Profile: Amy Pearl, Springboard Innovation
Creating sustainable social change
Conversations with Amy Pearl, Executive Director of Springboard Innovation, usually steer toward social innovation and entrepreneurship. As Amy tells it, translating a passion for solving global problems into helping others solve them sounds so easy anyone can do it.
After working at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, Amy got recruited by the Intel Corporation to manage intel.com/education. People from communities in thirty-four countries participated. One of the programs was “Design and discovery”, which teaches teenage girls how to be innovative problem solvers, and which, in turn, taught Amy to approach problems as a community member and launched her on a discovery of her own.
Amy founded Springboard Innovation in 2004 with a singular idea: Help communities solve problems with innovative, sustainable solutions. We cannot wait for government, business, academia, or nonprofits to solve global problems. Instead, as she put it, “we the people have to come up with our own solutions.” More people need to get involved, Amy stressed. “We need to stop putting band-aids on everything. We must dig deeper toward root causes, and do things smarter.”
That’s where innovation and sustainable strategies come in. “Let’s look at what’s working, what’s making a difference in the world,” Amy said, “and distill from both research and practice.” Social entrepreneurs are people who take on a challenge, work together to come up with the best ideas, and implement them with sustaining strategies.
A social venture is a “a new breed of organization”, according to Amy, albeit using the existing legal structure – most projects launched at Springboard Innovation are nonprofits. “Americans don’t trust for-profits, even if they’re mission-driven,” Amy said, “though we are headed in the direction of a legal designation for hybrid organizations.”
Springboard Innovation operates four initiatives to meet its mission:
- Local Agenda is an educational program that helps people envision and launch social venture
- Social Innovation Forum brings together the community on a monthly basis to discuss and discover solutions to societal and environmental problems
- ChangeXchange is an online financing vehicle for seed-funding social ventures
- Innovative Cities (in development) helps build a supportive ecosystem for social innovators in their communities
(April 2009)
