ATP energizes crowd during NYC reception at Studio 580 gallery…

Several friends of the Armenia Tree Project put together a New York City cocktail reception and silent auction for the organization at Studio 580 on Eighth Avenue. The program was led by Forbes columnist Vahan Janjigian and included remarks by board member Nancy Kricorian. ATP is currently raising funds to meet the Global ReLeaf Challenge as part of its partnership with American Forests.

Pictured here with gallery owner Serge Gregorian, Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian, and ATP benefactor Jean-Marie Atamian

Pictured here with Alexis Ohanian (center) and event organizers James Norian, Margarita Melikjanian, and Lisa Vahradian

A crowd of more than 100 friends turned out for the event, including musicians, painters, filmmakers, legal advocates, and leaders from the non-profit and business community. As with most ATP events, the evening was full of energy as young and older supporters mingled and bid on auction items.

More than 35 items were donated for the benefit auction including a private piano lesson at the Manhattan School of Music, signed photographs by Hawk Khatcherian, Garo Lachinian, Serj Tankian and items from businesses with Armenian roots such as Michael Aram, John Derian, Tufenkian Artisan Carpets, and Harvest Song. The event was covered by Voice of America for television broadcast in Armenia.

A few more photos from the ATP reception are available here.

Update: Honored guest Vartan Gregorian has selected ATP to share the stipend from the Henry Crown Leadership Award, which he received from the Aspen Institute. The award honors outstanding leaders whose achievements reflect high standards of honor, integrity, industry, and philanthropy. A conversation with Christiane Amanpour from the awards ceremony is available here.

TEDx Yerevan announces speakers for ‘beyond borders’ event...

TEDx Yerevan has announced the speakers selected for its first by-invitation-only event being held on Sept. 25. The theme of the widely anticipated event is “Beyond Borders” and topics of the 6-12 minute TED Talks will include innovation, technology, education, diaspora, and the arts.

The speakers selected after topics were proposed by the public and auditions held over the summer are Michael Aram, Rev. Ktrij (Armen) Devejian, Paula Devejian, Hagop Emrazian, Rich Goldman, Hans Gutbrod, Vardan Hovhannisyan, Hrair Hawk Khatcherian, Meroujan Minassian, Alexis Ohanian, Siemon Scamell-Katz, Timothy Straight, and Anna Yeghoyan (bios available here).

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission to promote “ideas worth spreading.” The program is designed to give communities, organizations, and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue. At TEDx events, talks given by thought leaders are intended to spark deep conversation and connections.

TED started in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design. The independent TEDx Yerevan event is operated under license from TED and it will be held at the Ani Plaza Hotel in Yerevan. The TEDx Yerevan organizing committee is headed by Alexis Ohanian and Kristine Sargsyan, along with representatives of the Civilitas Foundation and other organizations.

Alexis co-founded reddit.com, a popular social media site that was sold to Condé Nast in 2006. He recently completed a Kiva Fellowship in Armenia and founded Breadpig, Inc., an “uncorporation that’s responsible for bringing geeky things into the world” like xkcd: volume 0 and donating all the profits to charitable causes. In 2009, Alexis delivered a TED Talk on How to make a splash in social media.

Kristine has 13 years of experience in the non-profit and business sector as an organizational development consultant. She has worked with organizations including World Learning, USDA, PA Consulting Group, Eurasia Foundation, and Caritas Armenia. Kristine is on the board of the Professionals for Civil Society NGO and is the initiator of TEDx Yerevan and the TED Open Translation Project in Armenia.

En route to a presentation at a Startup Bootcamp at MIT, Alexis reflected on the reason behind initiating the TEDx Yerevan event: “I was so impressed by so many energetic, inspiring people who I met during my time in Armenia, that it seemed like such a waste to not have a conference to get them all sharing.”

Update: Videos of the talks presented at TEDx Yerevan are now available here.

New study looks at aggregation & mitigation to finance forest conservation…

The Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest has released a new research publication, Financing Forest Conservation Across the Commonwealth: Using Aggregation and Mitigation to Conserve the Forests of Massachusetts. I worked on the study over the past year with James Levitt and several others. I met Jim at Harvard after his guest lecture in the course taught by Mark Leighton on Conservation Biology and Sustainable Use of Forested Landscapes. He has been a great mentor and I owe him a great deal of thanks for his introduction to the field of Conservation Finance.

Last year Jim invited me to work on this case study on forest aggregation in Massachusetts, which is a pioneering effort led by a group of individuals and organizations to increase the pace of land conservation in a region threatened by parcelization and development. The goal of this effort is consistent with the new Harvard Forest Wildlands and Woodlands Vision for the New England Landscape.

In order to complete the research I had to turn down a couple of TA offers, took some time off from my work at Armenia Tree Project to attend meetings at the Harvard Forest, and to attend meetings of the Financing Forest Conservation Board of Advisors at the State House, at Appalachian Mountain Club, and at the New England Forestry Foundation.

The forest aggregation program highlighted in this report is an inspiring effort to achieve landscape-scale conservation that takes natural capital, social capital, and financial capital into account. It was even highlighted by the New York Times as a conservation finance innovation. I would like to extend my thanks to Jim and the many leaders of this effort that are highlighted in the report and that supported this research, including the Harvard Forest and the Massachusetts Environmental Trust.

Publications review latest Conservation Finance & Forest Carbon programs…

I have been reading two important resources on Conservation Finance and Forest Carbon and wanted to share the titles since they are highly recommended for conservation professionals.

The first, Guide to Conservation Finance, focuses on new sources of sustainable financing for conservation, including Payments for Ecosystem Services and other market-based economic instruments. This publication outlines mechanisms that have been implemented around the world, and case studies demonstrate both successes and challenges facing project developers.

The Guide to Conservation Finance was released by World Wildlife Fund this month and provides an overview of topics including Carbon Finance, Payments for Watershed Services, Tourism and Recreation Revenue Programs, Mitigation Banking and Biodiversity Offsets, and Environmental Investment Funds.

Deforestation has been a major driver of climate change, so it is widely understood that its reversal must be an integral part of the solution. In Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities, international experts explain the links between climate change and forests, highlighting the potential role of this sector within emerging climate policy frameworks.

Climate Change and Forests provides an excellent overview of forestry and the Clean Development Mechanism, emerging programs to finance avoided deforestation, and the growing voluntary carbon markets. The authors are prominent innovators in this field, and the book includes chapters on Risks and Criticism of Forestry-Based Climate Change Mitigation and Carbon Trading, Rewarding Developing Countries for Protecting Forest Carbon, and Carving a Niche for Forestry in the Voluntary Carbon Markets.

The first chapter by editors Charlotte Streck, Robert O’Sullivan, Toby Janson-Smith, and Richard Tarasofsky is available from the publisher here.

What you get from giving...

I had the pleasure of running into Terri Trespicio in the neighborhood and found out she is a senior editor at Body+Soul magazine. I am always fascinated by the people, organizations, and companies here in Watertown. I knew Martha Stewart’s magazine had an office just down the street, so it was a nice to make the connection. Of course I had no idea that Terri is something of a media celebrity, with appearances on television and in print as an award-winning poet, essayist, and public speaker.

Since I’ve wanted to comment on Bill Clinton’s book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, I thought I would point out Terri’s insightful conversation about giving during Martha Stewart’s interview with the former President about the Clinton Global Initiative.

Terri’s remarks were based on her article, What You Get from Giving, where she outlines a series of “inspirations to start making generosity a part of every day,” and I want to point out a couple of favorites. Be happy for someone else: “One of the most generous things you can do for the world (and often the most difficult) is to share sympathetic joy or true happiness for someone else’s good fortune…Rather than imagine that there’s less left for you, think the opposite: There’s more to be had as a result.”

Give what you need: “You might decide to give someone something but then a clenching fear arises that you’ll need it, that you don’t have enough of it to give away. The key is awareness of that fear, and giving in spite of it. That’s what makes altruism a practice. It’s not about succeeding or failing; it’s about learning the nature of generosity…Rather than view yourself as bereft and in need of things from others, see yourself as the giver of those things, and you’ll be surprised at what happens.”

Terri refers to research which suggests that nurturing others may feel good because it is rewarded by spikes of dopamine--the neurotransmitter linked to cravings, pleasure, and reward. “If you want a better life, better health, and the sense of being connected and hopeful in this world, the answer is to give,” says bioethicist Stephen Post. “In what can only be considered a blissful karmic payoff, it’s more often the giver--not the receiver--who reaps the biggest payback,” Terri writes.

So watch the interview here to find out why President Clinton said he wished he had Terri’s article before writing his book.

JFK Forum defines new trends in social innovation…

Kennedy School Reynolds Fellow Illac Diaz created innovative programs in the Philippines to address unemployment and poverty (Photo source: http://illacdiaz.multiply.com/)

I was fortunate to attend the JFK Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School this week on trends in social entrepreneurship. This phrase has entered our lexicon along with sustainability as something that everyone wants to be associated with right now, and the ideas are sound and inspiring. A more down to earth way to describe the concept may be social innovation, but the term is not what is important since these are people doing important work to create large-scale change in society.

The panel was titled after the new book The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing the World, and it featured theorists and leaders from the field. This book was considered so influential, in fact, that it was given to attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year.

The speakers were Leslie Crutchfield, managing director of the Ashoka Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship and coauthor of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, Pamela Hartigan, managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and coauthor of The Power of Unreasonable People, Stacey Childress, senior researcher at Harvard Business School, Vanessa Kirsch, founder of New Profit, Inc., and Christopher Gergen, founding partner of New Mountain Ventures and coauthor of Life Entrepreneurs. Rebecca Onie and Illac Diaz are young leaders in this field who also participated.

Here are some of the important points I took from the presenters:

Stacey Childress: social entrepreneurs seek opportunities to address the root causes of problems, rather than the effects of a problem, and they affiliate with larger movements to change the rules of the game. Rebecca Onie: social entrepreneurs leverage the assets of existing systems to create change, and are often able to find simple, elegant solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Leslie Crutchfield: social entrepreneurs build movements and find points of leverage in all sectors including other non-profits. She also recalled that the founder of Ashoka said rather than teaching a village how to fish, you need to revolutionize the entire fishing industry! Vanessa Kirsch: resources made available by government can be important for success, and too often organizations become focused on sustaining themselves rather than finding ways to create change.

In a highlight of the evening, Reynolds Fellow Illac Diaz described how he was able to address unemployment and poverty in the Philippines through listening and learning from beneficiaries of a Habitat for Humanity program to implement simple and practical solutions that were traditionally overlooked. He emphasized that business plan competitions can connect innovative ideas that often exist locally with necessary sources of capital investment.

In response to the anticipated crisis in non-profit leadership, Christopher Gergen concluded that rather than going out to start new organizations, there is a need to catalyze existing non-profits with these ideas so they can have more of an impact.

What High-Impact Nonprofit Groups Do…

Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant have gotten some great press for their recent book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, which examines 12 successful organizations including Environmental Defense, City Year, and YouthBuild USA.

In fact, Ms. Crutchfield will be leading a high profile panel that takes its title from John Elkington’s latest book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing the World, on March 3 at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's JFK School.

A Chronicle of Philanthropy profile noted that the authors expected their research into successful non-profit organizations to confirm the notion that charities could thrive by modeling themselves after their for-profit counterparts. What they found was something a little different, and the following are some of the traits identified in Forces for Good that distinguish vibrant organizations from those that are less effective.

What High-Impact Nonprofit Groups Do:

• Use leverage to change entire systems
• Do whatever it takes--short of compromising core values
• Engage outsiders in meaningful experiences
• Build long-term relationships
• Nurture networks of nonprofits
• Constantly adapt and balance creativity with structure
• Empower others to lead and take action
• Invest in the basics: people, fundraising, and systems
  

What Less-Effective Groups Do:

• Focus exclusively on their own organization
• Only provide direct services, avoid politics
• Treat volunteers as free labor or donors as check writers
• See fellow nonprofits as competitors
• Fear change, become mired in bureaucracy, or get overwhelmed with too many ideas
• Maintain a command-and-control hierarchy and allow the CEO to be the "hero"