Why One Step Backwards Can Be Necessary for Progress to Occur
Shaiza Rizavi sees the world — American culture, politics and economics — from an outsider’s perspective. Raised in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, her family moved to Illinois when she was a...
View ArticleHow Encouraging People to Move on Sparks Innovation
As the host of the “TED Radio Hour” on NPR, Guy Raz examines what it means to be a human being (or “an upright, advanced primate,” as he puts it): how we love, grieve, judge, create, imagine, and...
View ArticleMeet The Educator Who Accurately Predicted Technology’s Potential to...
Elisabeth Stock founded PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit that leverages technology to transform teaching and learning in low-income communities, in 1999 — a time when the cloud was still in the...
View ArticleFor Education to Improve, Emotional Learning Must Be Emphasized
In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s...
View ArticleThis Professional Risk-Taker Explains Why Exceptional Leaders Aren’t Always...
In the early aughts, Annie Duke was an unbeatable poker player. At the very first World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in 2004, she brought home the trophy and a $2 million pot. Later, in...
View ArticleQuestioning How Society Is Constructed Is the Best Way to Enact Change
As a staff member working for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the mid 2000s, Tomicah Tillemann reported to now-Vice President Joe Biden and worked extensively with, he says with a...
View ArticleThere’s More to Innovation Than Asking ‘What’s Next?’
Omoju Miller, a self-described futurist (someone who studies the future’s possibilities), enjoys picturing tomorrow. As a Nigerian woman who settled in the Bay Area, she’s already torn down historical...
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How Do You Inspire Good in Others? Listen to Them
In 1969, long before running became a popular workout activity, George Hirsch completed his first marathon in Boston. The 26.2-mile race was the only one Hirsch had ever entered. Huffing to the finish...
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How Do You Keep the American Dream Alive? End the Digital Divide
More than one in five Americans don’t have access to the Internet. For the majority of the disconnected, the biggest issue is cost. As CEO of EveryoneOn, a nonprofit working to close the digital...
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The Visionary That’s Getting Everyone to the Table to Talk About Social Good
This February, on the exact same day, two governors from two very different states — Nikki Haley, a Republican in South Carolina, and Dan Malloy, a Democrat in Connecticut — both announced social...
View ArticleThanks to This Man’s Vision, 22,000 People Are No Longer Living in Poverty
A native San Franciscan, Daniel Lurie has witnessed his hometown change as two tech bubbles inflated, introducing “tremendous wealth” and sometimes crowding out those living, by contrast, in...
View ArticleWhy Cities Have the Unique Ability to Heal Themselves
At the Brookings Institution, one of America’s oldest think tanks, Alan Berube and his team of former politicos and wonkish academics are coming up with new solutions to age-old urban problems. As...
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This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter
As a resident of Weston, Conn., about two towns over from Newtown and the father of a first-grader, Don Kendall, Jr., was deeply affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But rather...
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How Do You Overcome the Persistent Problem of Finding and Retaining Teachers?
For much of the last decade, Jennifer Moses and her husband Ron Beller leapt across the pond, from America to Britain and back, picking up the best from each culture. Both former Goldman Sachs...
View ArticleHow Star Trek Is Inspiring Diversity in the Workplace
The recent tech boom inaugurated an age of invention, but NationSwell Council member Greg Gunn, who founded his own education technology software startup, has been “frustrated” by the sector’s lack of...
View ArticleTo Find Success with Data-Driven Education Reform, You’ve Got to Make It...
When Enoch Woodhouse III surveys the state of education reform today, he sees the same ineffective battles duplicated nationwide. Sure, there are more reformers than a decade ago, he notes, but most...
View ArticleThe Newest Way to Solve the Country’s Biggest Problems
What if there was a way to invest in a nonprofit and earn a financial return based on impact? What if donors made performance-based donations that catalyzed investment capital and unlocked impact data?...
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In Order to Revitalize America, Our Concept of Leadership Needs to Change
The son of an Air Force veteran and a history teacher, Jeff Eggers attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., with his heart set on learning to fly jets off of aircraft carriers. Once...
View ArticleForget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting
Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for...
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Headlines Focus on Environmental Disasters. But the Real Story Is How...
In the early 1970s, as part of an internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Frances Beinecke spent a summer developing land use policies in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New...
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