Saving the World with Cash and Prizes

This is the story of a student-founded organization at my university. I won’t reveal their name, but the curious reader could quickly find it through an online search if they cared enough. The reason I’m focusing on this organization is not to criticize what they do. This is a bunch of extremely bright and passionate students doing courageous work. I’ve met with the founder of the organization and respect his drive. The organization is merely a conduit to reveal some of the strange happenings in the realm of higher education, particularly its craze for entrepreneurship.

The university's new marking campaign encourages students to market their "fearless ideas."

In 2011, a group of forward-thinking students noticed that their university dining hall was throwing away perfectly good food. Tons of it. They devised a plan to collect that food and donate it to local shelters. The plan was a resounding success, and soon they started an organization to systematically donate food that was otherwise destined for the dump. I’ll call the organization Save the Food, or StF, for the sake of clarity.

In a different era, one might consider StF a socially-conscious student club. It might even be labeled a form of community service. Over time, with a little financial backing from the university or a grant, it might grow into a thriving non-profit organization and serve many people in the community. As it turns out, StF has accomplished this latter objective. However, the path it took differs from markedly from what anyone in higher education would have predicted 5 years ago.

StF decided to call itself a “social enterprise” and harnessed the vast resources the university poured into entrepreneurship. They started entering business pitch competitions and winning cash and prizes. Between on campus and off-campus contests, the organization raked in around $40,000. In order to sell itself as an example of social entrepreneurship, StF had to carefully consider how it was incorporating concepts borrowed from business, namely scalability and sustainability. Scalability essentially refers to the ability of a company to move beyond the “mom and pop store” and grow into something that truly disrupts the market. In the case of social entrepreneurship, the goal is to address the underlying causes of problems in society. Sustainability is a cleverly phrased way of saying that they also earn income so that they can continue their work without recourse to handouts.

Innovation Fridays is a weekly program where students can meet with entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas.

Scalability was achieved by launching new chapters of StF at other colleges and universities. In order to respond to the need to be sustainable, they developed what they termed “income models” that involved selling food donation certifications to restaurants. Thus, being a social enterprise required commoditizing the service they were providing to the community. In fact, the community took a back seat to what the organization considered their true “customers”: donors. Ironically, the biggest donor of the organization—at $150,000—turned out to be the Sodexo Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the French multinational corporation. Sodexo specializes in food services and manages the dining halls of many universities. It has been subject to nine boycotts at campuses nationwide for the treatment of its employees and low wages.

By the measures of success employed in campus entrepreneurship, StF has been wildly successful. They have won numerous competitions and received national media attention. The university has become attuned to this success and, as part of its marketing campaign, displays StF in television commercials and on advertisements adorning the sides of city buses. The university is in the midst of rebranding itself as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, and StF perfectly suits its new brand vision. Accordingly, the university has provided StF with additional resources, including mentoring and office space. StF has become the poster child of the university’s entrepreneurship movement.

None of this has detracted from the organization’s main accomplishment, which is donating an unfathomable amount of food to local shelters. So, you might ask, what’s the problem? The first problem is that the organization’s success has been predicated on thriving in a prize-based entrepreneurial culture. They would not have been able to grow as quickly as they did without winning business pitch competitions. In order to win these competitions, the organization had to cater to the centers and judges that ran them. Most of these centers are housed in the business or engineering schools, and the judges are often wealthy alumni. Inevitably, in order to be competitive, the organization had to speak the language of business and spin what amounts to a non-profit organization into scalable, sustainable “social venture.”

Business pitch competitions contribute to and tap into the already highly competitive and consumer-driven culture at colleges and universities. They suggest that complex social problems can be solved with an iPhone app and channel student passion for addressing social ills and effecting change into the creation of a business whose benefits often accrue to individuals—and the university—just as much, if not more than, the community. It amounts to the gamification of student activism. In the new era, social problems aren’t solved through public institutions or policy change. That’s so 1990s. Instead of changing the system, students are encouraged to profit within it. And if they can make a job, not take a job, in the process, all the better.

There is very little recognition of the many tensions and ethical dilemmas that can arise in social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship itself is a concept laden with meanings and practices from the for-profit sector, only some of which are appropriate for a non-profit organization. Of course, the for-profit sector is also responsible for many of the social problems that organizations like StF are trying to solve, which is a tension no one seems to acknowledge. Lastly, there does not seem to be meaningful conversations about ethics of accepting money from foundations that acquired their wealth from questionable means. Should students be launching non-profit organizations with money from corporations that have shady track records?

The point is not that StF is evil. They have simply capitalized on what the university has provided and intelligently acted upon the cultural cues of America today. Entrepreneurship is sexy. Why become the local community organizer when you can be the Steve Jobs of food donation? I direct my critique and questions at my university and its abandonment of what I believe to be a more balanced and responsible approach to encouraging student activism. We may have cultivated an excellent poster child for our rebranding effort, but we may also be laying the groundwork for a generation who thinks the first step to saving the world is winning cash and prizes.

The Power of Proximity

There’s an old adage that says, “Distance makes the heart grow fonder.” People used to offer me this slice of unsolicited wisdom when I was in a long distance relationship. It was their way of introducing optimism into a difficult situation. My response was often to smile and nod—not because I agreed with them, but rather because I knew how rarely distance actually strengthens a relationship. In my case, distance was a constant challenge. It was an obstacle that we learned to overcome. Thankfully, we eventually found our way to the same city, and we’re still together today.

I share this personal reflection because, as someone who lives far from my family, I often think about distance around the holidays. It’s an almost inescapable part of this time of year. Friends are talking about travel plans over dinner. Post offices are bustling with business, as people hurry to ship gifts to loved ones. I even get a few out-of-state holiday cards. Most of us, it seems, contend with the fact that those who matter to us are not ideally located. We go to great lengths to throw ourselves back into their lives around December, even though we may not have seen or talked to them in months.

What this means, to me, is that when the festive lights come down and trees are carried to the curb, proximity once again governs our everyday relationships. Those who really know our story experience it with us in real-time. They are the people we turn to in times of need. They are our weekend plans. They are present not just for the milestones, but also for the pebbles that collectively constitute day-to-day life. For me, many of these relationships are with friends, some of whom I’ve only know for a few years.

We like to think that these people will be with us forever, and, if we’re lucky, they are. However, if either you or they move, the relationship fundamentally changes. Think of those high school or college friends who now live in a different city or state. They were a commanding part of our lives for four or more years. Yet without some sort of sustained, physical presence, the relationship is transformed into an occasional phone call, visit over the holidays, or Facebook status update.

There’s nothing remarkably new about this observation. The very definition of a relationship is that it involves at least two people relating to one other. Closeness makes the ability to relate all the easier. What intrigues me is that many people seem to increasingly think we are capable of overcoming distance with technology. We see Skype, Twitter, Facebook, FaceTime, and similar communication innovations as ways of connecting with people, irrespective of the space between us. In reality, technology will never be able to replace what can only be achieved by being there with someone. I’ve been thinking through a few reasons for this.

Skype and FaceTime are amazing applications, and the former, in particular, has been indispensable to me. When I travel abroad, it is the best way I can communicate with my wife. However, we do not greatly enjoy talking to screen projections, or putting up with frequent disconnections. We are able to tolerate Skype because we know it is a temporary fix. After a month, I return home, and Skype won’t be opened for another year or more. For those who use Skype to talk with loved ones in a more permanent way, it comes to function in much the same way as the telephone. Conversations may be frequent, even daily. And they are surely enhanced by the ability to see our friends or family members’ emotions. Nevertheless, at their core, these conversations are most often recaps of daily or weekly experience. In the process of explaining our lives to other people, we summarize, censor, and suffer from the inherent shortcomings of memory.

Twitter and Facebook offer even less in helping us overcome distance and maintain our relationships. Twitter is designed for rapid, regular bits of information. At its worst, Twitter is a conduit for vanity—a 21^st century journal that supplants introspection with spectacle. At its best, it is a tool of the 24-hour news machine: just consider how many Twitter handles the staff of The Huffington Post manage.

Facebook gives a sense of intimacy and knowledge about others. However, this intimacy is an illusion. What we share on Facebook is a carefully crafted version of ourselves.  Some even term our individual collection of “likes,” “shares,” and “posts” the “aspirational self”—not who we are, but who we desire to be. No matter what name you give it, our relationships on Facebook are shallow. As Malcolm Gladwell has correctly pointed out, such widely dispersed, loose connections are precisely the purpose of “The Social Network.” These days, I turn to Facebook to sate my thirst for information, not because I think it presents a viable alternative to in-person interaction.

This does not mean I intend to delete my Facebook account or stop using Skype. Rather, I advocate recognizing the limitations of technology, better valuing proximity to those who matter to us, and taking stock of the consequences of mobility. We need to think critically about what has caused us to be so distant from friends and family in the first place. It is sometimes the case that we have no control over our separation from others because of obligations or cruel circumstances. However, more often than not, it is the product of choices.

We live in a society in which it is common to move multiple times, often in search of proverbial greener pastures. Simply put, mobility is a defining feature of our generation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker stays at a job for 4.4 years. We hopscotch from city to city—job to job—and look to technology to help us feel close to the people that we left behind (or the people who left us). When it inevitably fails to live up to expectations, we fill the void by starting new relationships with people close to us. Relationships seem to fall into a cyclical pattern as we respond to frequent movement.

As I drive to my hometown for the holidays, making the seven-hour car trip to reinsert myself in the lives of my family members after months of being apart, I can’t help but think about how much of my life they have missed. How difficult it is to catch them up to speed, to help them understand my challenges and triumphs. I try not to get frustrated when they don’t know what I really do for a job, or can’t place the names of the new friends with whom I regularly spend time. All they know is what can be gleaned from social media and the synopsis I deliver over the telephone. Most importantly, I don’t blame them for the distance between us. I own that distance, and the decisions that created it.

From long car trips to holiday cards, there’s no doubt that we seasonally remember our roots, paying homage in December to all the people and places that feel like home. Perhaps instead of going to such great lengths to reconnect after frequent moves, or hoping technology can make physical distance irrelevant, we should simply pause: respect the power of proximity and give our roots time to sink in somewhere.