Andrew Zaleski has an excellent, sober commentary on Baltimore’s status as a “startup hotbed.” 410 Labs founder Dave Troy reminded me of Matt Yglesias’ three-month old post on local governments and tech startups when he points out on the Baltimore Tech Facebook group that,
There’s no city town or burgh not experiencing some kind of “tech renaissance” with startups, angel culture starting to bubble, collaboration, etc. I see it everywhere in the world, from here to Moscow to China. (When current and former communist countries get into the act, you know it’s happening everywhere.)
Yglesias recognizes there is room for tech outside of the traditional startup hubs, but argues that “if every civic leader in America focuses on this goal simultaneously they’re each going to accomplish very little.” Instead, he argues that state and local officials “should look more closely at what assets they already have and what those assets need to thrive.” This runs counter to attempts to get Baltimore’s political and business leadership to champion tech entrepreneurship throughout the city.
Baltimore has as many things going for it as it does things working against it, including dwindling population, persistent unemployment and lackluster schools. Of course, these intractable challenges can be seen as opportunities as well–talk about entrepreneurs solving real problems. Every time I step foot inside of a government agency, I imagine how technology can revolutionize the delivery and efficiency of social services–and how doing so can potentially make someone a pretty penny.
Case in point: software company Social Solutions, which designs software that helps nonprofits document and manage their efforts and outcomes in great detail. Three years prior to Millennial Media’s IPO (and before it considered leaving the city because of parking constraints) Social Solutions was a 90 person company that was quickly outgrowing its offices in the Emerging Technology Center. After a $6.5 million round of investment, it left the city for Middle River and continues its growth.
The founders at Social Solutions filled a need–utilizing technology to better allow social service nonprofits to execute on their missions–and found themselves experiencing great growth and profit. Baltimore is a great petri dish for a company like Social Solutions–and there’s more room for companies like it to follow.
The Baltimore City Public School System, for example, has a $1.3 billion budget–and isn’t even in the top-30 of largest school districts in the country. A savvy entrepreneur could solve problems for a multi-billion public education market with technology advances–just as Social Solutions has done for nonprofits. There’s potential for the same to be done for the billions spent locally in social and human services.
It might not be as sexy as mobile and web apps–but what’s better than solving “real problems” and experiencing exponential growth as a company?
I woke up to some devastating news on this Christmas Eve: Black youth account for nearly 85 percent of teens charged as adults in the Baltimore region. Of course, today is as good a day as any to bring attention to this largely ignored issue. We ignore and accept this unfortunate reality because, by and large, African Americans (particularly black men) are still viewed as violent threats to society.
Following the Sandy Hook tragedy, we’ve started a (better, slightly more nuanced) dialogue about gun violence and mental illness, but we’ve sidestepped an essential truth about gun violence in America: it is unequally distributed and young black and Hispanic men residing in inner cities bear the brunt of its consequences. In 2008 and 2009, the leading cause of death among young black men was gun homicide–at a rate 8 times higher than young white men. And, yes, most homicides of young black men are perpetrated by other black men, but intraracial homicide is not unique to the African American community–something we have a tendency to forget.
As argued by Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, there is a public health dimension of gun violence that we must confront. Through this lens, it can be argued that there is no greater epidemic as it relates to gun violence than in our inner cities. Philadelphia magazine recently reported that Philadelphians suffer similar psychological trauma as people in Afghanistan and Rwanda, trauma that can produce people who are “emotionally numb” and “indifferent to the value of life.” It’s a vicious cycle that precipitates more violence.
In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, we’ve been afforded an opportunity to reflect upon mental illness and gun violence more vigorously and intelligently than before; let’s not forget to explore the (visibly) invisible racial dimensions as well, and how psychological trauma contributes to everyday acts of violence in our cities.
Several weeks ago, I was asked by WYPR–the local NPR affiliate station–to contribute a radio essay to its year-long series on segregation, “The Lines Between Us.” I was asked to explore the differences between inclusiveness and diversity. You can listen to my essay here and read the text below:
Periodically, someone—or some organization—asks for my advice on how to become more “diverse.” Here’s how that question sounds to me: “Rodney….how can I be less white?”
That’s an awkward role for a 28 year-old black guy to play. Even more so in a majority-minority city like Baltimore. My friend, the Baltimore Sun columnist Lionel Foster, calls it “translating.”
For members of most minority groups, cultural dexterity seems to be a matter of survival. It’s not an option, or something you ask someone to help you with.
Kevin Starr, executive director at the Mulago Foundation, has sparked a fascinating conversation on the debate of for-profit versus nonprofit social enterprise. Here’s the crux of Starr’s position,
If you have a potentially high-impact new idea, you start out as a subsidized nonprofit that is focused on developing a scalable business model worthy of real capital. If you manage to get there, the organization flips into a for-profit and raises money from investors. The emerging business must be structured to ensure that it stays on mission, but that can be managed. We haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but it’s cleaner than the alternative and more likely to produce a business that really can scale via the market. All we need to make it work are philanthropists and investors who know their jobs and are willing to try something (kind of) new.
And if your impact is profound but your breakeven point stays over the horizon, you can simply remain a nonprofit. You can’t sell equity, but you can get grants and cheap loans. Grants are free money, and zero-interest loans to nonprofits are not unheard of. Better a struggling nonprofit than a dead for-profit, and given the overall performance of social enterprise equity investments so far, would-be impact investors might want to save themselves a headache and just give you the money instead. They probably weren’t going to see it again anyway.
Mark makes an insightful comment to yesterday’s post on financial resources, nonprofit performance and innovation. He writes,
Creating a culture of innovation where the focus is on doing more with less is critical for nonprofits. My take is that money alone cannot buy innovation as defined in this manner. Some nonprofit leaders do believe a direct relationship exists between the amount of financial support they receive (or do not receive) and their ability (or inability) to accomplish their mission. Although the necessary monetary resources are clearly essential, this belief discounts the value of the organization and the potential of its people.
Seth Godin believes the biggest, best-funded nonprofits have an obligation to be innovators. I agree. I quibble with how he arrives at this conclusion. Godin writes,
The thing about most cause/welfare non-profits is that they haven’t figured out how to solve the problem they’re working on (yet). Yes, they often offer effective aid, or a palliative. But no, too many don’t have a method for getting at the root cause of the problem and creating permanent change. That’s because it’s hard (incredibly hard) to solve these problems.
The magic of their status is that no one is expecting a check back, or a quarterly dividend. They’re expecting a new, insightful method that will solve the problem once and for all.
The New Republic has a particularly harsh critique of Kickstarter, deriding it as the “world’s No. 1 [would-be] solver of First World problems.”
I’ve my reservations about Kickstarter, but Noreen Malone presupposes that Kickstarter intended to be a platform for social change. Kickstarter does exactly what it was meant to do: help fund projects that would otherwise not get funded by (slightly) democratizing access to financial resources.
Rodney Foxworth is a Baltimore-based social entrepreneur, business consultant and strategic communications advisor specializing in corporate citizenship, philanthropy and social investment, and community and economic development.
