Women’s History Month is April but here at TechSoup we celebrate women in tech all year long, and here’s why: The Huffington Post blog shared a special spring collection, what it calls "a mosaic of contemporary femmes — each one swaying the narrative with her passion, technological imagination and genius." This Mosaic includes our very own Marnie Webb, CEO of Caravan Studios — and we’re proud! I’m posting Marnie’s portion of the blog post here:
"The interesting part of the story is communities. When people say yes, amazing things happen", says Marnie Webb, the CEO of Caravan Studios a nonprofit that uses a theory of technology intervention to allow communities to respond to the issues they care about most. She gives all the credit to community and reveals some non-tech aspects about herself, bringing her very distant background "in short fiction and stand up comedy, full circle". I’d first met Marnie in 2013, at an ideas generator in San Francisco through online community building guru, Susan Tenby, and knew I had to chronicle her nonprofit genius. She’d already had a 25-year history as co-CEO of TechSoup that distributes more than $600 million in donated technology to NGOs world-wide and counseled Fortune 500 technology companies, such as Cisco and Microsoft, on philanthropic initiatives that align with their business objectives. They recognize the creativity and innovation that nonprofits have to offer. Named one of the Top 10 Silicon Valley Influencers by San Jose Mercury News, in 2008, she won NTEN "Person of the Year" award and was included into the Nonprofit Times’ list of the 50 most influential leaders in the U.S. nonprofit sector and is the initiator of the NPTech tagging experiment. We met again more recently for lunch, she’d just returned from a trip to Brazil, where the local community came up with 10 ideas based on opportunities for tech intervention thanks to a Gates Foundation grant to help libraries. I wasn’t expecting Marnie’s response to my question about what she likes about tech, given her tech geek world saying, "I don’t know that I like any. It does a great job at illuminating and pointing out deviances. If my kid can’t eat in Berkley where I reside, we have resources we can use without technology. How would someone in Hawaii be able to help someone in Red Bluff California pay for a hotel room to survive a night of domestic violence? That’s what tech does well. We have a lot of technical imagination - we’re just shepherds who surface the doable." Now that everyone has smartphones, "the mobile is a powerful device we carry in our pockets," so an app like 'Safenight' made it possible for 200 people get to sleep the night before. "To be in a position to connect resources to people who need them, you’re just additive."
"The velocity of learning", is evident in lessons learned creating the 'Safenight' app. In her TedXBerkley talk, we hear more about what’s doable. Marnie wanted to recreate how we look at social issues saying, "when we start thinking about abundance, we often don’t think we have enough, but if you start thinking about abundance differently, from a possibility place, things start to shift." Examples of paradigm shifts that have made a dramatic impact include D.C. Central Kitchen, whose mission is to reduce hunger with recycled food and Youth Uprising helps youth kids in a rough part of an East San Francisco Bay Area, play safely at what used to be an abandoned Safeway supermarket. "I’m no expert on Brazil. My skill is to organise and morph, not different to telling a short story or telling a joke." She draws parallels saying, "building apps for communities is the same. You have to look at what happened. I’m an outsider, I see a society with strong parallels. People pulling out smartphones is not different. The scale and density of poverty I can’t comprehend as an outsider." Back in Berkley, "we forget that we look at tech for good. It’s nonsense in the U.S. People aren’t hungry. We haven’t figured out how to distribute food. I returned from a 2-week trip, ate in restaurants, had nice Chilean wine, filled my cupboards. Immense privilege." She is impassioned by so much. The lack of diversity in the U.S, wanting to give enough to get the sector built, the plight of nonprofits that survive on meagre resources and how much they do with so little. "In the U.S social services get solved by NGOs, it’s the community will that steps up to challenges". By the end of our lunch, I walked away thinking about the exploitation of labour, what it would take for modern slavery not to exist, and re-imagining a different well-tuned world that can thrive. A better world I can believe in, thanks to people like Marnie and all in the nonprofit communities, each one doing something to abet.
Marnie’s Wish list:
#1 Personal wish: I’ve got an 11-year-old. I just hope the world, you know, is a place she can navigate, come together with people different from her, and have choices. I worry, sometimes, that that isn’t the direction we are heading.
#2 Work wish: We’ve got tremendous opportunities ahead of ourselves at Caravan Studios. As a group, I want us to be able to take advantage of them, to change because of them, to create change because of them.
#3 Tech wish: Access is a tricky thing. Equitable access. And it’s something we all have to rest our minds against. I hope we get better at it, better at creating opportunity for a wide variety of people and projects. Much better.
Continue reading at The Huffington Post blog.