I live in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, where we have 27 transit agencies and yet the 8th worst traffic in the US. What gives?...
Category: Case Studies
Free Food Forests: The Return of the Commons
Once it was not unusual for a community to have shared land that everyone owned and everyone could benefit from....
Basic Income in Finland Increases Trust in People and Institutions
A recent experiment about basic income in Finland has all sides of the movement debating the results....
Using AI to Map Better Distribution of Social Goods
The effectiveness of social goods often comes down to distribution. Can you put social goods in the hand of the people who need and want them? This is a huge challenge in the informal settlements in the world’s urban areas. A team of university researchers, government agencies, and software companies are showing how AI...
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Six Characteristics of Sustainable Organizations
Someone once asked business strategist and lapsed biologist Martin Reeves a simple question: How can I build a business that lasts 100 years?...
Designing Bright Spot Solutions For Reducing Teen Drug Use
Iceland used to have the worst teenagers in Europe: smoking, drinking, getting high, staying out late. What’s a country to do?...
Designing a Credit Market for Stormwater Management
Heavy rains and flood waters flow across the impervious surfaces of roads and parking lots. That flow pushes pollution on those surfaces–plastic bottles, cigarette butts, motor oil–into stormwater management systems. That pollution then dumps into lakes and streams. This system is how so much plastic ends up in our oceans....
Innovative Pricing Turns Plastic Into Transit
It’s a different way to pay with plastic — bottles instead of credit cards. Cities like Beijing, Istanbul, Sydney, and Surabaya let you pay public transit fares with recyclable plastic. Innovative transit pricing is one way that public and social sector marketers achieve multiple goals at once....
Estonia Runs On Digital Government
I visited Estonia in the mid-1990s. Back then, I said it would be fascinating to return in 20 years and see what changed....
Case Study in Nonprofit Healthcare: Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative
For social goods like health care, the buyer and the end consumer are often two different parties. In much of health care, an insurance company or a government agency is the buyer, while the individual patient is the end consumer. At least in the United States, for-profit medicine companies exploit this split. They charge...
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