WHY, WHY, WHY????

Many thanks to David Schwartz and Alan Harlam for helping to crystallize these questions in my mind.

It is always the questions that we need to answer most that we the ones that leave us frustrated and paralyzed to act.  And yet those questions are often the simplest.  At this moment, I am in a state of paralysis, spending fruitless hours trying to answer the question: why?  Food recovery on college campuses is a brilliant idea (if I do say so myself).  And spreading that idea is a worthwhile endeavor.  Considering 75% of colleges in the United States do not have a food recovery program, simply starting programs at all of those schools is enough of an endeavor for an organization to undertake.  But what happens then?  Once the idea has been incepted into the brains of campus leaders and food recovery programs are started at campuses across the country, what value is added by having a national network?  Although it seems that starting a program on every campus will occupy our time for many years to come, the unsolved question of why to create a network manifests itself on many levels in the daily operations of our organization and poses a threat to the existence of FRN.  The first level is the health and sanity of our organizing team.  We are all putting in many hours a week spreading our gospel, and it is only fun and exciting if we truly and wholeheartedly believe in what we are doing.  That notion of contributing to societal change is the fuel that keeps our engine running, and we begin to sputter if we, for a second, doubt the necessity value of our work.  The second level is the snowball effect.  Ideally, this is how our expansion efforts will work:  First, we get a bunch of colleges to start food recovery programs and join the Food Recovery Network.  The students on those campuses become excited about food recovery, and help to spread the idea to other colleges.  Eventually, we reach critical mass and the media and food service companies begin to take notice of us.  Our message goes viral and students and administrators begin approaching us for advice on how to start food recovery programs on their campuses.  But that process breaks down between the second and third step when we don't have a rationale for why a network is needed.  Students are happy to start food recovery programs, but we aren't building a movement of food waste activists.  The third level is funding.  If we can't prove our impact and value-add, we can't get money.

So again we are back to the question of WHY, WHY, WHY?????
1.  We are spokespeople for the food recovery movement on college campuses.  We showcase the aggregate work that campus programs are doing.  This allows us to get funding and distribute it to campus programs.  It also allows us to use our sheer numbers to reach larger audiences than we could by working individually.
2.  Expertise.  This is vague, and it needs to be defined.  Ideas I have:  Provide a uniform tracking system to college programs.  Much more cost-effective than having many different tracking systems.  Provide a peer-support network guiding students through the process of starting food recovery programs.
3.  Connections.  By working with national food service providers, we can lower the barrier on individual campuses to starting a food recovery program.
4.  Networking and Traning.  Annual retreats and a social networking site help connect students and foster the creation of new ideas.

To get buy-in from chapters, we have to "sell" this movement.  We have to excite people about food waste, and show that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.  More on how to do that next week!

Enabling ChangeAuthenticity

Reading "Tribes" by Malcolm Gladwell, I was struck by two concepts, which I see as Enabling Change and Authenticity.  Those are not words that Gladwell used, but they are terms that seem appropriate to me when thinking about the promises and pitfalls of creating social movements.

Leadership is the new management, Gladwell proclaims.  No longer will the world be run by people in charge, but by people who think of new ideas and lead a tribe of followers who share a faith in something.  Creating anything big is hard, and sustaining it is even harder - there is a reason IBM and Google have tens of thousands of employees, and were initially backed by wealthy investors and tycoons of industry.
Gladwell , however, is asserting that any person, regardless of their position in society, can be a leader in a tribe.  That's a lot of work for one person.  So the solution is not managing people but enabling them to contribute to the movement themselves.  Wikipedia could never have thrived if Jimmy Wales had chosen to update every page himself.  But leaders have visions for a tribe.  And allowing others to contribute in a meaningful way to a tribe will inevitably alter the vision of the leader.  So leading a tribe requires trust.  What I got caught up on, however, was who the leader has to trust.  Leadership requires trust on two separate levels.  A leader must trust that they have created they have created the correct structures to enabling change to happen, and they must also trust in the tribe members.  Such trust does not come easily, but it is necessary if a leader wants to enable change.

A story is more important than an idea.  No ideas are new.  They have all been proposed before, or at the very least, someone has thought of them.  What turns an idea into a tribe is a leader and  story.  The better the story, the stronger the tribe will be.  Where, I wonder, is the place of authenticity in all of this?  And how does authenticity relate to the concepts of truth and modesty.  I have a natural inclination towards modesty, and I often equate confidence with bragging.  But that prevents me from effectively communicating my vision; from selling my story to my potential tribe members.  How can I balance modesty with storytelling, and how does authenticity relate to the spread of ideas?  These are questions I continue to struggle with, and which I hope to resolve as I move forward with this class.