Lisa Gansky

To me, the lesson here is that the antidote for despair is both dignity and beauty. There's a Navajo expression that says, "Always walk in beauty." Bill's story reminds me that poverty exists not only for poor people but also for rich people. For the rich, it's the kind of poverty that comes from disassociating yourself from nature and from others. It's the kind of poverty that comes when each day of your life ends at an airport, and you just want to make it all happen faster by connecting the airports with a tunnel. It's the kind of poverty that exists when you're eating the rind and throwing away the fruit.

For me, the solution is for those of us who've been fortunate enough to do well in the IPO game, and who've created wealth, to connect that wealth to the earth and to things that matter.

Seth Godin

Here's how I think about it from an entrepreneur's point of view. The knee-jerk question from people in the business community is, "How do we scale a program like Bill Strickland's?" As businesspeople, what we're all looking for is a model that works like this: You come up with a decent idea, you make money, and then you spend money to get bigger. That makes even more money for you, and at that point, the idea simply grows larger as a self-fulfilling, self-funding proposition. That's how scalable business ideas work.

But nonprofits don't work that way. With nonprofits, the bigger they get, the more money it takes to operate them. Not only that, but the additional people who come on board as the idea grows aren't nearly as good as you are. So I'd like to throw an idea on the table: You can scale a nonprofit by writing a manual and then finding the right people locally to put that manual to work. The beauty of this idea is that it allows you to centralize the thinking and to decentralize the operation.

Philip N. Diehl

My main message is "Don't write off Washington, DC." I'm speaking from my perspective at the U.S. Mint and taking into account what we've been able to accomplish over the past five or six years. I have no illusions that Washington has all the solutions -- or even any of the solutions necessarily. Although most of the time our government is dormant, which is the way our Founding Fathers designed it to be, occasionally -- as in the 1930s and again in the 1960s -- it plays a crucial role. And it takes on that role when people like us lay a foundation and begin to shape opinions -- and the time to shape our opinions is now. Bill Strickland's story is every bit as compelling inside Washington as it is outside Washington.

Steve Pontell

I also look at public policy, but I have a slightly different vantage point. Lately, I've been doing a lot of work with rural communities in central California. This area is one of the agricultural heartlands in the country, and it has had an unemployment rate of roughly 25% for the past decade -- but many of the agricultural interests there don't mind. Having such a high unemployment rate gives them a readily available, low-cost labor force. But the families and individuals who live in these communities look at their future and ask, "Who is going to choose to come to -- and stay in -- our communities? How many of our high-school valedictorians will come back here after college? With all of the choices that are available in the new economy, who is going to choose to live here -- and why would they do so?" These people see a direct link between future economic-development options for their communities and the education, skills, and abilities of their people.

Can Change Scale Down?

Barbara Waugh

I've always been about changing the world. One of the most important things that I've ever read concerning sustainable change is a two-page article about malnourished children in North Vietnam. Written by the Save the Children organization, the article is about that organization's research on past attempts to eradicate malnutrition in the area. According to the article, none of those earlier efforts provided a long-term solution. Development initiatives would provide feeding programs for malnourished children, but when those programs ended, the children would again become malnourished. But Save the Children field-workers discovered that not all of the kids were malnourished. In fact, some were actually thriving. The workers decided to find out what the parents of the healthier children were feeding them. The workers learned that those parents were giving their children foods that weren't necessarily the norm in the village -- foods like shrimp, crabs, and the greens from sweet-potato plants. As a result, their kids were getting additional nutrients.