobSearch.com, an open-source search engine for jobs posted on Twitter (SimplyHired and Indeed grab the same postings.) And the owner of an IT staffing firm in North Carolina launched TweetMyJOBS.com, a Twitter add-on that allows users to get tweets when jobs become available.
"This is instant notification, unlike a lot of job boards that give daily notification," says Gary Zukowski, who started TweetMyJOBS.com in March. "It's very competitive to find jobs right now, so it gives people a leg up to be the first to know when something opens up."
Zukowski says there are about 200 companies posting positions on the site and there are currently 140,000 jobs being tweeted. Users can search jobs by signing up for various job channels (in over 200 cities in 12 countries). A New York man who landed a position through TweetMyJOBS.com called it "instant Karma." The same postings will come up in a SimplyHired search, but the prospect of instant notification has attracted over 6,000 hopefuls to TweetMyJOBS.com. When a job becomes available, a person will get a text message that looks something like this:
TweetMyJOBS.com offers everything from IT positions to health care and automotive jobs, but Zukowski says he sees potential in using the site to recruit temps or day laborers. Shafiq Lokhandwala, CEO of an HR technology firm called NuView Systems, says the usefulness of Twitter and other social media sites for recruiting is still debatable.
"[Social media sites] may be very good for lower level jobs because your vetting process is not deep," Lokhandwala says. "For professional hiring, that sourcing cannot be depended on." And Lokhandwala sees potential for lawsuits if employers make hiring decisions based on inaccurate Internet information about a candidate (that tweet about smoking crack was a joke!). Getting hired using Twitter might be as likely as getting fired using Twitter.
Recycling water is a murky issue. Some say grey water--the wastewater from domestic tasks like washing dishes, doing laundry and bathing--is too good to go down the drain. Grey-haters say it smells, and cite the need for long-term health testing. And since grey water codes vary by municipality, installing such a system could be illegal in your town. Nevertheless, 13.9% of households in California, and 7% in the U.S., save some part of their sullage--legally or not--according to a grey water study conducted by Soap and Detergent Association. That's why designers are increasingly ending up with their minds in the gutter. Here are a few systems that will help flush your grey water worries away.
South Korean designer Jang WooSeok’s sink flows elegantly into the toilet. Grey water in the toilet bowl is mixed 50/50 with new water from a separate source, so the system stays fresh. [via The Design Blog]
Shower water is more plentiful (and greyer) than sink water. Alison Norcott, an Australian student, designed a system that stores shower drainage in the wall before it flows into the flush. To avoid bacterial growth, the tank is discharged every day. The system is competing for the 2009 James Dyson Award. [via Freshome]
The Sloan AQUS recycling bin hides under the sink and fits with preexisting plumbing to keep fixtures looking traditional. The system filters sink drainage, then stores it in a reservoir and uses that to flush the toilet. A two-person household can save 5,000 gallons of water a year using AQUS. [via Inhabitat]
The simplest sink-to-toilet trick might be this adjustable sink toilet top. SinkPositive is connected to the toilet’s refill cycle: It diverts water from the intake pipe to a faucet, which then drains into the toilet bowl. A flushing fountain may not be pretty, but it works for a hand rinse. [via TreeHugger]
If washing dishes in the bathtub ever catches on, doing laundry in the loo might take off too. This wash machine and toilet concept by Turkish designer Sevin Coskun saves space while it flushes the grey water from dirty clothes. [via Boing Boing]
Seven years ago, a 17-year-old kid from Boulder, Colorado, boarded a plane bound for a refugee camp in Uganda. He'd seen pictures of Ugandan refugees--dusty, shirtless children loitering in front of straw huts--and he'd read about their lives--the food shortages, sweltering heat, disease and fear that ravage the camps. He had started the Amnesty International club at his high school, and felt as if he should do something more to help those poor people, though, in typical high-school fashion, he wasn't sure what.
When Glustrom returned to the U.S. he raised money so Olivier could go to a better school. "We just did whatever it took," Glustrom says. Then he cobbled together enough money for 22 other students and began a program of leadership seminars, coaching, and mentoring, which grew into Educate! The goal: to help those scholarship recipients start social programs in their communities. "It wasn't an education as an end in itself, but an education as a means to leadership," he says. "We want to help you get an education so you can lead change in your community."
