Work in Progress: The Hewlett Foundation Blog

The biggest climate moment since Paris

Flora Zhang — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 17:26:52 +0000

(Credit: Ben Hattenbach)

A combination of overwhelming scientific evidence and observable fact has persuaded all but the most obstinate holdouts that climate change is both real and dangerous. Like many others, I believe global warming may pose the greatest and most complex challenge humanity has ever faced. Rising sea levels, unrelenting extreme weather events, droughts and floods and food and water scarcity are but a few of the catastrophic impacts we must expect if average temperatures continue to rise—impacts that will hit hardest the people and nations with the fewest resources to react and respond.

It’s a global problem that demands a global solution. We must act boldly and swiftly, and we must act together. Philanthropy has a role, but philanthropic funders, no less than the governments of the world, must work together if we are to achieve the necessary impact quickly enough. One of the best opportunities for collaboration and immediate impact will come about next month, when 190 nations gather in Kigali, Rwanda, to plan the phase down of an extremely potent greenhouse gas, the chemicals named hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs.

HFCs were created in the early 1990s for use in refrigeration and cooling appliances. They were created for good reason, too: to replace the chloroflourocarbons (CFCs), then being used for cooling, that contributed to producing a hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer. We succeeded in getting rid of CFCs, but at a cost. HFCs are almost 10,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide in causing global warming.

Fortunately, since HFCs were first introduced, scientists have developed climate-safe alternatives. And now, the nations of the world, developing and developed alike, are discussing how to eliminate these dangerous chemicals through an amendment to the Montreal Protocol (the international treaty governing the use of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer).

It’s the biggest climate moment since the signing of the Paris accord last year: a monumental opportunity to avoid up to .5°C of global warming by the end of the century. To put that in context, if every nation fulfills its Paris commitments, they will at most reduce warming by 1.5°C. Opportunities to accomplish this much in a single step are rare.

A group of developing nations that includes many of the most vulnerable are pushing an ambitious plan that calls for an early phase out of HFCs and a quick transition to climate-safe and energy efficient cooling technologies. To achieve this goal, they need funding support to help expand their energy efficiency programs. The link makes sense: using the transition to new cooling technologies as an opportunity simultaneously to increase energy efficiency offers developing nations significant long-term economic benefits (on top of the climate benefits). Cooling drives as much as 40-60 percent of peak summer energy load in these nations. Done properly, improved efficiency can relieve strain on weak electrical grids and reduce the need for hundreds of new power plants, thus saving money and emissions.

Not only that, but improved efficiency can help avoid another .5°C of global warming, helping these nations fulfill their Paris agreements and doubling the climate benefits of the HFC phase down.

Responding to this call, the Hewlett Foundation joined with 17 other charitable foundations and individuals to create a $53 million fund that will support expanding energy efficiency programs in developing nations. Our fund will provide these nations with essential, up-front resources to hire staff, consult expert advisers, and develop and implement policies to improve energy efficiency. Like the path that led to the successful Paris agreement, the fund allows countries to make their own decisions about which regulations to pursue and which sectors to regulate.

Big-picture, this collaboration could change the trajectory of energy efficiency progress globally—a win for everyone, because efficiency is the fastest, cheapest, most readily available climate solution out there. And by using energy efficiency to double the climate impact of an HFC phase out, we can at the same time take a large step forward in helping to protect every nation—but especially the most vulnerable ones—from the worst impacts of climate change.

Read our statement about the fund.

What we want to learn at the evidence-informed policymaking extravaganza

Flora Zhang — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 17:05:46 +0000

The global evidence-informed policymaking extravaganza kicks off this week with the Africa Evidence Network’s EVIDENCE 2016 event in Pretoria, South Africa. As we head to some of these events, here's what we hope to see and hear:

Is there momentum for evidence-informed policy in developing countries?

Our hypothesis is that interest is growing. We’ll be watching to see if there are organizations and individuals—pioneering governments, think tanks, evaluators, data gurus, or evidence translators—leading the way in developing countries. Better yet, we hope to see a global community taking shape, with enthusiasm for collective learning across countries and areas of expertise.

Do global and regional efforts help at the country level?

Most of the events this fall will bring people together to learn about evidence-informed policymaking, build a community of practice, and share experiences. Will these meetings in New York, Pretoria, London, and Lima increase the use of evidence in developing countries? We won’t be able to identify country impacts right away, but we’ll be looking for promising signals.

What concepts and practices are we missing?

We are developing our own approach to evidence-informed policymaking at the Hewlett Foundation, but are eager to learn how others think and talk about what enables and motivates policymakers to use evidence.

Who else is working to promote and improve evidence-informed policymaking?

We know many great organization and individuals working in this area, but hope to see and learn from many more in the weeks ahead.

What are you hoping to get out of the global evidence-informed policymaking extravaganza?

A global evidence-informed policymaking extravaganza

Flora Zhang — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 02:06:33 +0000

Hold on to your seats, evidence enthusiasts! Whether you’re a fan of evidence-informed policymaking, evidence-based decisions, or just what works, you’re in for an action-packed few weeks. Not even the most globetrotting devotee could make all the events September and October have in store, so here is a quick guide to what’s on, what we’re watching for, and how you can keep up with the details.

Follow the Evidence: The Promise and Potential for a Different Approach to Policymaking (Washington, DC, September 8)

The Bipartisan Policy Center event will be one of the first public discussions about the new U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, recently created with rare bipartisan support. These are tough political times for new policy initiatives in the United States, so we’ll be looking for champions in Congress, the administration and outside groups to talk about how to carry evidence-informed policymaking into the next administration and new Congress. You can count on our friends at Results for America to follow this one, or follow on Twitter @BPC_Bipartisan.

EVIDENCE 2016 (Pretoria, South Africa, September 20-22)

The Africa Evidence Network (AEN) will host EVIDENCE 2016. The event will draw senior policy officials from across Africa and organizations working to increase policymakers’ access to and use of evidence. AEN began as a network of partners in the DFID-funded Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) program, and is now 700 organizations strong. We’re excited to see what the network’s members are learning about fostering an evidence-informed culture in Africa. We’ll especially be looking for conference reflections from the team at the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) given their leading role as an evidence-to-policy translator.

UN General Assembly annual meetings side events (New York, September 19-26)

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) will discuss the global refugee crisis and the Sustainable Development Goals. The week will include events on Big Data and Refugees and Data for Climate Resilience, and feature an event of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and a “Data Playground.” We’ll be watching whether data enthusiasts focus on using better data to achieve the SDGs, not just monitor them. Keep the pulse through UN Global Pulse and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

What Works Global Summit (London, September 26-28)

The What Works Global Summit (WWGS) will bring together hundreds of evidence-oriented policymakers, scholars, advocates and funders to dive into scores of evidence-informed policymaking topics. Hewlett’s Sarah Lucas will host a session that will put two Think Tank Initiative organizations on center stage. “Bringing Evidence-Informed Policymaking to Life: Films and Discussion from Senegal and India,” will feature research-to-policy stories from the Consortium for Economic and Social Research (CRES) in Senegal and the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP) in India, and frank dialogue with the scholars and policymakers that made them possible. Get sneak peeks at the videos here and here, and keep track of WWGS highlights from Campbell Collaborative, 3ie, or any of the dozens of other partners. Or follow on Twitter at #WWGS2016.

Ghana Education Evidence Summit (Accra, September 27)

This Summit caught our attention because it is co-hosted by Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Ghana Ministry of Education. This collaboration reflects one of the main hypotheses about fostering evidence use: partner with policymakers from the outset to identify policy questions that evaluation (or research or data) should address. We’ll be looking to the team at IPA to share lessons about whether this approach leads to more reliance on evaluation findings in formulating policy and implementing programs. On Twitter @poverty_action.

Evidence Works 2016: Global Forum for Government (London, September 29-30)

Results for America / Results for All and NESTA will host Evidence Works 2016: A Global Forum for Government. Gathering policymakers from across the world, these sessions will share practical lessons from 40 different countries across six continents about the tools, incentives, and partnerships they are using to foster a culture of evidence-use. We are particularly interested to see if there is appetite among this community of like-minded, evidence-oriented government officials to collaborate and learn from each other in a more structured way going forward. Our friends at Results for All will track this closely. On Twitter: @nesta_uk and @Results4America.

International Open Data Conference (Madrid, October 6-7)

Madrid will host the International Open Data Conference (IODC) with open data experts in everything from agriculture and extractives to humanitarian assistance and transportation. At IODC we’ll be most interested in seeing how different data communities come together, including open data enthusiasts, data revolutionaries, and official statisticians. Our friends at Open Data Watch will be watching these dynamics closely. On Twitter: #IODC16 and @opendatacon.

Semana de la Evidencia 2016 (Peru, October 17-21)

Finally, Peru will welcome EIP enthusiasts from across Latin America at Semana de la Evidencia 2016 (Evidence Week 2016), hosted by the Peruvian Alliance for Evidence Use. The week promises to celebrate efforts to bring evidence into the policy process, and help build capacity to do so. We’ll be watching to see how the strong network of Latin American public policy think tanks uses this opportunity to better understand the questions public officials are grappling with, and how their research can address them. The team at On Think Tanks will surely offer useful insights from this exciting week. On Twitter: @Evidencia_Peru.

While we’ll only be able to make some of these events in person, we're excited to see a rapidly growing community of people pushing for, producing, and using evidence in policy decisions. We are eager to hear what you see and learn in the evidence extravaganza ahead.

What hacking taught journalists about cybersecurity

Flora Zhang — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 01:29:26 +0000

(Credit: Scyther5/Shutterstock)

Hannah Yasharoff is a student at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. She participated in a cybersecurity workshop at the college that was supported by the Hewlett Foundation.

With the help of a hacker, reporters and editors inside a computer lab at the University of Maryland this summer witnessed for themselves just how easy it is to break into an insecure website.

By deleting one backslash from a line of code and replacing it with two other characters, participants in a “Cybersecurity for Journalists” workshop were able to remove each other’s posts, see each other's passwords and ultimately, upload a file to destroy a website altogether.

“Do not do this outside this classroom,” admonished Craig Stevenson, the lead instructor of the Cyber Exploitation Unit of Raytheon Solipsys.

The workshop, funded by the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative and co-hosted by the University of Maryland's journalism school and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, drew 35 journalists from around the country. It was designed to give journalists first-hand experience of critical — but often little understood — cybersecurity issues, as well as giving them a chance to develop sources and come up with story ideas.

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, the conference organizer and the Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the school, spoke about the importance of developing cybersecurity reporting skills: “There are many, many obstacles set in your way… but the American people— even though they keep saying how much they hate you— the American people depend on you to tell them what is happening.”

The hacking exercise “took the mystery out of it,” said Kimberly Pierceall, a business reporter at the Virginian Pilot who says she writes often about cyberattacks but had never seen one from the inside. “It was nice to do it ourselves… It isn't magic, it's knowing some semblance of coding.”

Michel Cukier, associate director of UMD’s undergraduate cybersecurity honors program, explained that when the internet was created, no one worried about security. Only decades later are governments, businesses, free speech proponents and policymakers trying to retrofit changes onto what has become an unparalleled global cyber infrastructure.

“It's like you figured out how to design and build the first car and someone then asked you to turn the car into a boat,” he said. “And then turn the boat into a plane.”

Michael Hamilton, the former Chief Information Officer of Seattle and currently CEO of Critical Informatics, gave reporters a rapid-fire briefing on the vulnerability of local governments’ critical infrastructure, 85 percent of which, he said, is owned by industry.

To find sources, Hamilton suggested that reporters visit industry trade shows and hacking conferences, begin relationships with local FBI offices responsible for investigating larger breaches, and get to know leaders at cyber security firms, cyber fusion centers, and the cyber units at the state National Guard.

While understanding journalists’ fondness for the Freedom of Information Act, which allows reporters and the public to file requests to obtain public documents, he lamented what he called "public disclosure trolls," individuals who file hundreds of FOIA requests as a hobby. These requests clog up resource-strained cities and state government bureaucracies.

Hamilton urged journalists to find a way to limit what he described as “nuisance filings.”

Stanford University cyber scholar Herb Lin walked through the many unanswered questions about cyber warfare. The first and most important question is attribution -- who attacked whom?

But attribution is just the beginning, he said. What were the motives of the attacker? Was miscommunication a factor? What will be the intended and unintended consequences of responding militarily to a state-sponsored attack? Can the consequences be contained? What are the different levels of appropriate response?

Lin and others also lamented the lack of knowledge on the part of policymakers. “Technology leads policy by a lot,” he said. “At the federal level, there are maybe two people in Congress who understand this technology… law enforcement doesn't really understand their role yet.”

Ellen Nakashima, one of the nation's top cyber reporters and part of the Washington Post team that produced a Pulitzer Prize series based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, urged reporters to develop sources by cultivating cyber experts in academia who can go in and out of government. “Formers, formers, formers,” she said, referring to former government employees who are more free to speak to journalists after leaving government positions.

Both of them recommended attending hacker conferences such as Defcon, Black Hat, ShmooCon, and DerbyCon. Hackers, Lin said, love to brag and share their accomplishments.

Two presentations offered reporters examples for turning the complexities of cybersecurity into effective storytelling. Bruce Auster, a senior editor at NPR, walked participants through the production of a story dubbed "Project Eavesdrop," meant to show listeners how much personal data their cell phones and computers send out without their knowledge.

NPR hacked into reporter Steven Henn’s home office, with his knowledge and permission. Even though Henn believed he had set up good security measures, basic skill-level hacking was able to access his Google search data, locations visited, email addresses and telephone numbers through always open, data-trolling apps.

“Your phone is a promiscuous device,” explained Auster. “We're willing to make a deal with the devil for the convenience of the society that we're living in.”

Also presenting was visual artist Hasan Elahi, who recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his surveillance-themed art projects. The project began shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when he was mistakenly added to the U.S. government's watch list and spent six months being questioned by the FBI.

The FBI agent assigned to his case told him the best way to avoid questioning was to share his whereabouts with him. Elahi took the instruction literally and began an open-ended art project in which he revealed every aspect of his life to the agent, from the food he was in the process of eating, to bathroom toilets he visited.

Elahi photographed and uploaded plane tickets, road signs and everyday shopping trips. He has posted thousands upon thousands of images to his webpage for his agent and anyone else to see.

The result? “All my data is out there,” he said.

In the world we live in, cyber threats are more prominent than ever. The Internet has forced reporters to reinvent the way news is produced and shared. It’s also making them realize that understanding cybersecurity – a topic that still puzzles even top government officials – is increasingly important on a whole host of beats around the newsroom, from health care and business to national security and now, even domestic politics.

“I know some stuff just because I'm a computer nerd,” said Matt Dempsey, data reporter for the Houston Chronicle. “This cyber workshop has been a lot of information to take in, but it's been helpful, really helpful.”

The next step to Paul Tough’s 'Helping Children Succeed'

Flora Zhang — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 22:14:41 +0000

(Credit: EL Education)

The core qualities that drive success in the 21st century can be learned but not necessarily taught. That is the most critical insight in journalist Paul Tough’s excellent book, “Helping Children Succeed,” which came out this summer. It is an important conclusion, in part because it takes issue with more conventional school reform, which has tended to focus on “fixing” the students, the parents, and, most recently, the teachers inhabiting that environment.

Instead of concentrating on individual actors, Tough’s book showcases the interventions – some school-based, many not – that have altered the very conditions in which children grow up. Building independence and self-efficacy through rigorous but meaningful academic work is key. Doing so, the research shows, has successfully lifted up children in poverty, imbuing in them the same sort of academic ambition and resilience that has traditionally been the province of higher income neighborhoods.

But as remarkable as these programs are, sadly many of them live on the margin of the K-12 and surrounding systems. They are niche programs removed from the mainstream and delivered to a lucky few recipients. Along with Tough, those of us who are grantmakers to these programs worry that this work, at least to date, is reaching too few students and at too slow a pace.

For his next book, I am hoping Tough will write “Helping Children Succeed at Scale.” This is a difficult and complex proposition. But if I were to venture a guess, I would predict that Tough’s insight about the conditions for student learning to be successful are also true for adults.

In other words, to construct powerful learning environments, teachers and school leaders also need to work under conditions in which they are challenged, autonomous and accountable. As it currently stands, teachers chafe under school constraints, districts complain about state mandates and states, in turn, about federal strictures and their inability to chart their own educational destinies in light of the detailed prescriptions of No Child Left Behind.

Fortunately, all of that is beginning to change. Or at least the possibility of change exists. No Child Left Behind is over. It has been replaced by new federal legislation with a much less evocative title – the Every Student Succeeds Act, which does not envision an entirely new education system.

But Every Student Succeeds Act does reduce some of the barriers, remove the more onerous and impractical provisions of No Child Left Behind, and maybe most importantly, it begins to restore a degree of agency to state education systems.

My hope is that this is the moment where the beautiful work of our grantees in crafting the sort of vibrant learning environments that Tough describes can begin to find purchase. Where states can create the system conditions for districts to do their best work and districts can enable schools to innovate for their students.

Several respected policy organizations, including the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Learning Policy Institute, are focused on forging state education systems that encourage a broader view of student progress. States are beginning to recognize both academic excellence and the non-academic skills that Tough so eloquently describes. And they are focused on capacity building at every level so that the adults in the K-12 system have the resources, support and authority to be successful.

I don’t think that any of us are naïve about how challenging this will be to bring about. Policy change can at best enable - but not create - the learning environments that Tough and others seek, particularly for our most disadvantaged students. This hard work will fall to schools, teachers and the students themselves.

That said, for a very long time, the education programs Tough so beautifully describes, like EL Education, have succeeded despite a myriad of hurdles from many quarters. They have kept “two sets of books” – holding themselves accountable for the deeper learning competencies that will help their children thrive and enduring a multiplicity of challenges that have very little to do with this.

Beginning to develop coherence and alignment between the work of great educators and the environments, in which they find themselves, is both an important next step and near-term opportunity.

On SSIR: Why fund philanthropy infrastructure?

Flora Zhang — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 18:12:10 +0000

(Credit: Gui Jun Peng/Shutterstock)

Does support for the infrastructure of nonprofits and philanthropy – the research, publications, events, networks and technology – compete with funders’ primary areas of giving?

In an article published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fay Twersky and Lindsay Louie explain why the answer is no. The two work on philanthropy sector grantmaking at the Hewlett Foundation.

They shared their ideas following a joint call-to-action from nearly two dozen infrastructure organizations for funders that give $2.5 million or more a year to dedicate at least one percent of their grantmaking budget to this form of giving.

Twersky and Louie describe the foundation’s approach, but said, “We don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to approach infrastructure funding.”

They added, “Invest in the organizations that are most crucial for your foundation and/or your grantees to be effective. Invest in those you think the sector as a whole needs to be strong and healthy. Say no to requests that aren’t a fit for your work. Invest in one deeply or many lightly, and evolve your approach over time so that it continues to help you achieve your goals.”

Read the full article.

Planning for a renewal of the Madison Initiative: Feedback requested!

Flora Zhang — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 03:30:39 +0000

Last month, the Hewlett Foundation convened our Madison Initiative grantees and some of our philanthropic partners at a retreat center outside Washington D.C. to discuss the work we have in common, explore possibilities for collaboration, and build stronger relationships with one another.

This was the second time we’ve brought the group together and we came away impressed with everyone’s willingness to share their thinking and engage with colleagues that they don’t always see eye-to-eye with when it comes to politics. What they do share, of course, is a commitment to — and belief in the possibility of — getting beyond the polarization that’s stopping Congress from working the way it is supposed to: deliberating, negotiating, and compromising in ways that more Americans can support.

We also had a more selfish reason for bringing this group together. The Madison Initiative was launched in 2014 as a three-year $50 million effort, and we’re planning to bring our proposal for a renewal to our board in November. To prepare for that conversation, we wrote an update on our work to date and our plans for the future and circulated it to participants before the event. We got a great deal of valuable feedback on our thinking during our time together with our partners, and now we’d like to ask the same of you.

The memo we shared with them is now available on our website. Please excuse the formatting (or lack thereof). In the interests of transparency we’re sharing the same document with you that we shared with the group.

We welcome your thoughts on where we’re going and the lessons we’re drawing from the grants we’ve made so far. You can leave a comment below, or if you’d prefer to respond privately or at greater length, you can email me.

As I said in the introduction to the memo: “We look forward to constructive feedback from critical friends who can point out the blind spots and weak links in our emerging strategy.”

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts with us.

How we're implementing our transparency, participation and accountability strategy

Flora Zhang — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 21:53:31 +0000

Juliana Brown Afari leads a meeting of the Makola Market Traders Union in Accra, Ghana, which negotiates with local and national governments to improve the markets. The union is a member of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), an organization that helps make informal work visible to policymakers. (Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

Back in December, Global Development and Population Program Director Ruth Levine published our refreshed strategy to “make transparency matter.” At its heart is the assumption that we need to do more than just make information about government budgets and public services available -- such information needs to be relevant, actionable and context-specific if civil society organizations and government reformers are able to use it to improve public services like health, education, water and sanitation. "Without citizens acting on this information to hold their leaders accountable,” Levine wrote, "the problems of poor quality government services persist.”

Over the coming years we’ll fund relatively less around the provision of information and relatively more on learning from interventions that use information and participatory mechanisms to address poorly performing public services. The five-year strategy we released in December offers guidance on what we aim to do, though less on how we aim to do it. We’re sharing these initial plans with you because in philanthropy, like development itself, implementation is everything.

Our first challenge was to divide the strategy into manageable themes that could be overseen by each of the four program officer. It wasn't easy to categorize the organizations and projects we support as many span across multiple categories. Though imperfect, here's what we settled on:

Money Flows seeks greater transparency around governments' sources of revenue though initiatives like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the International Aid Transparency Initiative and the Financial Transparency Coalition. It also includes increased transparency, participation and accountability in how governments budget and spend money through the support of organizations and initiatives like the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, the International Budget Partnership, among many others.

Service Delivery Monitoring aims to improve public service delivery by empowering citizens and watchdog groups with information to engage productively with governments. This is done both through citizen-generated sources of data, such as the work of DataShift and the People's Action for Learning Network, and by monitoring government-generated sources of data, such as the I Am Aware platform in Ghana and GESOC's Index on Public Program Performance in Mexico.

Governance Channels seeks to foster new channels and approaches to productive engagement between citizens and governments to improve service delivery. The channels -- media, technology and legal empowerment -- are represented by grantees like Well Told Story, the engine room, and the International Senior Lawyers Project. The two approaches, co-creation and feedback loops, aim to foster spaces for collaboration between civil society and government and increase government responsiveness to the needs and complaints of citizens.

Field Learning supports research organizations like JPAL, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico to better understand when increased transparency, participation and accountability bring about improvements in service delivery. This work also includes support to research networks like Evidence in Governance and Politics and the Governance Data Alliance, which produce research and socialize it to ensure that evidence informs the work of practitioners and policymakers.

The challenges ahead

As a small team based in California, we sure have our work cut out for us. Two challenges are top-of-mind. First, is there a role for us to play in bridging the divide between organizations focused on transparency, participation and accountability and sectoral organizations that focus primarily on improving the delivery of specific services? Second, public service delivery is mostly managed by local governments, yet our strategy is global. How can we support innovative methods of improving service delivery through transparency, participation and accountability that will contribute to learning across sectors and geographies? What are the most effective methods and networks to spread the best ideas?

These are difficult, but not insurmountable challenges. We're encouraged by the experimentation led by Making All Voices Count to better understand the roles of transparency, participation and accountability in the water sector. And we're encouraged by the Open Government Partnership's Subnational Government Pilot Program, which brings together local governments and civil society organizations to address governance and service delivery challenges together.

Finally, we are developing our own learning strategy to test the assumptions and hypotheses of our strategy. In a future post we'll describe the indicators we're tracking and the questions we're addressing as we implement and refine our strategy.

Learn more about our transparency, participation and accountability team members.

What does Brexit mean for global development?

Flora Zhang — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 23:42:05 +0000

(Credit: Donfiore/Shutterstock)

In the wake of Britain’s stunning vote to leave the European Union, those of us who work in global development are trying to figure out what a Brexit would mean for the organizations and causes we care about. Even if we think only about the practical implications, and steer clear of hand-wringing about what the British referendum tells us about attitudes toward global citizenship, it is not a pretty picture.

First, the U.K. Department for International Development, already beleaguered by challenges in the pro-“leave” press, will now enter a period of extreme uncertainty at best. The impulse toward nativism, combined with the decline in the Britain’s economic prospects, will place DFID’s global leadership and relatively high levels of foreign aid spending in tension with taking care of growing problems at home.

For the many organizations in our orbit that receive DFID funding for their research and implementation of development programs, and for national governments that have come to depend on Britain’s funding in health, education and other sectors, this is not a good moment.

Second, British political leadership on development issues – including the most recent gains around transparency from Prime Minister David Cameron’s anti-corruption summit – is by no means assured for the future. We have come to expect that Britain will be among the most far-sighted, globally-oriented among members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, and will promote a pro-development agenda within the G8, the G20 and many multilateral institutions. Whether Germany, France, the United States or other countries step into that vacuum remains to be seen. Surely, the advocacy strategies that have depended on Britain as a first mover will have to be rethought.

Third, from a very practical perspective the weakening pound is going to immediately affect buying power of the organizations whose work we support. Yes, our dollars will be worth relatively more, but we will not be able to make up for the drop in the value of the pound.

Finally, how many dollars we have to make grants with in 2017 and beyond will be affected by whether or not financial markets regain some balance, and what the impact is on our endowment. There’s some time for this to shake out, but the current state of the markets is making us cautious about developing hopes of a growing budget next year.

All in all, for our issues, for Britain and for much of the rest of the world, a Brexit is bad news. How bad is yet to be seen.

Q&A with Joseph Asunka on the big hurdle to using aid data

Flora Zhang — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 17:34:04 +0000

(Credit: Revers/Shutterstock)

The International Aid Transparency Initiative aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand. It’s meant to help individuals in developing countries and donor countries see where aid, development and humanitarian money comes from, where it goes, and whether it helps reduce poverty. The IATI Members’ Assembly, which includes country governments, multilateral development institutions, civil society organizations, and representatives from the public and private sector, will meet in Copenhagen June 29-30 to approve a new vision and mission for the initiative.

Joseph Asunka, program officer with our Global Development and Population Program, focuses on how government officials and citizens use public information about revenue, taxes, contracts and budgets to improve policy. He will be at the IATI meeting and told me why they’re thinking about a new approach and how it could increase opportunities for policymakers and citizens to use the data to improve development policy and practice.

Why is the International Aid Transparency Initiative searching for a new vision and mission?

First, a brief background: IATI was launched at the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra in September 2008. It’s a voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiative, comprising providers of development cooperation, partner countries, and civil society organizations, that seeks to increase transparency of development cooperation. At the Fourth High Level Forum in Busan in 2011, IATI endorsers adopted a common, open standard for publishing aid information. This common standard was reached through consultations with all the key stakeholders: donors, recipient country governments, and civil society organizations.

Since its inception, the initiative has been governed by a multi-stakeholder Steering Committee. As the community grew, this governance arrangement became unwieldy for decision-making and the need for reform became increasingly apparent. A recent evaluation of the initiative confirmed a widespread dissatisfaction with the governance structure among the main stakeholders, which prompted a call for reform. On April 1, 2016 (and this is not a hoax), IATI adopted a two-tier governance structure comprising a new Governing Board and a Members’ Assembly, which replaced the Steering Committee.

The evaluation also highlighted a number of questions around the future direction of the initiative, such as: Does IATI strive to become more a global data standard in of itself, i.e. a “container” for data, or does it work to become more a development effectiveness tool? Can both these paths be pursued jointly by IATI? These questions underlie the current efforts to define IATI’s vision and mission. The process has started and will conclude at the first Members’ Assembly meeting next week where members will deliberate and ratify a new vision statement and a new mission statement.

What kind of aid data exists and who uses it?

There has been quite a lot of progress and helpful innovations on the IATI standard itself and in making the data available and relevant to potential consumers, notably governments and citizens of aid recipient countries. To date, more than 400 organizations, including some of the largest donors, publish information on development cooperation to the standard. For this group of publishers, it is now possible to know how much money they are providing, when and where the money will be spent and what it is expected to achieve. There are also options for publishers to include more nuanced data, including spatial data showing specific areas – regions, districts etc. – that benefit from aid resources.

With respect to aid transparency, the initiative has made considerable progress to date. If the number of publishers continue to grow monotonically – IATI needs to actively pursue this – the initiative would be well-positioned to make a significant contribution to the aid effectiveness agenda. Indeed the original motivation for the standard was to improve aid transparency and it appears that endorsers are increasingly comfortable and have the necessary skills to do so in a timely manner. This is an excellent outcome; but transparency to what end?

This is where the importance of data use comes in and I think it should be a central theme in the new IATI vision and mission statements. To be sure, some aid recipient countries governments have used IATI data in development planning and other purposes, but this has been very limited. And even though there are excellent examples of how the data could be used as a monitoring and accountability tool – a crucial element of the aid effectiveness agenda – very little has been done in this area.

Focusing on data use – building the necessary skills in-country, making the data store more intuitive and flexible, encouraging the production of infographics etc. – would advance the aid effectiveness agenda in many ways:

Governments would have the capacity to use IATI data for development policy planning and implementation.
Citizens, civil society groups and other stakeholders could use the data to hold governments accountable for the use of aid resources.
Donors would have an added incentive, perhaps a greater incentive, to continue publishing to the standard. It not enough for a donor to commit resources to publishing to a standard only to demonstrate transparency. That the data is actually being used to make a difference in people’s lives in an expected way is much more incentivizing. Moreover, this could serve as a strong recruitment tool for donors who are yet to sign on to the standard.

How can citizens in developing countries use aid data to improve government services?

The potential impact of IATI on government services is twofold: first, because the initiative strives (and also encourages donors) to publish forward-looking data, it helps to enhance the overall quality of government development policy planning. In a recent interview with Frederick Krah at the Liberian ministry of finance and development planning, Krah said IATI data gives a realistic picture of most external resources and informs their development strategy and national budget preparation. Second, since IATI data are public and include detailed information on the amount of money as well as where, what and how the money is to be spent, the initiative offers citizens the opportunity to monitor the use of aid resources and to hold their governments accountable for services. Effective planning of national budgets by governments and citizen oversight/monitoring should lead to improved publics services.

However, I must say that IATI data by itself is not pretty and certainly not immediately digestible by both governments and citizens. Governments need to have the necessary capacity and skills to make use of the data; and for citizens to be able to leverage this data to hold their governments accountable, there is a need for some amount of data processing. A possible way forward would be to encourage a network of infomediaries to make the data digestible for civil society organizations, including journalists, as well as other citizen groups interested in monitoring the use of aid resources.

What can IATI supporters do to make sure people use the data?

I can think of at least three things that could help in this direction. First, the IATI community should continue to work on improving the quality of the data and increasing the coverage though active recruitment and retention of providers of development cooperation. Interest in using the data could grow very rapidly if IATI is able to capture a large proportion of aid data. Second, the community needs to build (or at least facilitate) a network of data intermediary organizations who would analyze and present the information in ways that is easier to digest and who can respond to requests for IATI data in specific formats. I imagine that such a network would benefit the work of journalists and other transparency and accountability civil society organizations in aid recipient countries. Third, the community should strive to build the capacity of developing country governments to use and innovate with IATI data.

Is there anything else you hope IATI members discuss?

I will revisit the issue of data coverage: IATI needs to do more to improve coverage of aid resource flows. With more coverage, governments and citizens of recipient countries would have a much fuller picture of aid resource flows into the national budget, including projected future flows. I hope that the meeting will deliberate on the way forward for attracting new publishers.

For a start, I think an interactive and regularly updated data visualization tool could help with recruitment. I am thinking of a map of world showing where IATI data downloads are occurring. Just knowing the spatial distribution of data downloads, not necessarily whether or how it is used, would be useful in many ways: the community would have an idea on where the data is being accessed and at what frequency, which could be helpful for IATI to follow-up and learn how the data is used and/or target technical support as part of efforts to promote data use. Showcasing the patterns of data downloads and how that informs IATI’s strategy for promoting data use might help to attract donors who are yet to publish to the standard. And if there is flexibility to incorporate citizen feedback on whether projects have been completed and/or specific services delivered, that will take the aid effectiveness agenda to the next level.

Why is the U.S.-India solar partnership historic?

Flora Zhang — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:22:58 +0000

A U.S.-India partnership aims to bring solar energy to millions of people in India. (Credit: UK Department for International Development, CC By 2.0)

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India announced a historic agreement to phase out the powerful greenhouse gases known as F gases and to inaugurate a partnership that will advance solar energy development in India. The agreement between India and the U.S. builds on ambitious pledges made by both nations at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.

The solar partnership will leverage seed philanthropic investments by a group of U.S. foundations, including the Hewlett Foundation, together with funding from the India government and loans from the U.S. government to attract billions of private investment dollars. This will help catalyze renewable energy growth across India and provide energy access for the first time to millions of people in the country.

Why is this solar partnership unique and innovative, and how would it help reduce poverty in India? Matt Baker, a program officer who leads the Hewlett Foundation’s global climate funding strategy, explains.

Why are the U.S. and India partnering this way?

The world’s efforts to mitigate climate change have made considerable progress in the past two years. In particular, commitments made by the U.S. and India at the Paris Climate Conference could represent a turning point for both countries.

In order for India to meet its goals, which include generating 100 gigawatts of new solar power by 2022, it needs quickly to create a robust market for renewable energy investments and growth. This squares nicely with its development goals of delivering low-cost energy to the 300 million people in India who currently lack access to electricity. As India is endowed with vast solar energy potential, clean, affordable, abundant solar energy – off-grid, micro-grid, and rooftop solar – is the best way for India to reach its goals.

How does the initiative work?

The Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Jeremy & Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation are putting up the first $30 million to fund two innovative public-private initiatives in India, which will then be matched by the government of India.

The first initiative will award grants to clean energy business projects to help get them finance-ready. Specifically, it will give energy access solar developers the resources they need to make their projects “finance ready.” This funding will pay for the business activities – feasibility studies, project finance documentation, land surveys, customer due diligence procedures, and so on – needed to meet the loan requirements of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a U.S. government loan agency that works in developing nations.

The U.S. government set up a similar initiative in Africa via the United States-Africa Clean Energy Finance Initiative (ACEF), which has deployed $20 million in grants to catalyze over $1 billion in clean energy project investments in Africa. We think our funding in India could do even better, leveraging as much as $400 million in investments from OPIC and other investors to generate projects that will deliver solar energy for the first time to communities without any power.

The second project will do something similar, but in the domain of financing projects like those developed under the first one. Philanthropic funding will help catalyze funding for solar energy projects from development finance companies like OPIC, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the German Investment Corporation (DEG), the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO), and others.

This, in turn, will make it much easier for private capital to flow in. The foundation funding essentially acts as insurance against unexpected setbacks for the solar projects. It helps mitigate risk sufficiently to bolster the confidence of the global investment community. We think this can mobilize up to $1 billion in capital flows to Indian solar projects, in particular those that serve the poor in areas currently without electricity.

The two projects thus work in complementary ways to ripen Indian solar projects for billions of dollars of private sector investments, which of course will have the effect of multiplying the impact these projects can have towards protecting our natural environment.

What will this initiative do for people in India?

Good question! It’s too easy, when talking about billions of dollars, government agreements, and lofty finance projects, to lose sight of what this means for everyday people.

More than 300 million people in India – that’s a quarter of the Indian population, mostly rural poor – cannot turn on a light. What power they have for their homes and kitchens comes from kerosene, wood, coal, and cow manure. This takes a huge toll on people’s health, not to mention on the nation’s economy and air quality. Solar energy can deliver power without harming the air or the global climate – and with power, people’s quality of life and economic opportunities improve dramatically.

This initiative will get people in Indian states like Utter Pradesh or Bihar, and many others, rooftop solar for their homes and solar installations that can power whole villages. For the first time, a child will be able to read at night, medicine can be stored in local villages, a kid with an idea can more easily start a business, and small business owners and entrepreneurs can save time they need to focus on their work. And meanwhile, the use of solar energy instead of fossil fuels will help mitigate global warming and contribute to protecting lives all around the globe.

Over the last four years at Hewlett, I have had the privilege of working with a number of solar nonprofits doing pioneering work to deliver clean, affordable solar energy to people without power across India – incredible organizations like the Selco Foundation, the Clean Coalition, and the Shakti Foundation. Our partner Harish Hande at the Selco Foundation says their mission is to "eradicate poverty and the darkness" with renewable energy. “The poor are not looking for sympathy; they are looking for a partner,” Hande says. My hope is that these projects will give those millions of people in villages across India the partners they are seeking and, in this way, improve millions of lives.

What is philanthropy’s role?

Figuring out how philanthropy can attract private investment dollars into clean energy infrastructure could well be the single most important step we as a foundation can take to achieve our goal of protecting humanity by keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees centigrade.

Getting this right is not only great for India’s economic growth and the people of India who will gain access to affordable, clean power. It’s great for the global economy and for redressing the climate crisis.

I believe this U.S.-India partnership, enabled by our relatively small amount of seed support, shows what can happen when governments and civil sector and private sector organizations team up and work together. And if it works, we may have a model that can be used in other places and other countries. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Four questions for Steven Weber on cybersecurity futures 2020

Flora Zhang — Mon, 23 May 2016 16:56:32 +0000

A scenerio from Cybersecurity Futures 2020. (Credit: Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity)

Recently, leading thinkers gathered to discuss what cybersecurity could look like in 2020 and beyond. Among them was Steven Weber, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where he serves as faculty director of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (founded in 2015 with a grant from the Hewlett Foundation). Weber has led the development of Cybersecurity Futures 2020, a set of scenarios to “serve as a starting point for conversation among academic researchers, industry practitioners, and government policymakers.” Following are edited excerpts from an email interview with Weber about his approach to scenario planning.

The five scenarios you developed for what cybersecurity might mean in 2020 — just four years away! — present some fascinating possibilities, from wearable devices that track our emotional state to a “new normal” where everyone just assumes their personal information will be stolen. What do you see as the most important insights arising from the scenarios?

One of the goals of scenario development is to ask and answer the question: What insights about the future are likely to be true in any plausible future? We’ve extracted ten of these insights from our work, but there are two that really stand out.

The first is that cybersecurity is on the verge of becoming the “master problem” of the Internet era — an existential challenge that is quite like climate change in its significance and global consequences. If you think about the resources — economic, political, or technical — that are being mobilized around climate, then you have a sense of what we believe the world will need to do around cybersecurity in the next few years.

That recognition in and of itself will bring major changes in how human beings and digital machines interact. Cybersecurity is about to enter the arena of vast psychosocial impact in a manner we’ve not seen up to now. Corporations and governments will be able to predict with precision individual human behaviors and come to know us deeply — not just what we buy or where we go. They will know us better than we know ourselves when our memories are storable, searchable, shareable, and possibly changeable. These are the kinds of things that go to the essence of what it means to be human, how we interact with each other, what freedom and fairness mean, and ultimately how we assess a feeling we call security.

The second is just how much hinges on the ways in which the political economy of data evolves. We think that security issues around data will become more critical than the security of digital devices or communications networks. When data becomes a more easily exchangeable asset, it also becomes something of measurable value that criminals want more so than ever to acquire and sell.

Governments won’t be able to avoid the challenge of managing markets for data, both licit and illicit. The interactive dance between data and algorithms — where the scarce resource lies at any moment, where differential insights can be created, and where the most dangerous manipulations can occur — will become a critical variable in the shape of the threat landscape.

We also landed on the view that there is no silver bullet and probably never will be. That’s hardly a new argument, but we understand better now why. It’s because the ongoing and ever-increasing demand in the digital realm for features, performance, and extensions of capabilities expands to fill the space of what is technically possible, and then goes beyond it.

This observation is a pretty basic statement about human behavior, but it suggests that the digital realm will evolve very much like other security realms have always evolved in human affairs. Which is to say that bad actors co-evolve with good, and that the meanings and identities of good and bad are never settled. Threats don’t disappear. They change shape.

In setting up the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation, one of our key concerns was how to foster a cybersecurity field that offers robust, multidisciplinary solutions to complex policy challenges. Could you talk about how the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity’s own multidisciplinary approach contributed to the development of the scenarios, and how you see them feeding back into your research?

We started by convening a broad group of scholars, practitioners, and policy people to identify and grapple with what we call “critical uncertainties” — the forces of change that are most important and at the same time most uncertain in the system under study. I’m not a fan of multidisciplinary approach for its own sake, but I am absolutely convinced that no single discipline can claim to understand what it is that drives a challenge to become sufficiently crucial that people label it as a security issue. The very concept of cybersecurity still needs work.

If that sounds like an academic abstraction, it shouldn’t. Most people in 2016 wouldn’t think of a credit card breach as impacting their core security interests; it’s more like a tax on your day to day life or an annoyance that somebody else has to deal with (and pay for). This matters because the landscape of potential solutions really changes when a problem becomes a security problem in political discourse, public imagination, and C-suite strategy conversations. And that happens at the intersection of politics, technology, economics, psychology, and a lot more. That’s where the demand for multidisciplinary solutions comes from.

There’s another way this could play out, of course. Cybersecurity would rise to the top of everyone’s agenda very quickly if the Internet were to become first and foremost a military realm. That’s possible — we’ve all heard about “cyber Pearl Harbors” and the like. We hope that it doesn’t evolve that way. Ironically the concepts and practices around security would then narrow, and that won't be a good outcome.

Our contribution here is based on the proposition that getting a little bit ahead of emerging challenges, rather than continuing to play catch up, is the best way we can help to prevent outright militarization from becoming the story of the Internet in 2020.

Your kickoff event for the scenarios featured one of the most successful cybersecurity storytellers: Walter Parkes, screenwriter and producer of the movies WarGames and Sneakers. How would you describe the role of narrative in your scenarios and helping the public understand cybersecurity?

I’ve never accepted the notion that science, theory and narrative are at cross purposes with one another. Quite the opposite: If you want to bring about change in what people believe and what they do as a result, you have to tell compelling stories that embed science and theory in a narrative. In politics, stories do battle with other stories and I think a policy-relevant research agenda needs to acknowledge that reality and own it. This doesn’t mean sacrificing theory or academic integrity. The stories that matter are those whose plot can be rigorously defended with logic and evidence.

Walter Parkes taught me the difference between story and plot and I think it’s a difference that every researcher who wants to change the world should keep in mind. Plot is what research creates — logic, causality, evidence, and reason. Story is what the human mind wants to consume — the narratives that move human beings to act differently tomorrow than they did today. In Parkes’ telling, here’s a plot: A woman loses her baby. Here’s a story: Baby shoes, for sale, never worn.

We’ve taken that message to heart in our scenario work. Each of our scenarios expresses a clear logical plot about how the landscape of cybersecurity could change. Each has explicit theoretical causal claims at its core. And, we’ve embedded little fictions that represent snapshots of data from the future, which are characteristic observable implications of those logical plots. Those newspaper stories and the like aren’t predictions -- they are stories that represent the kinds of data points that we’d start to see, if the causal logics of a particular plot are starting to unfold. Policy relevant research needs both of these elements to be effective.

Given the siloed nature of the huge sums spent on cybersecurity each year — government priorities or hardening individual company networks — we believe there’s an important role for philanthropy to play in fostering more cooperation among government, industry, civil society, and academia. Where would you advise us and other funders interested in supporting cybersecurity for 2020 and beyond to invest our resources?

It’s always easy to tell other people where they should spend their resources, isn’t it? But in this case, we’ve put our own time and money too where our mouths are. I think the key to fostering cooperation is to recognize that the time to play catch-up in the cybersecurity realm is over.

The bad actors are out ahead of the good actors in many if not most parts of the landscape. There isn’t enough money in the world to change that, if the good actors stay reactive and are generally responding to what the bad actors do. After all, it’s a no-brainer move for the bad actors to do everything they can to impede cooperation among exactly the people and institutions that funders want to bring together. People sometimes talk about a collaborative moonshot approach, but it’s important to remember that the moon was not an intelligent adversary that was trying to defeat the attempt to land on its surface.

So my advice is to get out ahead of the game and identify areas for cooperation that will start to emerge just over the horizon. I don’t know precisely what the right time frame for that kind of approach is, but my instincts tell me that we’re almost too late, for example, to deal with the first generation massive deployment of Internet of Things and that it might be smarter to move on right now to address what happens after that first generation is brought down by attackers.

I also want to endorse strongly the Hewlett Foundation’s emphasis on addressing the global dimensions of the cybersecurity challenge. The Internet is still a new enough realm of political-economic-security games that the concept of national interest in those games is up for grabs.

It isn’t that long ago that John Perry Barlow proclaimed the end of national state sovereignty on the Internet. 20 years after he wrote, “A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace,” the global policy agenda is crowded with issues like data localization and cross-border jurisdiction that put national borders and national power questions right at the top.

We may need to go back to first principles on some of these questions and seed a global conversation about the basic characteristics of Internet “space” and what it means for national interests. That will frustrate people who see the urgent cybersecurity dilemmas in a global frame, and I understand that frustration. But how else to get sustained, productive cross-border collaborations that improve the security of this new domain? It’s a long game that I hope the most ambitious philanthropists will see as their unique place to invest.

Why I’m inspired by Millions Learning for developing countries

Flora Zhang — Wed, 18 May 2016 21:14:44 +0000

Do we really need another report about global education? If the report is Millions Learning: Scaling Up Quality Education in Developing Countries, the answer is yes!

Millions Learning starts with a single proposition: the 100-year gap in educational outcomes between developed and developing countries cannot be closed with a business-as-usual approach. Co-authors Jenny Perlman Robinson and Rebecca Winthrop recommend five actions to expand quality education to millions more children in developing countries. Three of them stand out:

Fund the middle phase
Measure and learn what works through better learning and scaling of data
Share new ideas through a network of Idea Hubs

I’m hopeful that donors and governments will heed this advice and find new ways to provide flexible funding so that learning innovators have time to refine, adapt and sort out who is responsible for what to deliver on the promise of improved learning for more children.

Pairing this flexible funding with new investments to produce timely data and information about what it takes to scale up learning innovations could also advance the “science of delivery.” And a network of Idea Hubs could offer real-time advice and connections with others tackling similar challenges – a concept that the team at Brookings Center for Universal Education calls “real-time scaling labs.”

Reading Millions Learning reminded me of a story from our own grantmaking. In December 2013, I received a call from Mamadou Ly, executive director of the Senegalese NGO Associates in Research and Education for Development. ARED specializes in developing African-language instructional and reading materials that are culturally relevant, low-cost yet high quality and designed to meet community needs. The Hewlett Foundation funded the pilot phase of ARED’s instructional approach for teaching reading, math and social studies in grades 1-3 beginning in 2011, and in November 2013 approved a three-year renewal grant to provide ARED time to further test and solidify its approach and plan for expansion.

Ly reported that the minister of education had taken notice of ARED’s positive evaluation results and invited them to submit a plan for scaling up their model to 500 schools (a five-fold expansion). This was good news because ARED’s goal was to demonstrate that mother-tongue instruction was feasible, and would enable Senegalese children to stay in and succeed in school.

Yet, Ly had questions he wanted to tackle before he presented a plan for scaling up the approach to the minister of education: What other government institutions would need to be involved and what would it take to get them on board? Who would be responsible for training and supporting teachers? What would ARED need to do, and who would pay for the 500-school expansion? How would ARED work with many more communities to ensure the programs were designed for their needs?

At the end of the call, we agreed to help ARED find and fund a scaling-up advisor that could work with them and the ministry of education – someone who had experience navigating the technocratic and political enabling conditions for scaling up that could coach ARED through the process.

ARED is making good progress today, and Dubai Cares has joined us to fund their work. Government officials, National Parent-Teacher Association representatives and others who participated in planning workshops with ARED have become “learning champions.” And the minister for education recently endorsed ARED’s plan to scale up.

ARED still has some way to go to put mother-tongue instruction and reading materials into the hands of more of Senegal’s teachers and students. Success will depend on the ability of ARED and the ministry of education to consolidate their education alliance, mobilize longer-term funding, continuously track and learn from their progress in scaling up, and measure and communicate children’s learning outcomes. Perhaps they will be among the first clients of real-time scaling labs!

Which leaves me wondering how many other potential real-time scaling lab clients are out there? And how might their actions improve your work? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter @Hewlett_Found or with me @pscheid6.

Reclaiming assessment for deeper learning

Flora Zhang — Tue, 17 May 2016 22:02:34 +0000

Students working on geometric designs at a New Tech Network school. (Photo Credit: Courtesy of New Tech Network)

While the word assessment in education conjures up images of testing, its Latin root, assidere, means “to sit beside.” This raises a provocative question: In this era of high-stakes testing that’s used to rank kids and schools, what if we reclaimed the word assessment and put it more authentically in the service of learning?

Going a step further, what if we connected educators who are passionate about deeper learning with a coalition of technical assistance providers and researchers, surround them with resources and tools so that they can develop new forms of assessment as a learning community of grantees?

Recently, I met with the Assessment for Learning Project, a group of leaders who are catalyzing innovative approaches to assessment that encourage observing, collecting and interpreting evidence of deeper learning. They are inspired by the belief that any form of assessment “worth its salt,” as one teacher put it, “should also be an occasion for learning.”

Each pilot project within this group aims to build a new type of formative assessment that teachers and students can use to get feedback during instruction, so that they can adjust their teaching and learning accordingly. This group is also developing a series of “proof points” that would allow these assessments to scale beyond particular local contexts, geographies or school systems.

What would that look like in practice? Here are a few things being tried by the Assessment for Learning Project leaders.

The Center for Collaborative Education in Boston is working with Rhode Island teachers to design and implement complex, deeper learning tasks that require students to demonstrate mastery of key skills.

In contrast to a fill-in-the-bubble-sheet test, these tasks ask students to engage in real-world work like carrying out an investigation or constructing an argument based on primary sources. The most exciting part of this project is how participating teachers are trained to use the new assessments. Designed to “walk the talk” of competency-based assessment, the project’s teachers must first demonstrate competencies in three stacks of “micro-credentials” and they must present those skills to their peers.

Two Rivers School in Washington, D.C., students embark upon two expeditions each year. Their teachers guide them in a project-based learning experience that challenges students to interact with science or social studies curricula in non-traditional and exciting ways.

For example, second-graders learn about the physics of flight by exploring gravity, and then make recommendations to the Smithsonian National Air and Space museum for a child-friendly exhibit. Fifth-graders learn about American history by studying protests, and then draft recommendations for the D.C. public charter school community in response to funding concerns. Two Rivers is developing performance assessments to better understand how and if students are able to transfer the skills and habits they use in these learning expeditions to new tasks.

The California Performance Assessment Collaborative is launching an official state pilot where schools and districts develop, test, and share learning about high-quality graduation performance assessments that can serve as a viable alternative to California’s high school exit exam (a now suspended test of basic skills.) Learning within the pilot will occur on three levels:

Current practitioners - those already engaged in performance assessment
Emerging learners, those at the beginning or expansion stages of performance assessment implementation
Observers, those interested in learning closely with the collaborative

At Envision Schools, for example, students assemble a portfolio of their best work, which they must defend, dissertation-style, in front of an audience of educators, peers, and community members. Students must present a defense of their work at the end of 10th grade, and, for seniors, passing the college success portfolio defense is a graduation requirement.

The center of gravity of Assessment for Learning Project is its learning agenda, a set of core questions that the grantees hope will galvanize the broader field into rethinking the role of assessment. These are questions such as: “What assessment practices most effectively empower students to own and advance their learning?” and “How can we most effectively build educator capacity to gather, interpret, and use evidence of student learning to enhance instruction?”

Over the next two years, the schools, districts and nonprofits in Assessment for Learning Project will be using these and other guiding questions to catalyze an ongoing conversation – both in their schools and with their fellow grantees - on how we can #rethinkassessment. Throughout the process, they will be supported by assessment experts, in-person meetings, and a digital hub where they can share challenges and get real-time feedback from their peers.

Assessment for Learning Project is led by the Center for Innovation in Education (CIE) at the University of Kentucky in partnership with Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) at EDUCAUSE and is co-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Our new local advocacy approach for reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa

Flora Zhang — Mon, 16 May 2016 16:33:24 +0000

This week, I’m at the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen where global leaders, researchers and advocates are pushing for practical ways to boost the health, rights and well-being of women and girls. My colleagues Ruth Levine and Margot Fahnestock are here too, and attendees are talking about everything from gender data to gender norms.

There will be conversations about local advocacy for reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa and I’ll be talking about how the Hewlett Foundation is shifting our grantmaking to include a creative advocacy platform.

The Hewlett Foundation has supported family planning and reproductive health for decades, and we recently increased our focus on Francophone West Africa and East Africa, where progress has been slow or stalled.

Today, we are publishing a more detailed approach to support local advocacy that “can capably and positively influence the family planning the reproductive health policies and funding decisions of their own national governments and of international donors.”

Dozens of interviews with advocacy organizations, funders, policymakers and influencers—in developed and developing countries—helped identify two primary obstacles to effective local advocacy for family planning and reproductive health:

Advocacy organizations in developing countries are often constrained by short-term funding that is focused on narrow advocacy objectives
Technical assistance such as workshops or trainings is often poorly matched to local organizations’ longer-term needs and poorly informed about local political and policy realities

In response, we will support local policy advocacy priorities (and connect them to global efforts); provide hands-on and sustained technical assistance tailored to each organization; support longer-term advocacy partnerships; encourage mutual accountability among funders, intermediary organizations and local partners; and measure progress, share learning and adapt.

We expect to fund a handful of “Advocacy Partners” that can serve as trusted intermediary organizations to identify and support local organizations to advance family planning and reproductive health funding and policy goals over a five-year time horizon. These longer, five-year grants should allow the Advocacy Partners to pay particular attention to building sustainable advocacy capacity of their sub-grantees, so that these local organizations can define local policy priorities, develop advocacy strategies, secure resources, document and measure progress along the way, and adjust strategies as necessary.

We’ll also be supporting a new Advocacy Accelerator, an online and in-person platform for advocates and their supporters to share experiences, evidence and approaches. Rachel Wilson at Catalysts for Change is leading this effort and I’ll be joining her to discuss the Advocacy Accelerator at Women Deliver (Wednesday, May 18, 6:30 am – 8:15 am at the Bella Conference Center; a report about the Advocacy Accelerator will also be available at an interactive booth too, at location C3-060).

I hope many of you will join us for the discussions in Copenhagen and will continue to provide input and feedback to our grant-making approach.

Five questions for Ruth Levine on how to close the gender data gap

Flora Zhang — Wed, 11 May 2016 16:34:18 +0000

A member of Nairobi Young and Old cooperative group in front of her charcoal stand in a local market in Kenya. Her job is not typically captured by surveys. (Photo Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

Women Deliver, the world’s largest conference on the health, rights and well-being of girls and women will take place in Copenhagen from May 16 to 19. It will bring together global leaders, policymakers, advocates, journalists and businesses to focus on how to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including ways to improve maternal, sexual and reproductive health given their important link to women’s economic empowerment.

Ruth Levine, director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development and Population Program, will be there and told me she is hopeful participants will identify practical steps—and follow up with hard work—to build gender and data equality.

There’s a lot of talk about the gender gaps in pay and politics. You focus on a gender gap in data. What does that mean?

There’s a difference in the amount and quality of data about men and women that reflects—and reinforces—intrinsic biases.

For example, from demographic and health surveys in many countries, we know a lot about the health and fertility of women of childbearing age. We know where they get health services, whether they have iron deficiency, and even whether they had sex in the past two weeks.

But we know very little about what those same women do for a living, how much they earn, or how safe they feel in their homes and communities. In contrast, men’s employment and earnings tend to be counted more accurately, but there are few surveys that collect information about men’s health.

The gender data gap is about the difference in the information we have about men’s lives and women’s lives, in large part based on social values; and we have less and poorer quality information about women’s lives.

This isn’t a new topic, but it feels like there is a special moment right now. Why?

A lot of factors are converging, although I have to admit I don’t fully understand it myself, since many people have been working on this issue for a very long time. I think there’s a data story and an economic policy story. Together, they add up to some very welcome progress.

On the data side, there’s certainly a growing appreciation for the power of information to catalyze, inform and monitor progress. You don’t have to look further than excitement about the potential of the “data revolution” – or the fact that data scientist has been heralded as one of today’s “sexiest” professions. And there was a specific breakthrough in 2013 when the International Congress of Labor Statisticians adopted a new and far more inclusive way of measuring work in labor force surveys.

Data2X, a project at the UN Foundation established specifically to close the gender gap in data, has also helped move things along in a very practical way. Data2X created an inventory showing where the most significant data gaps are, across areas as diverse as civil registration and vital statistics to gender-based violence. So we have a baseline to see how fast we’re making progress. Data2X is taking that forward with important partnerships in six of these areas, building on commitments made by governments, UN agencies, multilateral institutions and private sector companies. (The Hewlett Foundation is proud to fund Data2X, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; during its first phase, I’ve also been co-chair of Data2X with the World Bank’s Caren Grown.)

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is also fifth on the list of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals UN member nations agreed to last September. Tracking progress on all the goals demands more and better data on women and girls.

On the economic policy side, important work has been done by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as some leading academic economists to shine a light on the importance of female labor force participation in sustaining economic growth. And global networks like WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) bring researchers, informal workers and advocates together to show where women work and how it should inform policymaking. That’s really helped legitimize a focus on gender-specific employment issues, although the work is just beginning.

And you can’t underestimate the importance of powerful champions. IMF Chief Christine Lagarde wants her staff and others to help women reach their full economic potential to “help boost growth, prosperity and stability for the whole world.” Leaders at the United Nations and the World Bank are also making strong statements in support of women’s economic empowerment – and better measurement as a means to get there. And Melinda Gates has brought a particularly welcome voice into the conversation. I’m hoping to hear more from her on at the Women Deliver conference during her keynote presentation on May 17th.

Why should gender-specific information be part of economic analysis, labor statistics and policymaking?

The reality is that men and women are in different situations to start with. They often have different education levels and different economic assets, and they respond differently to policy interventions.

Let’s say a government decides it doesn’t want to be so dependent on oil, gas and mining revenues and wants to diversify its economy. It’s going to make a lot of choices about tariffs and subsidies; maybe it will set up export processing zones for light manufacturing or invest in particular types of infrastructure to attract heavy industry.

Each of those decisions will have particular and distinct impact on male and female workers. And since men and women don’t just make money differently, they also spend money differently, there will be knock-on effects.

If the decision-makers don’t have gender-specific information, or if the data they have excludes a large share of the population, then they’re not likely to make the best choices. In fact, even if they don’t intend to reinforce existing gender differences in economic opportunities, policymakers using business-as-usual information are likely to do so simply because they’re working in the dark.

Using a “gender lens” to understand how labor markets work, or what households consume, is not yet a part of mainstream economic thought. When I was in graduate school and asked a question in a labor economics course about why some jobs, like nursing, are “women’s jobs,” and others, like taxi driver, are “men’s jobs,” the professor told me I should get out of economics and instead join the sociology department! I stayed in economics, and ended up doing dissertation research on occupational segregation by gender. (That professor was not on my thesis committee and today I’m happy to see a growing number of feminist economists hard at work.)

I think – and hope – we’ve moved beyond that moment, but gender continues to be a blind spot in the kind of economic analysis that’s essential for labor, tax, pension and other kinds of fiscal policy. And in the end that doesn’t just lead to policies that are bad for women, it leads to the wrong policies for everyone.

Progress depends on many things, but crucial among them is having quality data that would permit us to understand – not guess at and ignore – gender differences.

How might citizens in developing countries use this kind of data?

I think we can get a hint about that if we look at what’s contributed to progress in gender equality in some countries, including our own. For example, combatting gender-based wage discrimination and hiring bias requires being able to document it in a credible way, so civil society organizations can advocate like crazy to draw attention to the unfairness and the consequences for women and their families.

In developing countries, where the informal sector is so important and so poorly understood, there’s a particular opportunity to collect information about who is doing what. Once we know who are the street vendors, domestic workers, home-based workers and waste-pickers, among others, we can estimate what they contribute to the economy. We’ve seen that sort of information empower members of workers’ organizations. They can see themselves not as marginal but truly as a part of the national economy, and with that knowledge they are better able to speak up for their rights.

What else needs to happen to close the gender data gap?

Progress will require hard work, not just bold statements. It will take real financial investments alongside policy change, political will and hard work. It will require patience and brainpower across the board. For employment data, for instance, what needs to happen is that organizations that are responsible for large data collection efforts, such as the World Bank, the International Labor Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, need to agree on and try out ways to collect better and more comprehensive information.

Then national statistics offices that actually create the surveys and collect data need to make the necessary changes in the way they do business. There will be no quick wins, but this could be the foundation of new and more inclusive ways of understanding the world.

Q&A with Micha Rosenoer: Colorado taught me the true meaning of public lands

Flora Zhang — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 01:36:43 +0000

Colorodo. (Photo Credit: Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management, CC By 2.0)

Micha Rosenoer is West Slope Field Manager for Conservation Colorado, an organization dedicated to protecting Colorado’s public lands. This is the seventh Q&A in a weeklong series celebrating Earth Day 2016.

How did you become involved with the environment cause?

I grew up in coastal California surrounded by public lands and reveled in the opportunities to trail run, climb, and bike as often as possible. But it wasn’t until I moved to Colorado that I truly understood what the words “public lands” meant – these wild places that have been set aside to respect the inherent value of nature, and for us to enjoy together or in solitude for as long as we can fight to keep them protected.

I love working with local communities to protect our public lands because they are so important to our quality of life in the West. Regardless of political party or profession, I’ve seen that the majority of people love and value our public lands; it just takes the right spark to bring people together to rally behind them.

Who has inspired you along the way?

I met one of my formative mentors, Nurredina Workman, while I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Workman led an annual anti-racism year-long training program which I was lucky enough to be a part of during my sophomore year. She taught me to confront my privilege and question my personal and political positions on a daily basis.

I needed someone in my life to ask those hard questions and continually remind me that my work on environmental issues has to take into account racial and economic inequality. Workman taught me to prioritize social and environmental justice.

Can you describe a recent effort that you are proud of working on?

I’ve been working with a group of “accidental activists,” as they call themselves, in Cortez, a rural town in southwestern Colorado. This small but fierce group is made up of mostly retiree-age community members -- landowners, business owners and teachers – who are upset with the way oil and gas development have impacted their air quality, water, and way of life around their homes over the past few decades.

I’ve had the opportunity to become friends with many of these individuals, and together we’ve been rallying the community to work with land managers towards more community-focused oil and gas leasing processes. Our efforts are prevailing and we're well on our way to protecting Mesa Verde National Park from increased oil and gas drilling around its edges, and the community as a whole from more traffic, noise, and light pollution from industrial development.

But more than the policy gains we’ve achieved, I’m continually inspired by the people who have committed so deeply to a cause they believe in and continually demonstrate the best qualities we see in community organizers. They are inclusive and respectful of all kinds of people and ideas, are driven by a deep-seeded passion for protecting their natural environment and their neighbors, and take care of each other even in the hard moments. I am glad to work alongside them to create positive change in the southwest.

What sustains you?

I find a lot of joy in the act of building and being part of a community. When I am most upset, or exhausted, I push myself to find a friend or coworker to spend time with or I make an effort to attend a community event. That sense of interconnectedness is deeply comforting to me; I try to cultivate it as often as I can.

I also spend a lot of time in nature, even if it’s just jogging down my street with an eye towards the clouds or sitting in the local public park. Often times I get so stuck in my own head, wrapped up in worry, stress, and cyclical thinking. But being outdoors, moving around, spending time with friends -- all these things help shake me loose of the negativity or looping thoughts and remember to be grateful. Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” is a great inspiration to me, as are Edward Abbey’s thoughts on being a “part-time crusader.”

Q&A with Natasha Hale: Tipping the scale of fairness toward tribal communities

Flora Zhang — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 01:07:14 +0000

Proposed area for Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. (Photo Credit: Adriel Heisey)

Natasha Hale is Native America Program manager for the Grand Canyon Trust, which works to protect the air, water, and wildlife of the Grand Canyon. This is the sixth Q&A in a weeklong series celebrating Earth Day 2016.

How did you become involved with the environment cause?

Growing up in Twin Lakes, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation, I saw inequality around me and in neighboring towns. All the work I’ve done – from journalism, politics, philanthropy, to conservation work – is about playing a small role in helping to tip the scale toward what’s fair and just.

Who have inspired you along the way?

China Ching, a program officer with the Christensen Fund, is changing the way big funders think about Native American communities and their role within conservation. She’s a bridge between philanthropy and cultural understanding of native communities.

Heather Fleming, CEO of Catapult Design, is addressing climate change and injustice through her pragmatic work as a social entrepreneur and design engineer. She’s making an impact in developing countries and bringing her amazing network to projects in tribal communities.

I admire these two women because they are committed to their profession and have a strong work ethic. They inspire me to work harder!

Can you describe a recent effort that you are proud of working on?

It’s been personally and professionally gratifying to work closely with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Utah Dine Bikeyah board. I had the opportunity to help bring together five tribal governments around the vision of protecting a culturally important landscape of 1.9 million acres in southeastern Utah.

The Coalition is calling on the federal government to dedicate this land as a national monument. The proposed “Bears Ears National Monument” would involve strong co-management by our Native nations. This vision is an assertion of our right as tribal people to access public lands and sustain our traditions, songs, prayers and identity.

What is one message you would most want to tell world leaders?

We can learn from the wisdom and values of Native communities around the world, especially in face of the global environmental crisis. We can be inspired by their simple and profound lives.

What sustains you?

Chilling with my husband, puppies, friends and family are a constant reminder of what’s real in life. I’m happiest when I’m with them, no matter what we are doing together. Going to ceremonies, reading, hiking the Colorado Plateau, camping, fishing and riding horses makes my heart happy and keeps me energized and inspired.

What do you hope can be achieved in the next decade?

The staff and boards of conservation organizations need to be a true reflection of our diverse society. I’d love to see both the conservation community and philanthropic community make a more concerted effort and take a more open-minded approach to breaking the “green ceiling.”

My hope is that the Bears Ears movement, and intermediaries like the Colorado Plateau Foundation, can serve as a catalyst for a paradigm shift in how the broader conservation community understands, supports and funds environmental projects.

Q&A with Walter Figueiredo De Simoni: It’s good to be a hippie and a heartless capitalist

Flora Zhang — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:09:26 +0000

Brazil is working on reducing air pollution. (Photo Credit: Daniel Hardman, CC By 2.0)

Walter Figueiredo De Simoni is program officer at the Institute for Climate and Society, which funds nonprofits working on climate policies in the power, transport and waste sectors in Latin America. This is the fifth Q&A in a weeklong series celebrating Earth Day 2016.

How did you become involved with the environment cause?

Having grown up in the countryside in Brazil, I was always interested in environmental issues. I remember how the Kyoto Protocol was a big part of the international climate debate in the early 2000s. It was also the topic of several of my high school academic projects. During college, the more I understood about development, the more I realized that environmental issues would be the defining challenge of my generation.

I tried to balance my economics degree with a major in environmental studies, which quickly turned me into the “hippie” of my economics discussions and the “heartless capitalist” of the environmental ones. This actually puts me in a good position to understand both sides of the debate and bridge the gap.

Who has inspired you along the way?

My father worked in the mining industry his entire career. His field is practically the poster child for disaster. In spite of that, he paid attention to environmental and social issues every step of the way. Watching him from an early age, it never crossed my mind that economic development, environmental protection, and social issues were a trade-off. He really took his work to heart, made some “unpopular” (or perhaps unorthodox) decisions that prioritized local development and transparency, and still remained a successful private sector leader.

He showed me how good leadership can change a field. While he was CEO, the mining company was elected the most sustainable company in Brazil. If a mining company can achieve that, anything is possible.

Can you describe a recent effort that you are proud of working on?

The work I’ve done since joining the Institute for Climate and Society has been incredibly rewarding. Working on urban mobility is a way to make climate change a more concrete issue, since it affects people’s economic opportunities and access to healthy air quality and safety.

I enjoy bringing institutions from different sectors with different outlooks together to find solutions to common goals. Bringing technical institutions together with local advocates has been particularly interesting. Both sides benefit greatly from these interactions, making technical work more impactful and advocacy more legitimate.

I also enjoy supporting budding initiatives in important areas, such as the pedestrian and the bicycle movements. These people are passionate, knowledgeable and want to build a better city. It feels like a great privilege to be able to support them through grants, convening key players, and facilitating networking efforts.

What is one message you would most want to tell world leaders?

It’s not very poetic or romantic, but I would urge government leaders to try to better understand human behaviors. We bet too highly on our ability to make rational decisions, and we keep getting disappointed by the results. Climate change is a classic example of this pitfall: We slowly walk towards a somber future, and yet, as a society we do not make structural changes to how we live. This irrationality is present everywhere, from the way we eat, to the way we drive, to the way we consume materials goods.

So when you are building national policies, using game-changing technologies, or financing massive projects, think about whether you are making those decisions based on how people should react, rather than on how they will react. It seems like splitting hairs, but it really makes all the difference.

What sustains you?

I have been lucky enough to work on climate change issues in various different roles. I worked as a consultant, doing corporate strategy work for different sectors, from oil to cattle. I worked as a policymaker for the state of Rio de Janeiro. Now I am a grantmaker, working closely with numerous civil society organizations with a focus on urban mobility.

I have been able to look at the same issue from different lens and that has kept things interesting. Climate change is complex and the solutions must come from a combination of public, private and social efforts. Seeing that there are many people working toward a common goal and that each piece is a part of the puzzle keeps me excited about things to come.

What do you hope can be achieved in the next decade?

I have very high hopes for a future where societies are just, equitable and sustainable. The roadmap to this future will take us through deep cultural shifts, a reevaluation of our current consumption model and structural changes. To get there, we need to deploy accessible and affordable solutions for everyone. As long as a sustainable future takes considerable personal sacrifice, we will not be able to make enough changes in time to avoid broader and more permanent damage.

Q&A with Rue Mapp: Inspiring African-American leadership in the great outdoors

Flora Zhang — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 23:20:07 +0000

Outdoor Afro's 2016 leadership team in Yosemite National Park. (Photo Credit: Courtesy of Outdoor Afro)

Rue Mapp is founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, an organization that promotes African-American leadership and participation in nature. This is the fourth Q&A in a weeklong series celebrating Earth Day 2016.

How did you become involved with the environment cause?

I created Outdoor Afro as a blog in 2009 to connect African Americans with nature. It was inspired by my own upbringing on a ranch about 100 miles north of Oakland, California. We grew our own food and raised the animals we ate. We were self-sustaining with our cows and pigs and a bountiful garden. As a child, I found endless adventures outside. I rode my bike on country roads and explored the creek.

When I grew up, I wanted to stay connected to the outdoors. But whenever I went to the parks and particularly to wilderness areas, I rarely saw people who looked like me. I started the blog as a project to make those connections. I wanted more people to experience the kind of opportunities that I had, and the benefits of physical and emotional wellbeing that come with spending time in nature. I wanted to find ways to get that conversation started.

Who have inspired you along the way?

President Barack Obama is a huge inspiration. Less than a year of starting the blog, I got an invitation to go to the White House and meet with the nation’s leading conservationists to talk about the future of outdoor engagement. It was incredibly rewarding to be in a space with people who have devoted their lives to getting people outdoors and protecting our public parks. They were eager to hear about my experiences and perspectives. To this day, the people I met at that event are some of my most valued and trusted colleagues.

My father is also a great inspiration. He was a cowboy who left Texas’ Jim Crow South and came to California, partly to escape blatant and unbridled racism. He brought with him his passion for the outdoors and nature, and took a chance by buying a ranch in northern California. He cultivated the land and raised animals on the side. The ranch is still with our family.

Another inspiration is Carolyn Finney, a professor of cultural geography. When I told her about starting Outdoor Afro, she took my hand and said that there are so many people out there who will identify with my mission. She is a great mentor and helped shepherd me into networks of people with similar passions and interests. Her support means a lot to me.

Can you describe a recent effort that you are proud of working on?

I’m proud of the Outdoor Afro leadership team, now in its fifth year. We were able to create a network of African-American men and women, including attorneys, accountants, teachers and real estate agents, who love connecting with nature. We are training more than 60 leaders who are tasked with getting people outdoors and prioritizing our national parks.

It’s been very fulfilling to watch the people in our network serve as leaders. Often times, great outdoor leaders aren't the ones who have been groomed for leadership in their careers or gone through outdoor leadership certifications and trainings. The best leader is not necessarily the executive, manager, outdoor expert, or mountaineer. He might be a garbage man who loves spending time outdoors and wants to help others connect in the same way.

What is one message you would most want to tell world leaders?

We need a measure of atonement and an awareness that access to our national parks for so long was denied to many people of color in our country. Now is the time for healing and reimagining our national parks to reflect all the groups of people that make up America. Now is the time for government leaders to link arms with organizations like Outdoor Afro that are successful in raising awareness about inclusion and diversity. We need all hands on deck as climate change affects all of us.

What sustains you?

I love my work so much that I probably work too much. You’re never going to hear about us in the middle of a fight. We are not on a battlefield. We are focused on sharing this love of the outdoors with people around the country. You cannot help but be inspired by that. I’m also inspired by the leaders around me.

What do you hope can be achieved in the next decade?

The nonprofit sector can learn a lot from the private sector about staying relevant and how to reflect the rich diversity of our nation. You see more diverse leadership in the private sector and a lot less hesitation around the value of diversity as a business case. The nonprofit and environmental field can make significant strides in this direction.