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It’s the event that all DC edtech enthusiasts have been waiting for: TechChange is teaming up with General Assembly DC to host this month’s ICT4Drinks happy hour event!

All are welcome to attend. Free drinks will be provided for those that register and come early. We’ll also be giving away some TechChange cubebots and GA stickers!

TECHCHANGE + GENERAL ASSEMBLY D.C. HAPPY HOUR
Friday, October 17, 20145:30 PM – 7:00 PM
General Assembly Washington D.C. (1776 8th Floor)
1133 15th Street NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Register now for the chance to celebrate the end of the work week with your pals at GA. Drinks are on us, so stop by for mingling, beverages, & great conversation with the movers & shakers of DC.

TechChange Founder and CEO, Nick Martin, has been selected as a 2014 Ariane de Rothschild Fellow! The AdR Fellowship program connects social entrepreneurs with a well-connected network across sectors aimed at conflict resolution through cross-cultural discourse.

Nick is one of 28 competitively selected, visionary fellows who have demonstrate early achievements of a social good organization with a commitment to facilitating cross-cultural dialogue.

As part of the fellowship, Nick will be participating in an intensive series of Rothschild Fellow trainings at the end of August at the University of Cambridge, UK. There, the AdR program will focus on business training, unconventional social science approaches, and workshops to extend the impact of these selected social leaders.

To learn more about the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship, please click here.

Please join us in congratulating Nick!

TechChange Program Coordinator Matthew Heck explains technical aspects of Google Maps Engine to UN Summer Academy Director, Patrick van Weerelt (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

In June 2014, TechChange Founder & CEO Nick Martin and Program Coordinator Matthew Heck conducted a training at the 2014 United Nations Summer Academy at the UN headquarters in New York City. 45 participants from across the UN system based in 25 different countries joined Nick, Matt, and TechChange Mobiles for International Development alumnus and guest expert, Arjen Swank of Text to Change in a hands-on workshop on “How to use innovation and technology for development”.

In the session, participants learned about and experimented with online tools for development including CommCare, Google Maps Engine, Magpi, Open Data Kit, and OpenStreetMap, Text to Change, TextIt, and more.

Here are some highlights from the workshop:

Nick Martin meets the participants of the 2014 UN Summer Academy and gives a quick introduction about TechChange and ICT4D.

TechChange TC105 alumnus Arjen Swank leads a workshop on TTC for the participants (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

Check out Arjen’s latest blog post on the training and “Why basic mobile technology is still powerful” here and the UN’s summary of the event here.

In smaller break-out groups, Arjen Swank demos how Text to Change can be used via tablet (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

UN Summer Academy participants experiment with OpenStreetMap (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

If your organization is interested in training with TechChange online or in-person on technology for social change, please contact us at info [at] techchange [dot] org.

With a domain that ends with [dot] org, TechChange is sometimes mistaken for a non-profit organization. However, we are actually a for-profit social enterprise business that is focused on market-viable solutions that bring both profit and positive social impact. As we continue on our journey from a start-up to a small business, we’re proud to be a registered B Corporation, a category of social enterprises that also focus on double bottom line values.

Being this type of small, yet growing, online learning business based in Washington, DC brings its own unique set of challenges, recently featured in this Forbes article, “When And How To Scale: DC Startup At Crossroads.” Launched in 2010, TechChange remains a bootstrapped social enterprise. Unlike other high-growth startups in the edtech space that have received an injection of venture capital funding, scaling for us is less straightforward than more employees, bigger offices, and lunchtime perks.

“To scale does not always mean bigger. A thought that seems to get lost in the relentless drive to scale businesses across continents.”

For a social enterprise, scaling offers different incentives than a traditional for-profit business that focuses primarily on maximizing profit. In our case, part of the challenge in scaling is codifying our business priorities and establishing social impact as a core value of our business.

TechChange CEO, Nick Martin, presenting at a meeting on social entrepreneurship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Affairs (SAIS) in Washington, DC.

Check out the full article on this link here.

What do you think? What is the best way for TechChange to scale our impact while growing as a business? Who are the best investors that are looking for organizations that promise both financial and social impact returns?

We’re excited to announce that TechChange president Nick Martin was selected as the runner-up for the 2014 Andrew E. Rice Award for Leadership and Innovation by a Young Professional in International Development.

The winner of first place for the Rice Award for 2014 was Diana Jue of Essmart, a U.S. Corporation and India Private Limited company that “brings essential, life-improving products to all people, no matter who they are or where they’re from”. Diana’s company is doing great work to create better distribution and supply channels of existing consumer goods to hard-to-reach places in the developing world.

Nick received a certificate of distinction at the 2014 SID-Washington Annual Conference, “Delivering Results in a Changing World,” on May 20th, in Washington, DC. Thanks to the team at SID-Washington for organizing the award and event.

Please join us in congratulating Nick!

Read more about the SID Rice Award here and consider applying next year.

The Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame is launching a pilot initiative with TechChange to experiment with blended learning online and offline on the topic of mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health. As part of Notre Dame’s continuing experiments of best practices in online and hybrid learning, this initiative of the Master of Science in Global Health program will be combining an on-campus class on mHealth taught by Professor Joseph Bock with TechChange’s mHealth online course. According to Dr. Bock, “This pilot course is an exciting initiative and we are eager to promote it.”

Notre Dame’s Master of Science in Global Health program is sponsoring 11 students and program directors to join TechChange’s mHealth online course in conjunction with Professor Joseph Bock’s face-to-face offline mHealth class, which aims to equip students with technical knowledge to apply mobile and Information Communications Technology (ICT) for global health challenges. The school will be receiving data on the students’ participation on the course platform from TechChange, which along with their written assignments for the Master of Science in Global Health class, will factor into determining the students’ grades. As the students will be logged in and participating in TechChange’s online learning platform, Professor Joseph Bock will be meeting in person with the students weekly to discuss the content on the TechChange mHealth course and the professor’s assignments.

In partnership with the mHealth Alliance, TechChange has offered this mHealth: Mobiles for International Development online course four times since 2012. The course, which has been mentioned in the New York Times, has welcomed over 450 doctors, nurses, community health workers, and global public health experts who regularly participate in this online course from over 75 countries. Participants have included representatives of organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Medicin Sans Frontieres (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Cleveland Clinic, Global Health Corps, officials from ministries of health of several countries, and many more.

Notre Dame’s MS in Global Health students have been enthusiastic about beginning the mHealth course, which will run March 31 to April 25, 2014 – just before final exams and before the students travel abroad to pursue summer global health field and research projects. Several students plan on tying in their mHealth online learnings into their planned field work after this semester, including Michael Clark, who believes this mHealth course will help focus his current project to track mosquito-borne disease in Belize using a mobile database platform by meeting other global mHealth practitioners in the online class.

“The mHealth course will help focus my efforts in Belize as it teaches best practices learned through collaboration with local partners across the world,” says Michael Clark. “Further, I look forward to the invaluable tips for implementing ICT4D in previously technology-deprived areas, like rural Belize, that the expert lecturers and current global health practitioners will be able to provide.”

Jingmeng Xie plans to build upon her past experience at a Nairobi maternal health clinic (a Ford Family Program) by applying the content she learned in the mHealth classes to explore the roles mobile technology can play in public health. The MS in Global Health students, through the mHealth initiative, are diving deeply into the role that mobile data collection, electronic health records, and Information and Communications Technologies can promote better health for populations even in the most remote areas in the world. Another student, Thomas Ulsby, is preparing for his summer research trip to India where he hopes to learn how electronic reporting of blood glucose levels via mobile phones has impacted treatment plans for type I and type II diabetes.

We’re very excited to welcome these students from the University of Notre Dame and can’t wait to see how they’ll be applying their experience in mHealth to their summer field projects in India, Belize, Kenya, and beyond!

Interested in learning about mHealth this spring as well? Register now for our mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health online course.

Earlier this week, Georgetown University announced the launch of its brand new Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation.

This 10-million dollar center funded by Georgetown alumni, Alberto and Olga María Beeck, aims to inspire and prepare students, faculty, and global leaders with the necessary skills to generate and innovate solution-based world change. The Beeck Center actively promotes a policy-relevant, cross-disciplinary approach to research, ideas, and action. The Center’s approach hopes to challenge common assumptions and lead to ideas and actions that are creative, adaptive, and morally grounded. Planned initiatives include: workshops, speaker event series, social innovation fund, fellows program, social impact lab, and research and policy initiatives.

At the center’s opening event on February 11, the Beeck Center welcomed leading experts in the Social Innovation space such as Pam Omidyar (Co-Founder, Omidyar Network and Founder, HopeLab), Jean Case (Co-Founder and CEO, Case Foundation), and other leading experts on design and storytelling for advocacy. The reception’s closing remarks were by the Center’s Executive Director, Sonal Shah, whose brings leadership from her wealth of experiences at the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, Google.org, Goldman Sachs, the Center for Global Development, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and other organizations.

We had the chance to talk to some of the students already involved with the Beeck Center from across Georgetown University who shared their work in social innovation across the world, from the GU Impacts Fellowship program to the SIPS Fund.

A Georgetown student shares her stories from her GU Impacts program field experience in South Africa.

Georgetown sophomore, Naman Trivedi, discusses projects that have been funded through the student-run Social Innovation Public Service (SIPS) Fund; the Fund has given out grants ranging from $300 to $13,000 for projects here in DC and as far away as Nepal.

If you missed the Beeck Center’s launch event, you can check out the recorded webcast here.

Social innovation can come from anywhere, whether it is from individuals dedicated to public service, social entrepreneurs, or social intrapreneurs working at companies, multilateral organizations, non-profits, or government agencies. We can’t wait the see the impact on the world coming from institutions such as the Beeck Center and are very excited for this welcome addition to the social innovation community.

According to Mark Hanis, Director of the Beeck Center,

“We’re delighted to be working with TechChange, who is a prime example of the type of B Corps social enterprises that we want to foster at the Beeck Center. Like TechChange, Georgetown has always leveraged technology for social change, and Georgetown students are eager to pursue careers that involve a double bottom line business model like TechChange’s. Part of Beeck’s unconventional approach will be grounded in social intrapreneurship as an important component of the social change ecosystem because we often work with larger entities like government, NGOs, and multinational corporations. Ultimately, intrapreneurship is about teaching people how to be more effective in inspiring positive change.”

To help welcome members of Beeck Center community, we’re offering a $100 discount to Beeck affiliated organizations and individuals to join our upcoming Social Intrapreneurship course, which begins in on February 24! Use coupon code: DriveImpact before February 21 to get $100 off the course!

We’re excited to have one of our top viewed TechChange animated videos featured in The Guardian! Check out our “Why Is It So Hard to Try Something New in ICT4D?” video created by TechChange animator, Pablo Leon, and narrated by Laura Walker Hudson of FrontlineSMS.