Guest Speaker: Lucy Bernholz - Philanthropy and Technology Part 1
Giving 2.0: The MOOC
Université de Stanford
A philanthropist is anyone who gives anything — time, money, experience, skills, and networks — in any amount, to create a better world. This course will empower you to practice philanthropy more effectively and make your giving more meaningful to both you and those you strive to help. Giving 2.0: The MOOC, is a Stanford University-sponsored online course intended to teach givers of all ages, backgrounds, incomes and experiences to give more effectively. Taught by social entrepreneur, philanthropist and bestselling author Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Giving 2.0: The MOOC will teach you how to assess nonprofits, create a high-impact philanthropic strategy, volunteer more effectively, use existing, free technology for good and more. Giving 2.0: The MOOC is a six-module course. Each module has a particular theme and 5-10 content-packed and activity-rich, videos exploring that theme. Videos will include lectures from Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen as well as interviews, discussions and lectures given by guest speakers. Guest speakers are renowned leaders in multiple industries including philanthropy, technology and business, who will provide unique insights into course topics. Course participants will have the opportunity to join Talkabouts – small virtual meeting groups created to discuss class-related topics. By the course's conclusion, course participants will have created an Individual Giving Action Plan to guide their future giving in a highly effective and meaningful way. Course participants will also complete a formal nonprofit assessment and be provided with ongoing, post-MOOC philanthropy education content that will support continued development and execution of their philanthropic goals.
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Giving with Greater Meaning
This module centers on discovering the many, diverse ways course participants can leverage their unique philanthropic resources to create the impact they want to have. We have numerous guest speakers sharing their expertise in this module – review the lessons that interest you before moving on to module 6.
Philanthropy and Technology2:12
Guest Speaker: Lucy Bernholz - Philanthropy and Technology Part 15:39
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
I'm Lucy Bernholz.
I'm a visiting scholar at Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and
the co-leader of the Digital Civil Society Lab here at Stanford PACS.
So, I actually started my career here at Stanford.
I came here to do my dissertation in history and education.
And the question that interested me then, which is now almost 25 years ago,
was what's public, what's private, and who decides?
And through the leadership of my faculty advisors here,
I was steered toward thinking about philanthropy in public systems,
wrote a dissertation about private philanthropy in public schools.
And I've been working in this space ever since.
So the digital civil society lab is a brand new effort here at Stanford PACS.
It will focus on engaged research, scholarly research, and policy work.
Thinking about how in the digital age,
now that we're pretty sure the internet is here to stay.
That's our starting assumption, that it's not going anywhere.
We need to understand how we can continue to express ourselves, associate freely and
privately, and continue to engage as a robust civil society,
using the full scope of digital tools.
Some of which we understand and
some of which we're just learning as fast as we can.
We're now at a point where Digital tools, so the Internet access,
Wi-Fi, cell phones that can do an amazing array of
things even if they're just basic feature phones, are really, really pervasive.
So we're kind of past what I think of as the shiny gadget phase of this,
where we're all just kind of enamored of whatever the next new toy might be.
And we're starting to ask ourselves some of the harder questions, like,
if I'm being monitored by the government or a corporation,
if all of the data I generate using these tools is being stored by someone else,
how do I continue to protest my government?
How do I continue to engage safely with my colleagues or my community to make change
happen if I'm leaving a digital trail of information behind me wherever I go.
Similarly, we're at a point where nonprofits and
philanthropists have access to tools that nobody imagined 20 years ago.
So, real time satellite imagery, and drones, and
using that set of technologies safely and
while protecting the privacy and rights of individuals.
That's actually the whole kind of role in civil society, is to make sure
we as individuals, continue to engage to make the world a better place.
So we wanna be able to use these technologies and
learn all the things we can learn from big data sets and things like that.
But we also wanna make sure we protect those basic abilities of ours to make
those decisions without either government or corporate obligation or manipulation.
So let me talk about this beyond the shiny gadgets, and
I wanna make sure we're talking about the same kinds of technology.
So there's lots of different technologies.
There's a few in particular that people usually mean when
they're talking just technology, and I'll talk about those.
Those are communications technologies, computational technologies,
the sensors that are in all of our devices now days.
And where I think some of the most exciting stuff is happening is actually in
what I would call institutional technology.
So when we think about communications technology, we think about the ability to
launch a fundraising campaign, or organize a protest, or
share a message and generate interest in a cause more broadly,
more quickly, and more robustly than we've ever been able to do it.
The practice is the same.
It's sort of friends telling friends, but we can do it around the globe in a matter
of seconds, using Twitter or text messages or whatever tool we're using.
So the communications role is where a lot of the attention has been.
It's very exciting, and it's legitimately different in that scale and pace.
It's really an amplification of the voice of individuals.
So if you take, well, to rip it right out of the headlines, last night's national
moment of silence, a protest against police brutality in the US.
Organized by a very small group of individuals in a matter of days,
took place in, I think,
40 or more cities, hundreds of thousands of people participating.
Simply not possible to organize on that scale that quickly in a matter of days.
Also there was a huge backlash to it.
So that's going to become one of these interesting case studies,
where you see not only how we can use these tools to create the change we want,
but how others can use it to push back on the change we're trying to create.
Similarly ripped from the headlines, the National Association
doing research on Lou Gehrig's disease is leading this ice bucket,
bucket of ice challenge, cold water challenge I think it's called.
They've raised more money than they could've imagined.
And this was a fundraising campaign that started outside the organization.
It was started by individuals.
So the interesting implication besides just this amplification
role that these tools give us, is that they're really changing the way you and
I can make change happen.
The scale at which we can do it, with or
without a structured institutional partner.
That has big implication for philanthropy particularly, foundation philanthropy
which typically can't fund individuals, can only fund an organization.
So if the organization goes away because the individuals can make the change
happen, we're going to have to see some changes in philanthropy.
So that's the communication's technology one,
the one that we're all really carrying in our pocket with us, cell phones.
The other is computational technologies, the more common name of this,
the buzz word that's being thrown around that there is big data.