The NYU Reynolds Program Blog

Big business in America has evolved over the last 40 years from an engine of growth and prosperity to a wealth concentrating and environment destroying force that writes its own rules and will do almost anything to ensure its survival. Can we recapture the potential of business to create a sustainable and equitable future? Hollender will discuss these questions and more at his lecture at NYU Reynolds on February 7, 2012. This event is free and open to the public.

By Jeffrey Hollender

I can't repeat these sad facts often enough:

• Just 1% of Americans own 40-50% of the wealth. Annual income for the wealthiest soared from $4 million in 1974 to $35 million on average in 2007.
• The richest 400 Americans average $270 million in income and pay only 18% in federal taxes. In 1955, the country's most affluent made far less money and paid 51 percent of their income in taxes.
• Inequality in America is worse than Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen.
• Tax rates on executive pay, have been cut in half since 1970.

Don't be fooled by declining unemployment numbers, strong automobile sales, or the fact that luxury brands like Tiffany's and Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) are making money hand over fist - our economy is still in a terrible mess. And we need to act NOW to fix it

The reason America's financial house is in such disorder is four-fold:

• First, we simply lack a credible strategy for creating a sustainable and equitable economy.


• Second, and related to point number one, we have allowed our largest corporations to sit on gigantic piles of cash (accumulated by some as a result of paying little or no income tax) rather than invest in the research and product innovation that is essential if we are ever going to hire more workers and maintain our global position of economic leadership.


• Third, our economy is being held hostage by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's old economy industries - from oil, gas and coal to banks and brokerage firms - which evade corporate income taxes and live on government subsidies.


• Fourth, as a nation, we are consistently failing to do what citizens in places like Egypt and Tunisia have done and exercise our democratic right to fight against this unacceptable state of affairs.

Last year, I wrote about the loss of the nation's third largest manufacturer of solar technology: Evergreen, based in Devens, Massachusetts, shut down its brand new plant, laid off 800 workers and left for China. And there's the real truth: the erosion of much of the manufacturing foundation of our economy continues unabated.

New jobs are appearing, but in all the wrong places. The Bureau of Labor projects that in the next decade we'll create 394,000 new food service and preparation jobs earning an average of $16,430. Lowe's Home Improvement stores announced not long ago that it was adding 8,000-10,000 jobs for weekend sales associates and "assistant" store managers while firing 1,700 store managers.

While it's unquestionably true America will never be able to compete when it comes to many sectors of manufacturing, a low-wage, service-based economy that specializes in flipping hamburgers rather than building solar panels, imports its food from China and manages health care costs by having X-rays read in India rather than investing in preventative and alternative health care providers is an economy I wouldn't want to risk my financial future on. To paraphrase Bloomberg Business, who would invest in an economy that lost $2 trillion last year and has a negative net-worth of $44 trillion?

And we keep making matters worse.

As 2012 came to a close, so did two federal tax incentives for the solar and wind energy industries that have powered their explosive growth. The expiration of the incentive tax credit - used primarily by solar - and the production tax credit for wind will cost tens of thousands of jobs and slow the nation's transition to carbon-free power.

The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that 37,000 jobs will not be created in 2012 as a result of the cash grant program expiring. The American Wind Energy Association, predicted that an extension of the production tax credit, or PTC, would create 54,000 jobs over the next four years.

So what's the solution? Here's a 10-point plan to get us back on the right track:

1. End all corporate financial subsidies. The renewable energy industry will do just fine if we stop subsidizing oil and gas with billions and billions of subsidies.
2. Institute a corporate flat tax with no exceptions.
3. Close the door on offshore corporate tax shelters.
4. Provide $5 billion of capital for start-up businesses, small businesses and worker-owned companies that provide livable wages and offers sustainable products or services.
5. Reduce payroll taxes permanently. Offset this with a tax increase for the wealthiest 1% of Americans and an elimination of the tax deduction on second homes.
6. Decrease the defense budget by 25% over the next 10 years and invest 100% of those funds in education, research and infrastructure.
7. Target three industries in which America can assume global leadership and align our federal investment in education and R&D in support of those industries.
8. Institute a tax on carbon and increase the gasoline tax to fund our federal investment in the three chosen industries.
9. Mandate over the next three years women make up 50% of the directors of all public and private companies.
10. Publicly fund all elections, allow online voting, get rid of the electoral college and let the public directly cast their vote for their chosen candidate.

About Jeffrey Hollender
Jeffrey Hollender is the founder of Jeffrey Hollender Partners, a business strategy consulting firm and the co-founder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, which he built into a leading brand known for its authenticity, transparency, and progressive business practices. For more than 25 years, he has helped millions of Americans make green and ethical product choices, beginning with his bestselling book, How to Make the World a Better Place, a Beginner's Guide. He went on to author five additional books, including The Responsibility Revolution and Planet Home. He is the Board Chair of the Greenpeace Fund US and a board member of Verite as well as the co-founder and Board Chair of the American Sustainable Business Council. Please visit www.jeffreyhollender.com to learn more and visit Jeffrey's blog. He can also be found on Twitter (@jeffhollender) and on Facebook.

By Nathan Maton

What do games have anything to do with learning? We spoke to nationally recognized researchers, teachers, game-based schools and companies that develop educational games and asked how they see games fitting into the education landscape.

IT'S ABOUT INTERACTION, NOT ISOLATION. "At the end of the day, a game is successful only if each individual gamer has an interaction with it that makes him or her want to come back for more," says Nt Etuk, CEO of Dimension U, an educational games company.  "Even the massively multi-player games [such as World of Warcaft] are successful only because they have tapped into a million individual need to interact, or to compete, or to form groups."

GAMES CAN HELP STRUGGLING STUDENTS.  "[Games] don't cause behavior problems but eliminate them," Ananth Pai says. Pai teaches students from second to fifth grade in Parkview/Center Point Elementary school in Maplewood, Minnesota. Pai took the time to develop a game-based curricula, and says he's seen the rewards of his efforts.

In his gamified classroom, students who performed below proficiency contributed the most to the double-digit growth in achievement. "These are the students that make up the whole education reform debate. Gamification helps them from falling through the ever widening achievement gap as they move forward from third grade," he said.

IT'S HIGHLY PERSONALIZED. With the best games, the player is challenged at exactly the right level and in the right way to keep the player playing. "Maybe the question we need to ask is what about games causes youth to engage that our traditional approach to education lacks," says Brian Alspach, Executive Vice President of E-Line Media, an educational games publisher well known for their game Gamestar Mechanic. "Perhaps applying games to classes is hard because they work on a different educational philosophy than our current education system. Classes are designed to get the lowest common denominator engaged, while games are an interactive, 'lean-forward' medium in which players can progress at their own pace while trying and failing in a safe environment. A well-designed game offers an intricate balance of challenges and rewards that continually pushes players to, and then beyond, the limits of their knowledge and skill."

GAMES ARE NOT ALWAYS THE MAIN POINT. Quest To Learn, a school led by renowned game designer Katie Salen that integrates games across all classes and subjects, is one of the leading examples of how games fit into schools. Yet even there, according to Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Director of Integrated Learning, none of their teachers teach exclusively through games.  Even when they do use games, they're frequently not what you'd imagine.

"Games are very flexible and can be used in different ways," Rufo-Tepper says. "It's not like they're in the classroom playing a video game or playing cards everyday but there is this larger contextual experience that is game like. We use the word 'game-like' a lot instead of 'game.'"

She gives an example of how the school's seventh-grade literacy class, in which they read a book called Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, about New York City during the American Revolution. Students are asked to write about the different types of power represented in the book, to give literary examples, and to write a literary essay with multiple drafts. Sounds like a typical English class, except the small twist here is that Oprah Winfrey has "visited" them in a video created by game designers and the teacher, and asked them to join her book club. "There's a fictionalized game-like experience and the kids know that it isn't really Oprah but it is all couched in this game like experience," she said.

GOOD EDUCATIONAL GAMES ARE DIFFICULT TO DEVELOP. "The fact is, many of the games out there suck," said Ralph Vacca, a doctoral student at New York University's Educational Communications and Technology Program. "They don't tackle genuine learning needs as teachers see them, they don't address practical limitations, as teachers see them, and they don't live up to the hype around them, as teachers see them." Those who design games need to recognize the "logistical, organizational, and cultural obstacles teachers have to deal with that underlie lots of perceived 'resistance' to innovations in the classroom." For busy teachers, spending days or weeks prepping to use a game in just one or two classes is not the best use of time, he said.

Even Quest To Learn, which hopes to be a leading example in implementing games in schools in game design, admits to the challenge of developing useful games. They've pulled together the best and brightest of both the teaching and game-design worlds and carefully thought through their plan. Even so, some of their games, particularly in their first year, were frequently over-designed and over-complicated.

"We'll have designed a board game where we realize that it has taken 45 minutes of class for the kids just to understand how to play it," Rebecca says.  "And we'll have said we'll take 15 minutes to explain it and then they'll play around and then we're in a classroom. Forty-five minutes have gone by and the kids are still trying to figure out how to play it." Add to that the fact that it was a Friday, by the time student return on Monday, "they've forgotten everything that you've talked about."

BY: Mike Jones

One of the more troubling aspects of a top-down system of governance is that all too often those who are impacted the most by federal or state legislation are the ones with the least input in its creation.  I was recently asked by the Coalition for Residential Education (CORE) to speak on a Congressional panel along with several other young people to push back against this issue and, hopefully, give those people at the top a little advice from those of us at the bottom.

The impetus for our visit to Capital Hill is the recent push to defund residential/group home care in several states across the country by reducing the number of minors that are placed into these programs. The foster care system, while still the first stop for young people that can no longer live with their families due to abuse, neglect, or issues beyond their control, is overcrowded and many youth end up bouncing to multiple different foster care placements before either turning 18 or becoming emancipated minors. Reform is needed but not all reform is created equal.

In the Fall of 2010, the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth released a white paper concerning the state of youth in the U.S. Child Welfare System. For the most part, the points provided are sensible and reflective of what welfare advocates have been pushing for years. For example, proposals to create a "foster care bill of rights" and to "monitor the use of psychotropic drugs" administered to young people in foster care are sensible and long overdue. Other parts however, such as a proposal to decrease funding to "congregate care" (Group homes) after a one-time 90 day period following the placement of a minor, and to eliminate that option for anyone under the age of 16, is raising eyebrows among advocates for residential education like CORE.

Over the past decade, states such as Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina have made reducing the number of youth in residential or group home care an essential part of their plans for Child Welfare Reform. The motivation behind this is two-fold. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that foster care placement, in which a minor lives with relatives or "qualified adults" that they are not related to, is preferred to placement in a group home. On the other, more suspicious hand, the motivating factor for states and a growing number of organizations in the field (such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation) is that foster care just costs less; in fact it costs 2/3 less than a comparable group home placement.

With this in mind, you might be asking yourself why these wildly expensive and supposedly less preferable group homes exist in the first place and you would no doubt find company in those higher echelons of policy-making that feel the same way. However, these institutions have been around for decades for a reason, there is a real and continuing need for them. There are approximately half a million young people in the child welfare system and although it would be nice to think they all have support networks of people to take care of them at a moments notice, that's simply not the case. Group homes may not be the best first option but if given the chance they can be a close second for thousands of young people across the country.

This was what I had in mind when, with the support of an amazing group of young people bearing similarly positive experiences with group home care, we made our way to Capitol Hill. The speakers, with ages ranging from 18 to 33 all gave incredibly moving testimony about how when the traditional foster care system failed them and they were placed into residential care, they found themselves in a community of young people just like themselves and were given a stable environment to live and ultimately thrive.

One by one, each speaker rattled off the ways in which a residential placement option, while not the ideal choice, eventually ended up being the right choice for them. The message of the event was clear; a monolithic system of care in which a few policy makers decide that foster care and foster care alone is the right decision for the 500,000 minors in the system is not an acceptable solution to this national problem. Defunding residential group home programs while knowing that there are simply not enough foster care families to meet the needs of displaced youth will further add to a population of transient minors in the foster care system. Maybe the top should listen a little more closely to what's going on down at the bottom.

By Hannah Oppenheimer

At 10:30 am on a Saturday morning in large Latin American city, I was sitting with a group of American students as we waited for a bus that would take us 40 minutes away to volunteer. I was curious to meet the kids we would be playing with that day. We were only told one thing about them--that they lived in severe poverty. Our job was simply to play with them--soccer, arts and crafts, board games. Despite the obvious language difference, I imagined it would be a lot similar to some of my teaching and babysitting jobs.

And in fact, it was. Just like my jobs in the US, the kids couldn't seem to keep the paint from spilling all over their clothes or the picnic tables. The boys were competing for who knew the most bad words and the girls were trying to lie about how many refills they'd already had of fruit punch. There was one adorable quiet boy, as there always is. But he warmed up to me, as they always do. And as usual, I had fun escaping the adult world to sit with young friends, who told me their dreams while I braided their hair or asked them to tell me the stories behind their drawings.

The only difference between this and my other jobs was the camera flashing. At the beginning of the day, while we were waiting for the bus, another American volunteer turned to me and said, "I just can't wait to take photos with the kids today. We will look so cute in the pictures! And we'll look really helpful, too!" For those who aren't fluent in modern American dialect, that translates to, "Putting this on Facebook will make me look like such a good person!"

But she wasn't out of the ordinary. In fact, the organization in charge of the event held an informal orientation on the bus ride, in which they literally told us it was okay to take a few "Facebook photos." They said, "We're all guilty of wanting our photo taken with poor kids." The volunteers were not, however, permitted to take photos of the neighborhood because they said, "This isn't a zoo."

I don't know if it was a zoo or not. But poverty certainly seems to be the most fashionable tourist attraction for travel abroad. And anyway, how is taking a bunch of Americans on a bus to play with poor foreign kids any different than taking them to a petting zoo? It's mutually beneficial, sure. The animals get their feed, the people get their photo. Not only do they feel good, but they look good, too.

But sustainable? There certainly are plenty of volunteer abroad programs that work. But I always worry more specifically about the child-centered volunteer programs that run on a flow of international volunteers. It's a great experience for everyone involved to be exposed to global cultures. But in some cases, a global mindset isn't in the bare necessities for the children actually receiving the services. Kids are complex and soak in everything, so they need neighborhood role models who consistently show up, who build relationships, who fuel local empowerment--not just kind-hearted foreigners with good intentions, in and out in a flash of the camera. 

Hannah Oppenheimer is a 2010 Reynolds Scholar at NYU's College of Arts & Science.  She is currently studying abroad in Buenos Aires.

by Annie Escobar 

This past summer, as part of our Reynolds Program Internship program, Patricia Schneidewind (a fellow Reynolds scholar) and I traveled to Bangladesh for nine weeks to document BRAC, the world's largest development organization's social justice initiatives.  Today, on the 100^th anniversary of International Women's Day we are launching Courage in the Heart, an online storytelling platform featuring the stories of 12 women who are radically changing the consensus about the value of women by organizing to demand their rights. Visit the site here: www.brac.net/courageintheheart

Mussamat struck us with her beauty from the moment we saw her. She greeted us with a brilliant smile, making me second guess if she was the woman we would be interviewing. I didn't expect someone who had acid thrown on her face (by her husband after he insisted her family pay a higher dowry) to be so full of life.  BRAC is now fighting her case in court to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Her interview was like many others. After convincing the inevitable crowd of interested neighbors to give us some space, we sat, just the three of us, in her courtyard. Ruhul, our good friend and translator, gave basic instructions about what our project was and then basically just told her to talk and then left (the women felt more at ease without the male presence).

Mussamat began speaking. She spoke quietly at first and then her voice developed a strength and a rhythm.  For long moments she stared into the distance, letting a loud heaviness settle into the spaces between her words. My limited Bangla meant that I could only understand bits and pieces, but it was as if my body could feel it all. So much is communicated through the face, the voice, and the breath. My heart felt compressed and breathing became difficult. When she was finally done, half an hour later, we quietly shut the camera off and all held each other and cried. And then, in a moment that is still profoundly humbling, Mussamat took her scarf and slowly, gently wiped the tears and sweat from my face. It is a moment I draw strength from every day.

Suddenly, a feeling of lightness came over us and we all started cracking up. We laughed and danced in that courtyard until it was time to leave.

The last image of her in my mind is of her beaming, holding her daughter, sending us away with a giant wave. As we drove away, I asked Ruhul if he heard her say how old she was.

"22," he answered.

The same age as Patricia.

When we left her house that day I made myself a promise. That I would make sure that we were not the only ones carrying that testimony.

To me, our experience in Bangladesh was a testament to the power of solidarity and connectivity. With the help of the BRAC staff and Ruhul, we approached these women and incredibly, they let us into their lives and revealed with intimacy some of their most painful and proud moments. The compassion we tried to bring to our interviews hopefully contributed to the trust with which they revealed their stories, but I also think it was something else too. The last words that Julekha, a mother in Mymensingh whose daughter was raped and murdered, said to us were, "When you leave, tell everyone that you heard my story. I have told you everything. I want to feel justice." Many of the women seemed to see the camera as an amplifying tool for their testimony and they spoke out to their imagined audience on the other side of the camera. Now that audience is there, listening.

Today, a year after launching this project, Mussamat's, Julekha's and others' stories will be passed on. My hope is that these women and their stories can give others the inspiration to believe in their own strength and courage to confront injustice.

Visit www.brac.net/courageintheheart to see these stories. Carry them with you. And please, share this project with anyone you can.

Photo Credit Annie Escobar, ListeninPictures

By Nicholas Chan

I'm writing this from Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS), where our 12 inaugural Blue Engine Fellows are wrapping up their three-week training. The heat is sweltering on the non-air conditioned fourth floor of this public school building, but these folks are beyond intrepid.

Our 12 Fellows come from as far away as California (2,3), as nearby as Harlem and everywhere in between (Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, Massachussetts, Pennsylvania (2), New Jersey). They turned down opportunities at Teach For America, law school, and the National Institute of Health to work for $1200 a month (before taxes) in the US's most expensive city. Their day starts at 7:30am when high school students roll into WHEELS (where 90% of the students are Dominican and 90% of students are eligible for free lunch), into the day, into afterschool programming, and into the night as they prepare for their next 7:30am day. Nearly 200 applicants applied for the Blue Engine Fellowship and after a lengthy, 3-part application process, these 12 Fellows will pioneer Blue Engine's first year.

Blue Engine's mission is to harness the power of national service to advance educational excellence and equity - to help all students, regardless of background or income level, be not just eligible to go to college, but ready to graduate from college on time. The Fellows are an integral part of this - as Integrated Algebra teaching assistants for all 8th and 9th grade students, they supplement the work of WHEELS teachers by helping smaller groups of students master the material. In the future, Blue Engine will expand to other subjects, grades, schools, and cities, but for now, the program centers on Integrated Algebra classrooms at WHEELS. Blue Engine's theory of change is based on evidence that the strongest predictor of college success is the academic rigor of one's high school program. You read that right - your high school program (especially Integrated Algebra, which often determines whether students continue in higher math) is key to determining your college future. Many of our youth enter college woefully underprepared. After struggling in remedial classes (where they receive no credit), many drop out, several thousand dollars in debt. Blue Engine, with the help of our Fellows, was founded to meet this challenge head on.

The last stanza of Shel Silverstein's poem "The Little Blue Engine" (where the organization gets its name) reads "if the track is rough and the hill is tough, thinking you can just ain't enough". Some interpret this line cynically, but Blue Engine believes it has a positive message. Rather than merely telling students they can succeed in college, hard work and preparation is required before they even set foot on a college campus.

School starts on September 8th. The Fellows have worked together for only a little over 3 weeks. But they are clearly up to the challenge of preparing the youth of WHEELS to succeed in Integrated Algebra and beyond. Follow their journey through our website and our Facebook page.