Jonathan Lewis

"You absolutely have to be comfortable with ambiguity....one of the unique and wonderful things about working in social innovation is that there is very little precedent for the roles that people are taking on," says Jessamyn Lau, the Peery Foundation Program Officer.

The Peery Foundation (full disclosure: I...

Of late, researchers and columnists have been hand-wringing about the alleged lack of civic-mindedness of the millennial generation. Don't buy it.

With millennials poised to comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2014, I am unabashedly optimistic. In fact, I can't wait. Saul Garlick is...

Being a social entrepreneur is tough work. Money hard to come by. Most before you have failed. Even your own family doubts your mental health.

The bracing happy talk at social investment conferences and cheerleading predictions about social investment capital poised to flood into the developing world begs for...

If The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable were not already taken as a renown book title, I would have used it to name my on-camera iOnPoverty conversation with Akaya Windwood.

Think I'm batty? Check it out yourself:

Improbably for a world of avoided candor, Akaya is a social justice truth-builder.

Akaya is the CEO of the Rockwood Leadership Institute. She trains nonprofit leaders, empowering them with the personal tools to take their organizations to new heights. She is a one woman social change movement.

The world of social change is a miasma of myths, hero/heroine fables, hidden failures, and puffed-up origin stories. At economic opportunity conferences and anti-poverty gatherings we bow to civility, pass out compliments, succumb to herd think and sip the Kool-Aid of convention. Rare are the voices to challenge the charlatans.

I'm as guilty as the next person. It is exhausting work. Akaya embraces it with the grace of a swan and the special insights of a black woman.

In her most formative childhood days, Akaya was one of just two black elementary school children "used" to desegregate an all-white school. I can't even imagine what that was like, but Akaya learned, and now teaches, that "isolation is one of the worst things we can do to each other as humans. So much is lost when we cut each other off."

Rejection is personal and hard, she acknowledges. And, the curative counsel: "You are not your ideas." Don't let rejection diminish your worth as a human. If rejected, she asks, "What are you learning? What meaning are you making of this?"

For these times, Akaya applauds many and multiple change-maker paths. "We inherently like order, but it's all falling apart and I think that's terrific," she rejoices. The takeaway: Flexibility is essential. In her words, social change opportunities call for "purposeful, risky action."

You just know that taking her "What moves your heart? What makes you light up?" advice is solid and sound. Her twinkling eyes, nurturing smile and smart charm are enveloping and encouraging, but with her strength she is pressing you to change yourself while changing the world.

I trust her. I listen to her. I try to see all of her -- to let her know she can safely be all of who she is. And, I take her advice (well, most of it). Isn't that pretty much what any friendship, but especially a friendship fixed on reinventing the future, is all...

Feeling somewhat disingenuous, I purposely asked Keely Stevenson, CEO of social impact fund Bamboo Finance, a dim-witted question. My feigned ignorance got us to the answer you need to know. See what you think:

Keely reminds of a hopeful lesson: For many of us, economic justice work is triggered at any early age and continues over a lifetime. Simple steps lead to big change.

For me, wearing a civic rights button in the '60s. For Keely, learning about life from the dying. Keely's first social change step: Hospice volunteer.

Hospice volunteering taught her basic, boring and vital life and business skills: How to listen to others, the value of customer service, the absolute necessity of organized filing systems, answering phones professionally and with a warming personality. "There's no replacement for that kind of 'normal' skill-building," Keely told me.

Her academic studies did not begin at a prestigious university. Not even close. She worked her way through a California community college and eventually earned an Oxford University MBA.

Along the way, Keely interned at the Acumen Fund, consulting with social enterprises as varied as an anti-malaria bednet manufacturer and the Royal Bafokeng Nation on economic development policy. At one point she was the very first employee of the influential Skoll Foundation (founded by eBay founder Jeff Skoll to advance social entrepreneurship).

Most impressively, she never quits on either her mission or herself. Upending convention, for Keely the two are inseparable.

She told me that she is a better leader when she takes care of her personal health. She recently lost 90 pounds.

Talking about her modest beginnings as a young teenager ("Ghetto Keely" she calls herself), she remembers that one of her close friends was murdered during a neighborhood basketball game. "Either I could be angry and sullen, or I could try to change things," she recalls.

Keely's entire life is about hard work - an often overlooked, but no-brainer, achievement attribute for social change agents. Commitment to cause, capacity to listen and compassion to share are the three C's on Keely's path forward. Focused hard work kept her on that path and we are all the better for...

Wall Street is facing a recruiting problem, reports the New York Times. The latest reminder that big banks are corrosive for careers of conscience comes from a NY Times op-ed piece by former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith who sharply describes a "toxic and destructive" workplace.

A white-haired black woman and a bald white man walk into a bar...OK, so I don't actually know any bar room jokes about white-haired black women, bald white men or any combination thereof.

What do a white-haired black woman and a bald white man really have in common? Both...

Let's face it. A tremendous amount of anti-poverty work is boringly unglamorous.

No, I am not referring to the blistering drudgery of building a school wall by hand or digging a ditch hard-packed soil for a new village water pipe. Community-based actions in a distant land, after all, can...

For 24 years, the Social Venture Network (SVN) has been pushing back against the received wisdom of American commerce. SVN members are building better, smarter businesses with multiple bottom lines: profits, planet, people.

Before Occupy Wall Street, there was SVN. Before impact investing and social entrepreneurship, there...

Last week's third annual Opportunity Collaboration (Ixtapa, Mexico) opened with my thoughts for a shared vision at social change conferences:

Greetings, Fellow Delegates.

At the Opportunity Collaboration, we are -- first and foremost -- pragmatists. In every conversation we are aware that the root causes of economic...

The 2011 Opportunity Collaboration is convening this week in Ixtapa, Mexico. Expectations are high.

Last year's Opportunity Collaboration was, by all accounts, over-the-top successful. But, what does that really mean?

For sure, it means more than my personal sense of accomplishment. I founded it in 2009, but...

We make it waaaay too easy for economic development gurus and market fundamentalists to naively hype the marketplace as a cure-all for poverty. Surely, after 10,000 years of mixed market behavior, we know better.

After all, even after the Industrial Revolution, economic globalization, the Information Age, and on and...

In important ways, the United States is a surrogate Latin American country.

The U.S. Hispanic population hovers around 48 million. In absolute numbers, only Mexico ranks higher. By 2050, the U.S. Hispanic population will be 132 million.

Consider income and wealth gaps. According to the...

Last week, the world's super achievers convened in New York for three days to celebrate their shared global citizenship as well as their accomplishments in solving the world's toughest problems. Heads of state, corporate titans, nonprofit CEOs, celebrity journalists, Hollywood stars and academic thought leaders rubbed elbows, received awards and...

Once a year, I teach a course at the University of California Blum Center for Developing Economies, but all year long I am on the lookout for good books to assign my students. I just finished a winner.

The Social Entrepreneur's Handbook is by Rupert Scofield,...

Meet Sakena Yacoobi.

She is a heroine of mine. She is also a heroine to hundreds of thousands of Afghan girls.

Sakena heads the Afghan Institute of Learning in Kabul, Afghanistan.

When I met Sakena, she was already a widely-acclaimed rock star for social change. As...

If you favor opportunity and upward mobility for the downtrodden, the disenfranchised and the deprived, then you know government is the ultimate program at scale. Want to go big? Go government.

Sure, the private sector innovates best, but only government has the power and resources to effectuate universal compliance. The...

Hidden deep inside the layered mystery of how markets work and the marketplace allocates resources, capitalism innovates to generate jobs making faster computers and deadly cigarettes. Innovation brings us the electric car and bigger bombs. It brings us progress and it brings us poverty.

"We are on the verge of...

If you think Portland-based Mercy Corps is an air ambulance service, a religious sect or a merciful military organization, you would be wrong.

Mercy Corp -- operating in 40 countries, employing about 4,000 people -- annually tackles the world's toughest challenges: agricultural development; children's survival; citizen involvement;...

We all know collaboration is a good idea. In politics, call it compromise. In business, call it a strategic alliance. Whatever you want to call it, teamwork produces results.

Examples range from innovation centers like Silicon Valley to artistic centers like turn-of-the-century Paris. Whether buying the latest computer or...