[Year in Review 2019] Top quotes by investors on startup opportunities in fintech, health, education, deep tec – YourStory

Drawn from our comprehensive coverage of Indias entrepreneurship ecosystem, we present around a 100 quotes from investors on sector opportunities for Indian startups (see Part I of the compilation here). How are data and deep tech creating new opportunities? What will it take to boost Indias design and production capacity in hardware? What looming gaps can digital health entrepreneurs fill?

Share these quotes with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights. See also our pick of the Top 10 Books of 2019 for Entrepreneurs, and our book review section with insights from 240 titles on innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, leadership and digital transformation.

Make it a habit to check out our Daily Capsule, Weekly Founding Roundup, and quotes compilation StoryBites, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of each past week. YourStory has also published the pocketbook Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

YourStory wishes all founders and investors a happy holiday season, and a year of success and scale ahead in 2020!

Deep tech is 'wow' tech. Today, computing power has changed so much that the way data is processed has also changed. - Swapna Gupta, Qualcomm Ventures

Globally, most countries are thinking of data protection, there are very few countries that have built a data empowerment architecture. - Nandan Nilekani

Identity is a key underlying infrastructure that drives digital transactions globally. - Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

This decade will be shaped by companies who can transform business processes with new technology and provide a differentiated experience. - Scott Shleifer, Tiger Global Management

Customer experience software is stuck in the 2000s era. Consumers have moved to smartphones and conversational interfaces, especially in the last few years. - Amit Somani, Prime Venture Partners

India does not have enough capital and manufacturing progress, especially when it comes to digital equipments. - TV Mohandas Pai, Aarin Capital

Online SaaS startups can market to, acquire, onboard, and service a larger number of customers with fewer resources than offline SaaS startups. This makes online SaaS a more scalable approach. - Adam Walker, Montane Ventures

For deep tech startups to emerge out of India, there has to be a strong partnership between industry, academia, and investors. - Naganand Doraswamy, Ideaspring Capital

With increasing digital penetration, a new creed of real estate customers has emerged in India that wants transactions to be convenient and fast. - Mayank Khanduja, SAIF Partners

Intelligent and automated systems will empower businesses to be more efficient in the coming decade. - Ravi Mehta, Steadview Capital

India is changing and its changing so rapidly. The internet, although in its infancy here, is taking away barriers between us all and making us equal. - Puneet Kumar, Nexus Venture Partners

One of the key challenges that VCs in India face when investing in deep tech companies is our collective lack of depth in technology. - Arpit Agarwal, Blume Ventures

Deep learning, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies are changing how pathology and diagnostic are working. - Dheeraj Jain, Redcliffe Capital

Digital health can play an important role in addressing the countrys healthcare gaps and meeting its increasing demand for healthcare services. - Ruchira Shukla, IFC

India's radiologist to population ratio is extremely low at 1/100,000, which leads to long lead time in analysing and reporting on X-rays and scans. - Milind Shah, Unitus Ventures

We have to move from diagnostics and individual screening to screening large population sets, and only AI can help you do that. - Venugopal Ganapathy, Axilor Ventures

AI diagnostic tools are helping doctors scour through data to better diagnose a variety of abnormal conditions and is the only way to bridge the huge demand and supply gap when it comes to quality healthcare. - Manish Singhal, pi Ventures

Given India's huge population and the nearly 20 million additional people who will have access to fundamental healthcare as part of the Ayushman Bharat Yojana, startups have to leverage the power of technology to scale up. - Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Venture Catalysts

Cancer is a global challenge. India alone adds more than a million patients every year. - Ranjith Menon, Chiratae Ventures

Whats exciting about where healthtech has reached today in India is the amount of funding coming into this sector. - Anjana Sasidharan, Sequoia

Mental health could very well be the next big epidemic to hit the human race. - Manish Singhal, pi Ventures

Skin and hair care in India is approximately $7 billion industry, and will achieve more than $10 billion in valuation over the next two-three years. - Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Venture Catalysts

The beauty and wellness market is consistently growing, but the industry has been running on outdated technology. - Shekhar Kirani, Accel

The womens wellness space is in great need of being invigorated and catalysed. - Prashant Mehta, Lightbox

Its a great time to be an agri-entrepreneur as data and technology revolution grips the agriculture sector in India. - Avishek Gupta, Caspian Impact Investments

Growth prospects offered by Indias agri and food sector are phenomenal and is all set for a big revolution. Many of the agri-food products grow in double digits. - Martin Wittwer, Pioneering Ventures

Supplying fresh fruits and vegetables from farm to fork has been a challenge for years. - Rajesh Sehgal, Equanimity Ventures

Without the standardisation and digitisation of quality assessment of agricultural produce, e-Mandi, and digital agri markets will remain a distant dream. - Puneet Kumar, Nexus Venture Partners

Increasing the profitability of smallholder farmers is the most important priority in rural India. - Jinesh Shah, Omnivore

The meat and seafood segment in India is pegged to be a $30 billion market. - Tushar Singhvi, CE Ventures

India is one of the most exciting fintech markets in the world. - Philip Aldis, Goldman Sachs

There is an increase in startups that go beyond payments and credit and into areas like savings, investments and insurance. - Roopa Kudva and Amol Warange, Omidyar Network

Investors are still looking to finance early-stage startups in the innovative insurance and financial product space.- Abishek Surendran, pi Ventures

Digital lending is revolutionising access to capital for MSMEs. - Pankaj Makkar, Bertelsmann India Investments

As retail participation in equity investments grows in India, investors are increasingly looking for easy to understand, transparent, low cost investment products. - Harshjit Sethi, Sequoia Capital India Advisors

Peer-to-peer lending is an emerging sector in India and we believe it will play an integral role in shaping the Indian consumer credit market in the near term. - Avnish Bajaj, Matrix India

Innovation in rural lending is the next frontier for financial services. - Sajid Fazalbhoy, Blume Ventures

There is tremendous potential in the small and micro lending segment. - Vikram Gupta, IvyCap Ventures

Low income consumers are underserved when it comes to financial services and pay the higher access cost for basic financial services. - Vikram Vaidyanathan, Matrix India

There is strong potential for inclusive fintech startups to reach historically underserved communities while generating returns. - Vikas Raj, Accion Venture Lab

Quality and scale will determine success in financial services in the future. - Parth Gandhi, AION Capital

The best innovation (in a sector) comes from people who dont come from that area. No fintech startup has come from anybody who knew anything about fintech. - Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

Two-wheelers are the choice of transportation as much in the top 30 cities in India as the rest of the country. - Siddharth Nautiyal, Omidyar Network India

The trillion-dollar global logistics market is ripe for disruption via technological change, particularly AI and Machine Learning-driven solutions. - Navroz D Udwadia, Falcon Edge Capital

Smart Cities present the next wave of opportunity for investments as pollution and climate change become more and more severe. - Shailesh Vickram Singh, Massive Fund

Two-wheeler ride-sharing is unlocking new customer base in India by bringing convenience at an affordable price. - Jeffrey Yam, Integrated Capital

A company that can execute well in the micro-mobility space could become a large company serving the domestic market. - Varsha Tagare, Qualcomm Ventures India

The micro-delivery space is a large addressable market, offering real convenience to customers for their daily requirements. - Ashish Sharma, InnoVen Capital

Startups must look beyond just efficiency of energy. One needs to figure out entire solutions around renewable energy, energy storage, and electric vehicles. - Vignesh Nandakumar, Aspada Ventures

In India, the first use of EVs is going to be the shared use - less of personal use and more where you can extract so much juice out of it that it becomes economically viable. - Vignesh Nandakumar, Aspada Investments

Indians are travelling for leisure more than ever before, seeking adventures and interesting experiences, both within and outside the country. - Sweta Jagirdar, Tres Monos Capital

Education financing is a massive under-served opportunity in India where a tiny percentage of students have access to bank credit. - Ritesh Banglani, Stellaris Venture Partners

A highly impactful and profitable business can be built in the large and untapped higher education financing space. - Sarvesh Kanodia, Omidyar Network India

Student housing is a large and underserved need globally, but in India, the supply-demand gap is particularly stark because of a rapidly growing outstation student population. - Navroz D. Udwadia, Falcon Edge Capital

The need of the hour is to improve the employability of our youth and leverage technology to enable them to meet both their potential and aspirations. - Sai Sundaram, SucSEED

In the last few decades, higher education in India has hardly seen any innovation whether in curriculum or methodology. - Amit Somani, Prime Venture Partners

Reading is a simple and inexpensive tool everyone has access to. Its a great democratic tool. - Aniruddha Malpani, Malpani Ventures

With increasing aspirations of Indians, music education is definitely on the rise. - Padmaja Ruparel, IAN Fund

Rental culture and recycling or reuse is here to stay as youth understand wastage more than the last generation or two. - Karthik Reddy, Blume Ventures

Creating value for customers in an age-old traditional construction market is one of the hardest and unique problems to solve. -Prashanth Prakash, Accel

Indian grocery retail market is approximately 70 percent of total the retail market in India. - Anup Jain, Orios Venture Partners

Creating value for millions of kirana stores, and their ecosystem of brands and consumers is one of the hardest problems to solve - Rajesh Raju, Kalaari Capital

Empowering tens of millions of small businesses to more effectively procure and sell goods is not only a massive business opportunity but will help transform the economy. - Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Capital

There is a gap in demand for sports facilities among people of all age groups and supply of good quality facilities. - Shweta Singh, SRI Capital

While the introduction of mobile gaming has seen the global gaming market reach new heights of success, it has also laid the groundwork for an even larger phenomenon - the post-mobile gaming market. - Yuki Kawamura, AET Fund Japan

The budget hotel market in India has matured in the past couple of years. - Tarun Davda, Matrix India

Despite India controlling almost 25 percent of tea production, there is almost a negligible presence of a premium India brand on the world map. - Nikhil Vora, Sixth Sense Ventures

Organisations of all sizes and scale face the challenge of improving employee engagement and retention. - Manu Rikhye, growX Ventures

To prevent wastages and unsold stocks, manufacturers have to have a firm grip on forecasting trends. - Sailesh Tulshan, 021 Capital

Coworking has changed the way commercial real estate business is conducted globally and has picked up a lot of steam in India. - Kshitij Sheth, ChrysCapital

Larger ticket sizes are a consequence of the new normal in venture capital globally. There is more capital in VC now and more VC funds than ever before. - Pranav Pai, 3one4 Capital

In a high-growth market like India, B2C needs very large, deep-pocketed investors. - Bhaskar Majumdar, Unicorn India Ventures

Investing is mostly making mistakes as well. - Munish Varma, Softbank

Angel investing does not make you rich. About 80 percent of startups fail. - Aniruddha Malpani, Malpani Ventures

If you focus on the mass market, over time, the general economic development trajectory in the country will enable you. - Hans Tung, GGV Capital

You need a strong tailwind. You may be a great sailor, but if there is no wind or if it is against you, you will only go so far. - Alok Goyal, Stellaris Venture

The economic slowdown will have a trickle down impact on startups. - Rutvik Doshi, Inventus (India) Advisors

It is time for a better kind of capitalism. - Andrew Kuper, LeapFrog Investments

YourStory has also published the pocketbook Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

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[Year in Review 2019] Top quotes by investors on startup opportunities in fintech, health, education, deep tec - YourStory

LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and the top 10 players of the 2010s – Yahoo Sports

In 2010 if you took a 28-foot three you were instantly benched and would be lucky to see the court again.

By 2019, that shot is encouraged.

With that change and many others, the popularity of the sport exploded.

That explosion was mostly about the star players dominant teams led by recognizable faces playing on the leagues biggest stages every year. This is the deepest the league has been in elite talent in a long, long time.

Which makes compiling a list like this a challenge outstanding players who had amazing decades are left off this list. The biggest among those is Damian Lillard, who had a monster decade four All-NBA teams, four-time All-Star, Rookie of the Year but also leaving out Blake Griffin, Giannis Antetokounmpo (maybe player of the next decade), and others was hard.

Here is our list of the top 10 players of the 2010s:

Everyone else on this list was a top 15 pick, a player scouts and GMs recognized coming in with potential. Draymond Green was a second-round pick, a player seen pre-draft as a tweener who would have trouble fitting his game into the NBA it turned out his positional flexibility would help define a decade. His defensive versatility the ability to switch onto all five positions on the court was exactly what the Golden State Warriors needed. Also, Greens emotional leadership glued together the Warriors championship defense, and with that their dynasty.

Green is a three-time NBA champion, Defensive Player of the Year, two-time All-NBA, three-time All-Star, and five-time All-Defensive team player this decade.

Why Green over Lillard or Griffin, who put up bigger numbers and were the No. 1 option on a very good Portland/Los Angeles teams this decade? Because 10 years from now, as we enter 2030, if we look back at this decade, what are we going to remember? The championships, the five straight Finals appearances, the way the Warriors changed the game. Green was at the heart of that. Greens contributions made the Warriors the Warriors, and that impacted the last decade more than just box score numbers.

Miami put up two banners in the 2010s, and those dont happen without Wade being both bold and savvy.

Bold because he recruited LeBron to South Beach, forming the super team that ushered in the era of player empowerment. By the end of the decade, the hype around NBA player movement was surpassing that of interest in the games themselves, and Wade was at the forefront of that movement.

Wade was savvy on the court because he was willing to do what he called one of the hardest things I had to do in sports and adjusted his game to become the No. 2 option on those Heat teams. He accepted the role of Robin to LeBrons Batman. It worked. Wade got two more rings and averaged 22.2 points per game in those four years with LeBron, with a 57.5 true shooting percentage, going to the Finals every season.

Wades skills faded as the decade wore on, but he was still an 8-time All-Star the past decade. He was at the heart of a team that changed the game, he picked up rings (plural), and for that deserves to be on this list.

The youngest player on our list he could be on this countdown for the next decade, too Davis is a dominant two-way force, a guy who can block shots into the third row in defense and step out to the three-point line on offense. Hes as complete a player as the decade has seen.

Davis toiled in relative anonymity through nearly the entire decade in New Orleans, a franchise that (at least until recently) thought short-term and made moves accordingly. Davis never had the kind of roster around him needed to win (he only made the playoffs twice, in 2018 getting to the second round before running into the Warriors), but fans coaches recognized the talent and made him a six-time All-Star in the decade. In 2019 he was part of the ground-shifting months of player movement that changed the balance of the league, getting traded to the Lakers to team up with LeBron (how that ultimately plays out remains to be seen). Wherever he played, he earned his spot on this list.

Story continues

The best floor general of the decade arguably the best game orchestrator in NBA history and one of the highest IQ players the league has ever seen, Chris Paul spent the last decade carving up defenses like a surgeon.

CP3s teams win he is second in win shares per 48 minutes during the decade. He started the decade getting the then New Orleans Hornets to the playoffs, but is mostly known for being the lob in the Lob City Clippers teams through the heart of the decade. Those teams were among the best in the league through the middle of the decade, but for a variety of reasons never lived up to expectations in the playoffs. Well see how the rest of his career plays out, but Paul could eventually go on top of the greatest player never to win a title lists.

Paul gets a mixed reaction from fans, some of whom can be frustrated by his flopping and complaining. All of that is a manifestation of his drive to win CP3 is as intense a competitor as there is in the league. Because of that, and just his understanding of the game, the future Hall of Famer was arguably the best point guard of the decade and earned his spot on this list.

Westbrook is an absolutely unstoppable freak athlete who just overwhelmed the NBA for much of the decade. Hes not the technical surgeon that CP3 is, nor is he the efficiency darling of the advanced stats crowd, but what Westbrook did was rack up numbers nobody thought we would ever see again back-to-back seasons averaging a triple-double

Westbrook came into his own after Durant bolted OKC for the Bay Area. Westbrook re-signed in the small market of Oklahoma City then proceeded to dominate the ball and give the fans there a show like nobody had seen before 147 triple-doubles during the decade.

What fans in OKC and everywhere appreciated is that nobody played harder than Westbrook he went out every night not playing like a superstar but like a guy on a 10-day contract trying to keep his job. Westbrook only knew one speed and that was fifth gear, pedal-to-the-metal, all-out.

Westbrook won an MVP award on the first of those back-to-back triple-double seasons, racked up a couple of scoring titles (2015 and 2017) and gave us countless highlights during the decade. Theres not going to be another guard like him because theres not going to be another athlete like him.

An NBA Finals MVP with two different teams in the same decade is a rare feat, one that requires a special combination of play on both ends of the court Leonard at his peak is as good a two-way player as the decade saw.

We tend to think back to the 2014 Spurs and picture the last title of the Duncan/Parker/Ginobili era, or to view that team as playing the most beautiful, elevated team basketball the league has ever seen (thats how I remember them). However, Leonard was the reason Gregg Popovich has a fifth ring. Leonard averaged 23.7 points and 9.3 rebounds a game while shooting 68 percent in the final three games of the series, all while frustrating LeBron at the other end with his defense. Leonard did that at the age of 22, before he even made an All-Star team.

In 2018-19, Leonard brought the word load management into the NBA lexicon and showed why it mattered he rested his quadricep tendon and opposing knee for 22 games during the regular season. Then in the playoffs he dominated 30.5 points and 9.1 rebounds with a 61.9 true shooting percentage, he hit one of the defining shots of the decade and played spectacular defense leading Toronto to the franchises first title.

When healthy, Leonard is as good as anyone in the game, a two-time NBA Champion, a two-time Defensive player of the year, and a three-time All-Star. He helped define the player movement of 2019 and his impact will carry over to the next decade on a few levels.

At the start of the decade, Harden was the sixth man on a team everyone thought would dominate the decade. By the end of it, he was an unstoppable scoring machine that generated a combination of admiration and frustration across the league. And throughout it all, his beard was spectacular.

James Harden was the Sixth Man of the Year, playing a critical role on a Thunder team that reached the Finals in 2012, with Westbrook and Durant as the stars. By the start of the next season, Harden was traded to Houston because of a ginormous tax bill coming to small market OKC. The Thunder got back Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, and a 2013 first-round pick that became Steven Adams; but by 2016 Hardens Rockets were knocking the Thunder out of the playoffs.

In Houston, Harden developed into the arguably the best scorer the game has ever seen the perfect analytics player for a modern era, taking and hitting efficient shots. His ability to hit a step-back three, or drive the lane and draw a foul, put defenders in an almost impossible position as Harden racked up a couple of scoring titles (and is on his way to a third). He also won an MVP and has been a perennial candidate for the award in the second half of the decade.

Not all fans love his style of play, but hes unquestionably become one of the games greats, an offensive machine for which there is no good answer. He will be one of the players that defined the decade.

We tend to forget sometimes that Durant is as good a scorer as the game has seen, with his 7-foot frame, high release and accuracy well beyond the three-point line, hes nearly impossible to defend. Starting with the 2010 season, Durant won four scoring titles in five seasons while playing in Oklahoma City, and picked up an MVP trophy along the way.

However, he wasnt winning and he wasnt happy, which led to one of the big franchise-changing moments of the decade Durant bolting OKC for Golden State, forming a super team as good as any the game had seen. Durant became a villain in the eyes of some for doing what those same people always say they want players to do prioritize winning over personal glory and it ate at him a little, but he kept winning.

On the court, Durant became the guy the Warriors needed in the final couple rounds of the playoffs. Thats when defenses could shut down favorite plays and force teams away from their preferred options, but the Warriors got the ball to Durant and he took over. Durant picked up two titles and two Finals MVP, rounding out his resume.

Durant left the West Coast for Brooklyn at the end of the decade but has yet to set foot on the court for the Nets because of a torn Achilles. How he recovers from that will help define the start of the next decade.

But he was a force in this one.

Curry unquestionably has an eye-popping resume during this decade three NBA titles, two MVP awards, a scoring title, and being a six-time All-Star.

None of that is what lands Curry this high on our best of the decade list hes here because he changed how the game is played.

His shooting range, his handles, his gravity to pull defenders to him spaced out the floor and defenses in a way nobody had ever seen before. Curry changed the geometry of the NBA and spawned imitators everywhere from the point guard in Atlanta to playgrounds and driveways of New York. And San Diego. And everywhere in between. Curry changed the idea of what was a good shot in the NBA, and with that changed the game.

Curry also was the driving force behind the culture in Golden State that led to the most dominant team of the decade three titles and five straight Finals appearances. Curry practiced and played a selfless attitude that inspired teammates to do the same, willingly giving up good looks for great. The joy the Warriors played with sprang from the fountain of love for the game Curry embodied. The Warriors were fun to watch because Curry was fun to watch.

Injuries and roster changes had the Warriors ending the decade on a down note, but nobody sane is counting Curry out in the future. He had defied expectations from Davidson until now, and thats one thing he will not change.

This decade was the peak of a Mount Rushmore NBA player the man went to eight straight NBA Finals, at times carrying teams that otherwise had no business on that stage to those lofty heights. He also scored more points in the decade than any other player, had brilliant assists, and made timely defensive plays. LeBron can do anything on a basketball court.

LeBron defined the game off-the-court as well. His Decision to join Miami sparked the player empowerment era that nearly a decade later led to the NBAs wildest offseason ever in 2019 (including Anthony Davis coming to join him). LeBron picked up two rings and two Finals MVPs in Miami, but he also came of age there in terms of learning what it takes to win, not just from himself but an organization.

LeBron then sealed his legacy by returning to Cleveland and leading it to a franchise-defining and region defining NBA title.

LeBron is finishing out the decade (and likely his career) trying to add to his legacy by adding to the storied Lakers history, but he also is there to grow his brand something other players look up to LeBron for. Hes the greatest player of a generation three MVPs in this decade, too but he has parlayed that into a business empire that reaches well off the court and sports and into the world of entertainment (that includes Space Jam 2, coming soon to a theater near you). LeBron became more than just a player, he did it on his own terms with his own people, and other players want to emulate that as much as his on-court exploits.

LeBron was the best player of the decade. No doubt. Hes one of the greatest ever to play the game, and we need to savor watching him play and look back in amazement at what he did this decade. Because there will not ever be another one.

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LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and the top 10 players of the 2010s - Yahoo Sports

Booked solid: The most anticipated books of 2020 – The Boston Globe

Loveboat, Taipei, by Abigail Hing Wen (HarperTeen) In a young-adult fiction landscape rife with outlandish dystopian premises, Wens debut novel for teens sounds truly bonkers in the best way possible. A group of frisky teenagers from wildly different backgrounds are thrown together in a summer program called Loveboat. Without adult supervision, they dance all night and hook up with great alacrity, chugging sake all the while. Romance blooms among the debauch, of course, and friendship, too. Out Jan. 7.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Weiner (FSG/MCD) Quite possibly a once-in-a-generation kind of thing, Weiners thoughtful, wry account of her experiences working in the tech sphere is, by any measure, the most anticipated book of 2020. Not only is there an Elizabeth Banks-helmed feature film adaptation in the works, but the book has already generated the kind of lavish praise that all but guarantees its inclusion in year-end best-of lists. Out Jan. 14.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, by Michael Zapata (Hanover Square Press) A mix of realist and speculative styles, this ambitious literary debut has earned Zapata comparisons to Jesmyn Ward. The plot spanning not only generations and continents, but universes, too follows a family beset by tragedies both personal and historical, leading the reader to the flooded streets of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Out Feb. 4.

18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics, by Bruce Goldfarb (Sourcebooks) Frances Glessner Lee, an heiress who died in 1962, became widely known to true crime fans in the current century with the publication of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a collection of photographs examining Glessner Lees grisly crime scene dioramas, still used in police training, and a 2012 documentary, Of Dolls and Murder, narrated by John Waters. In his deep dive, Goldfarb gives Glessner Lee her due, cementing her place as a pioneering forensic scientist. Out Feb. 4.

Apartment, by Teddy Wayne (Bloomsbury) Wayne follows three arch, gimlet-eyed novels about the vagaries of our late-capitalist fake meritocracy with a story of two MFA students sharing an apartment in New York City. Waynes previous novel, Loner, currently being made into an HBO series, chronicled Harvard undergraduate life, while Apartment takes place at Columbia University, but both take on masculinity and class struggles with precision and verve. Out Feb. 25.

The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich (Harper) Erdrich won the National Book Award with her 2012 novel, The Round House, and the National Book Critics Circle Award with her 2016 novel, La Rose. The Night Watchman, her 17th novel for adults, is set on a reservation in rural North Dakota of the 1950s and is inspired by the life of Erdrichs grandfather, a night watchman and Native American activist who fought against the dastardly deeds of the United States government. Out March 3.

The Herd, by Andrea Bartz (Ballantine) Amid WeWorks corporate implosion and the rise of female empowerment-themed rent-a-desk outfits that serve complementary oat milk, Bartz offers a uniquely timely whodunit set in an exclusive, womens only co-working space in New York, following her best-selling, critically acclaimed debut mystery, The Lost Night. Out March 24.

Bubblegum, by Adam Levin (Doubleday) When Adam Levins 1,000-plus-page debut, The Instructions, was published nearly a decade ago, critics swooned over his ability to write something both long and engaging. His latest, although not quite 800 pages, has a tantalizing setting: a contemporary in which the Internet does not exist. Those who live in this world are instead besotted with a mass-produced, highly interactive robot named Curio who seems much nicer than Mark Zuckerberg. Out April 14.

Death in Her Hands, by Otessa Moshfegh (Penguin) Hometown girl and experimental fiction writer Otessa Moshfegh came to national attention with her thriller Eileen, her uniquely dark and gripping first attempt at genre writing. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her last novel, won her an even wider audience with its story of a morbidly depressed woman who drugs herself to sleep. Her forthcoming novel, billed as a work of metaphysical suspense, centers on an elderly widow shaken by a cryptic note left in the creepy woods near her new house. Out April 21.

Citizen Baby: My Vote by Megan E. Bryant and Daniel Prosterman, illustrated by Micah Player (Penguin) Common wisdom dictates that young people would radically change the face of contemporary American politics if more of them stepped into a voting booth. While this thought delights some and horrifies others, all can agree that voting babies would cause a next-level upset at the federal level. (A Goldfish in every bowl?) Bryant and Prosterman dont lobby to lower the voting age to the single digits. Instead, they provide an adorable explanation of the voting process for those still in car seats, with an emphasis on stickers. Out May 5.

The Living Dead, by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus When filmmaker, societal critic, and zombie pioneer Romero died in 2017, he left behind the manuscript of the novel hed been working on in his final days. He felt confined by the constraints of filmmaking, so he started a zombie novel (naturally), one set in the present day and completed by rising horror novelist Kraus, who wrote The Shape of Water with Guillermo Del Toro. Out June 9.

Eugenia Williamson is a Chicago-based writer and editor.

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Booked solid: The most anticipated books of 2020 - The Boston Globe

The Best Stand-up Comedy Specials of the 2010s – Decider

Have you enjoyed this decade of peak comedy boom dot com?

We began with only a few outlets, namely Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime, doling out only a few hours each year to stand-up comedians to present their specials. We end the 2010s with technology and open platforms such as YouTube and Amazon allowing anyone anywhere in the world to put out his or her own special. Hundreds chose to do so this year. Thousands, if not millions more, also have established round-the-clock broadcasting of their musings to the void via Instagram Stories. Nobodys stopping you from adding your voice, your jokes to the maelstrom.

But if the wild, wild Web has no sheriffs, then how will we ever determine, if not also remember, which comedy specials were truly special?

Im no white knight, but as someone whos been paying rather close attention to the comedy industry for the entirety of the decade, Ive been deputized with the authority to take stock of what stand-ups have wrought for us from 2010-2019.

Comedians have opened up and played with the form of the hour special, even deconstructed it, and put it back together again.

Ali Wong showed us that women didnt need to stop telling jokes just because they were pregnant. Bo Burnham went from Comedy Central in 2010, to free on YouTube in 2013, to streaming on Netflix in 2016, to directing and producing other comedians in their specials, all the while self-reflecting on the very nature of entertainment. Hannah Gadsby forced comedians to confront their own roles in exaggerating their lives for the sake of laughs, and whether its all worth it.

Hannibal Buress convinced us all to take another look at Bill Cosby.

Louis C.K., who went viral at the end of the 2000s thanks to a bit about the amazing power of cell phones on Late Night with Conan OBrien, opened up the business so comedians could cut out the middlemen, and helped bring Tig Notaro to mainstream attention in doing so, but by failing to acknowledge his own character defects, he brought himself down from his award-winning mountaintop.

We also enjoyed so many great documentaries that took us inside comedians we thought we already knew but didnt, and illuminated the comedy experience for anyone who didnt realize how much work and struggle went into the business. These included Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Conan OBrien Cant Stop, The Bitter Buddha, Women Arent Funny, the I Am Comic trilogy, Pauly Shore Stands Alone, Call Me Lucky, Gilbert, The Problem With Apu, and Jim and Andy.

Id write separate entries for all of these, and more, if I could. Here are 10 worth mentioning once more.

10

One of our most unheralded comedic voices spent much of the 2000s writing and producing episodes of The Simpsons, but emerged back on the stand-up scene with this 2013 special, first released by New Wave (which later became the businesss behemoth, Comedy Dynamics) and currently available on Amazon Prime. Gould possesses what the old folks would call a rapier wit, and demonstrates his prowess right from the get-go, reminding us that you can joke about anything..with proper contextso lets start with an AIDS joke, rape joke and a 9/11 joke. Theres a still-apt political observation about how Americas divisions are rural/urban, now timeless stories about Bob Hope and Stephen Hawking, and what remains the best take on reality television. To wit: You will never experience less reality than when youre watching a reality show, Gould says. Youre watching people who arent actors, put into situations by people who arent writers, and theyre second-guessing how they think youd like to see them behave if this were a real situation. Which its not. And you are passively observing this. Youre watching an amateur production of nothing. Its like a photo of a drawing of a hologramIts The Beatles of wasting your time. He gets into some offensive bits, too, but presents them with a self-awareness that would serve anyone well into todays so-called cancel culture.

Where to stream Dana Gould: I Know It's Wrong

9

Do you remember Chill? No, not Netflix and chill. Chill was a pay-per-view platform that got into the comedy special game for a hot minute, offering exclusive hours from the likes of Kyle Kinane, Doug Benson and Maria Bamford. You can still find ChillComedy on YouTube, but the site itself is up for sale. Bamfords Special Special Special blew the doors open on what was possible for comedians, not only in terms of content but also in terms of presentation. Imagine performing for your parents in your living room, with an opening act (Jackie Kashian), musical accompaniment (Wayne Federman), camera crew and multiple interruptions, all while you pull back the curtain on the similarities between pot clinics and hip churches, the vacuousness of celebrity worship, and your own struggles with mental illness. By confronting every comedians fears, Bamford began overcoming her own, leading to a beloved Netflix series (Lady Dynamite) and a bigger-budget spin on the idea that good jokes delivered well can work in just about any setting (2017s Old Baby).

Where to stream Maria Bamford: The Special Special Special

8

Dave Chappelle released four separate stand-up specials on Netflix in 2017. Two of them had been collecting dust in his storage until the streaming giant paid Chappelle handsomely for them; another outing was rushed out at that years end to capitalize on the start of the #MeToo movement. Which leaves Equanimity,which alone rises up to meet its textbook definition, all while giving fans insight into the comic legend we may not have previously known. As I wrote then: It takes mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation, to not only acknowledge where your jokes may have rightly offended people, but also then add on more jokes to acknowledge why you come to your conclusions, and have everyone laughing along with you. It also captures the comedian at a time when he could comprehend that audiences had become more sensitive, without becoming overly sensitive himself. Instead, Chappelle looked into the darkness of the moment and still saw hope for all of us. He should rewatch this hour himself.

Stream Dave Chappelle: Equanimity on Netflix

7

Tig Notaro had quite the decade, personally and professionally. Receiving a cancer diagnosis might not have been the best thing to ever happen to her, especially since she has gotten married and become a parent. But her ability, time and again, to immediately find comedy in what everyone else saw as tragedy helped catapult her into the limelight. For all the shock value that came from her EP, Live, or going topless for HBO, or using her Amazon Prime series to force Louis C.K.s secret out of hiding before the #MeToo movement really gained momentum, my favorite work of Notaros from this decade is her Showtime documentary from 2015. A tour movie with fellow comic Jon Dore along for the ride, Knock Knock shows us the secret sauce of Notaros comedy magic.

6

Whatever you think of Kevin Hart now, its important you go back to Laugh At My Pain, his 2011 concert film that doubled as a documentary about the movie stars upbringing on the streets of Philadelphia. His pre-show chant was telling then, even more so now: Everybody want to be famous. Nobody want to put the work in! This film shows how much work Hart put into making himself a star. And his stand-up material illuminates how his personal struggles with his parents and his marriages have left him wanting to do better on the homefront, too. This is the special that proves Hart earned his spot at the top. He even reminds us that one celebritys catchphrase is not the one celebritys alone. Alright, alright, alright!

Where to stream Kevin Hart: Laugh At My Pain

5

Bill Burr had quite a decade, with four Netflix specials to his credit. But its the hour he recorded for Comedy Central at the beginning of the 2010s that now seems ahead of its time. In what would become a recurring bit about the need to thin the Earths population, Burr joked here that were the only species that saves the weak. His observations about how different races place their curse words in different syntax could be taught today to comedians who worry about cancel culture coming for them. And Burr is definitely in front of the curve in worrying about information privacy in the digital age, delivering a fresher take on automated checkout machines than some comedians nine years later. If you watched this years Paper Tiger, and then come back to Let It Go, youll see how Burr has been wrestling with his anger issues and knows whats coming down the pike for him. His treatise on toxic masculinity, or in Burrs words of 2010, the masculine threat of What are you, a fag?! remains relevant today, too.

Where to stream Bill Burr: Let It Go

4

If any single comedian proves that cancel culture is b.s., its Anthony Jeselnik. Perhaps all comedians need to inhabit an onstage persona so audiences can tell whats a joke and whats a sincere observation? No. How about comedians just work harder and funnier so there is no doubt. Jeselnik covers his bases, regardless. This special has everything: Death. Child molestation. Animal cruelty. Serial killing. Catholic school. Childhood cancer. Guns. Domestic violence. Neglect. Poverty. 9/11. Racism. Finding dead bodies. Shutting down abortion clinics. The Challenger space shuttle. Hitler. More death. Nothings off limits. Not for strong joke tellers. Its not about timing. Its about delivery. Jeselnik proves that over and over. And he even got us to think twice before typing out thoughts and prayers. Because those deliver nothing but empty words.

Stream Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers on Netflix

3

Colin Quinn has devoted one-man shows to the history of the world, the U.S. Constitution, and even the current divisions among the United States between red states and blue states. But its his 2016 show, which arrived on Netflix less than two weeks after the presidential election, which finds him at his most focused and insightful, narrowing in on the Great American Melting Pot story through the timeline of how immigrants and changing demographics made New York City the be-all, end-all for America. Its still the place to make it. Quinn reminds us just how true that is, to so many millions and billions around the world.

Stream Colin Quinn: The New York Story on Netflix

2

For his body of work, John Mulaney is our top comedian of the decade, from his contributions to the SNL canon with Stefon through his two solo efforts on Netflix (The Comeback Kid, and Kid Gorgeous at Radio City) and his two-hander with Nick Kroll that was a hit on Broadway and Netflix (Oh, Hello!). Mulaney offers masterclasses in bit construction and delivery, with so many classics to choose from. Just in describing Donald J. Trump alone! Mulaney could joke about him a decade ago as a hobos idea of what a rich man is, to now comparing him to something more serious, if not also amusing to imagine: a horse set loose in a hospital. Mulaneys 2012 special, New In Town, was his first, originally airing on Comedy Central. Looking back on it now, hes showing off all of the tools he has at his disposal as a comedian. Comparing Law & Order SVU to crime-solving in the pre-DNA age. Realizing the meanest people alive are 13-year-olds. Imagining himself as a Def Jam comedian (sincerely, not ironically). And declaring any comparisons between midgets and n-words as a nonstarter well before several other comedians dropped the idea into their own specials. He also casually and constantly checks his own status and sensibilities to remind us whos at the butt of most of these jokes. Its Mulaney. Hes a national treasure. And this is his origin story.

Where to stream John Mulaney: New In Town

1

You may wish you knew what George Carlin or Richard Pryor would have to say about whats going on in todays world. For me, its Patrice ONeal. Its always Patrice. The big guy who grew up in Boston died in 2011, just a week before he would have turned 42. He had a propensity for telling you exactly what he thought and not suffering fools gladly, even if said fools held the keys to his show business career. And yet, in 2010, Comedy Central captured ONeal in all of his glory with Elephant in the Room.You could watch it today, dated as it is, and still relate to everything in it. His opening crowd work segues seamlessly into a pointed take on how long society will care about a missing woman, depending solely on her racial and ethnic background. From there, ONeal takes on our ambivalence over the Obama legacy (despite it still being his first term as president), the softening of professional football, and more. And by more, I mean ONeal already had a hot take on masculinity and sexual harassment, offering his own solutions that may sound graphic at times, but also recognize the need for female empowerment. He was a truth-teller. Thankfully, much of his truth remains timeless.

Where to stream Patrice O'Neal: Elephant In The Room

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The Best Stand-up Comedy Specials of the 2010s - Decider

32 students receive scholarship from Schaeffler India – Times of India

PUNE: As many as 32 students received the Hope engineering scholarship by the Schaeffler India Limited. The scholarships are given to meritorious students from financially disadvantaged families, who aspire to build a career in the engineering field. Special preference was reserved for women candidates who had applied for this program. The initiative was implemented with Buddy4study foundation.A statement issued by Schaeffler India, said that, the scholarship is part of empowerment of students through education. To avail the grant, students from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu applied through a detailed online process. The selection was based on candidates fulfilling the eligibility criteria and going through a personal interview session conducted by a jury of eminent members. '; var randomNumber = Math.random(); var isIndia = (window.geoinfo && window.geoinfo.CountryCode === 'IN') && (window.location.href.indexOf('outsideindia') === -1 ); console.log(isIndia && randomNumber Vice-president, human resource, Schaeffler India, Santanu Ghoshal said, The youth of the country must be given equal opportunities to build a nation that is self-sustaining and progressive. The scholarship is aimed at helping promising youth especially young women pursue a career in the fields of science and engineering."The selected candidates will be supported with their engineering education expenses every year till the time they graduate successfully from college. We intend to stay engaged with these students during their study period through mentorship, study tour, counselling. However, their career decision is entirely their choice, said Ghoshal.A total of 32 students have been selected from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu for this program. Besides the scholarship initiative, Schaeffler India also runs the Schaeffler technical enhancement program in Pune and Hosur as well as other initiatives, to empower the underprivileged youth through education and skill development.

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32 students receive scholarship from Schaeffler India - Times of India

Squirrel AI Learning appears at 2019 Slush Helsinki as the Only Invited Chinese Education Company with Derek Haoyang Li sharing the Concept of…

Founded in Helsinki, Finland in 2008 and rated as a top global startup and technology industry conference by Forbes, Slush is about science and technology, game, the Internet, electronic technology, music, etc., serving as a platform where start-ups and technological talents get in touch with international Investors, large enterprises and media.

At the 2019 Slush Helsinki, the founder of Squirrel AI Learning Derek Li said, "As the first AI adaptive education brand in the entire Asia-Pacific region, Squirrel AI Learning has developed and owns the region's first advanced algorithm-based AI adaptive learning engine with completely independent intellectual property rights. Powered by AI technology, the learning engine is used to solve many problems in China's traditional education industry, such as the uneven distribution of educational resources and the low learning efficiency of students. AI education will eventually grow into personalized education and provide every student with a learning solution and an AI expert teacher of his own."

At the 2019 Slush Helsinki, DAVID SIMAS, CEO of the Obama Foundation, briefed the other attendees on the values and responsibilities upheld by the Obama Foundation: The Obama Foundation shoulders the mission of improving people's quality of life by communicating and cooperating with the world, promoting young leaders to change the world, cultivating and supporting young leaders that are able to provide solutions for global sustainable development, and exploring a way to provide opportunities and resources for them in their future career.

Famous venture investor Michael Moritz, a partner of Sequoia Capital, gave a profound insight into technology entrepreneurship, "Economic fluctuations provide a golden chance to establish a company." In times of economic fluctuations, users are more willing to risk trying a start-up's productprovided that they think this start-up's product can help them improve efficiency and reduce costs. It is the best time to sow when other people are in panic and frustrated. Reverse thinking helps to reap a high payoff.

DIANE BRYANT, former COO of the Google Cloud and incumbent President of Intel, expressed her view on the hottest topic of science and technologyAI, "Today, AI remains like a baby clamoring for food. The academia is exploring and researching tirelessly. This area still has endless potential for development."

AI Empowerment: AI makes education more efficient

Founded in 2014, Squirrel AI Learning is China's first AI unicorn company to apply an AI adaptive learning technology to K12 education. It is also a top Chinese AI company that has earned a place in the world's scientific and technological circles, and been named one of the Top Ten high-growth AI companies by Deloitte.

At the conference, Derek Li pointed out, "The AI technology can revolutionize the education industry, which has remained unchanged for hundreds of years, and provide every child with a best teacher. This is a dream of educating people. It used to be an unattainable dream, but now we have a chance to make it come true. In the manner of AI + education, Squirrel AI Learning helps to enhance children's learning capacity, learning method, learning thinking, creativity and imagination, thus increasing their learning efficiency. That is of great value to the development of the whole society."

There are many problems with China's traditional education industry, such as the uneven distribution of educational resources. The severe unevenness is caused by the great developmental gap between the coastal areas and the inland areas;serious shortage of excellent teachers makes it impossible for most students to gain high-quality learning resources; the traditional teaching is a kind of test-oriented education, which features non-variant learning content and learning progress, with individual differences ignored; children are just taught how to acquire knowledge, but their ability, thinking and learning method fail to be developed.

For a long time, Chinese students have been under a much heavier learning burden than that on their counterparts in other counties, but conversely, their inventiveness is much weaker than their counterparts in developed countries after they grow up. The main reason is that Chinese students learn inefficiently and think in a rigid way. They repeat learning while solving hundreds or thousands of examination questions, but are not clear about the range of their own ability value.

According to Derek Li, in this context, Squirrel AI Learning has chosen to develop intelligent adaptive education to empower China's education industry with the AI technology.

The Squirrel AI Learning adaptive education system can split a knowledge point at the super-Nano-level, e.g., the concept of rational number can be split into 20 knowledge points. Thus, the system is able to get a clearer understanding of a student's mastery of the knowledge points and thereby detect his weak points accurately.

According to Derek Li, the Squirrel AI Learning system is equipped with a low priority pool, which can dynamically sort all knowledge points learned simultaneously with easy-to-learn knowledge points put first and difficult knowledge points stored in the isolation pool. For students with a poor foundation, they can lay a solid foundation for their own learning and develop confidence first, and then enhance their learning enthusiasm slowly to receive personalized education in an orderly way.

Squirrel AI Learning also splits students' learning capacity and method, making them "definable, measurable and teachable". Then the MCM systems can detect their different learning capacities and rates and weak points, thus drawing a clear portrait for them. Not only can students master effective knowledge points, but they will also have their creativity and imagination enhanced under the guidance of the Squirrel AI teacher with their learning potential fully tapped.

Squirrel AI Learning's independently developed MCM system can truly make quality-oriented education a reality. By subdividing each learning thought, the system can detect students' model of thinking, learning capacity and learning methodology. For students with the same exam performance, after the end of evaluation and detection, the MCM system can recognize their different learning capacities and rates and weak points, thus drawing a clear portrait for them. Squirrel AI's MCM system can not only help students with learning, but also improving their lifelong thinking ability and method so as to tap their potential and make up for their weaknesses. Only in this way can they be fashioned into talented people.

According to Derek Li, different professions require different MCMs. Knowledge acquired may be forgotten, but capacity training needs to be continuously improved all the life. In the MCM system, AI helps every student build a model of thinking, learning capacity and learning methodology. That is the only way to fashion students into more outstanding talents.

Facing the unfairness of education and the disparate development of educational resources, AI + education provides a new way to solve the above social issue. "There is a hot social topic: It is increasingly impossible for a humble family to give birth to an honorable son. This is because the educational resources in remote areas cannot be compared with those in first-tier cities. Even in the first-tier cities, there is a great difference in education quality between the best schools and average schools. In Squirrel AI Learning's system, every student has an AI expert teacher, which offers one-on-one tutoring to the student according to his personal situation to help realize the fairness of education. Wherever you are, Beijing or Tibet, you can enjoy the best educational resources on the Internet.

Derek Li points out that for AI+ education, what matters most is the upgrading of AI technology, so only consistent technical support is able to bring the features of AI+ education into full play. As for the development of AI technology, Squirrel AI Learning has put in much time and energy: Squirrel AI Learning cooperates with Stanford Research International (SRI) in developing techniques, and has established a joint laboratory of AI adaptive learning with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences; this year, it set up a joint laboratory with the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). All core scientists of Squirrel AI Learning come from global AI education unicorn companies such as ALEKS and RealizeIt. Tom Mitchell, the luminary on machine learning and former Dean of the School of Computer Science, CMU, serves as a chief scientist of AI while Ken Koedinger, a professor at the Department of Computer and Psychology, CMU, serves as a chief learning scientist.

Owing to its concentrated research on AI technology, Squirrel AI Learning has carried off many awards and honors, such as the Rise Award, a top European technology award, the Reimagine Education Asian Sliver Award, the "Oscar Award in the educational circles", and TOP 30 SAIL (Superior AI Leader) by WAIC (World AI Conference), becoming a benchmarking enterprise in the AI adaptive education industry.

Data show that so far, Squirrel AI Learning has set up more than 2,300 learning centers in more than 700 cities and counties in more than 20 provinces of China, benefiting nearly 2 million students and bringing quality educational resources to tens of thousands of families.

"Student-oriented education, including teaching in accordance with students' aptitude, has been the ultimate aim of education for thousands of years. It is also Squirrel AI Learning's ultimate pursuit," said Derek Li. After the conference, he talked about Chinese education and Finnish education with Esko Aho, former Premier of Finland, and about the concept of personalized education with Tarmo Toikkanen, one of the master souls of Finnish education. He also communed with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director-General of the Finnish Ministry of Education, on the possibility of education cooperation between Squirrel AI Learning and Finland for the purpose that more school-age students around the world can have access to the results of AI + education.

SOURCE Squirrel AI Learning

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Squirrel AI Learning appears at 2019 Slush Helsinki as the Only Invited Chinese Education Company with Derek Haoyang Li sharing the Concept of...

Where Has Facebook Billionaire Sheryl Sandbergs $320 Million In Philanthropic Giving Gone To? – Forbes

Sheryl Sandberg.

Facebooks Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg quietly gave a total of $127 million to two of her charitable vehicles over the course of 2019. For someone whose net worth Forbes pegs at $1.6 billion, parting with 8% of her fortune in one year seems generous. But heres the thing: We dont know the end purpose of most of those funds.

My giving this year helps support and empower women across the globe through LeanIn.Org, helps people experiencing loss build resilience through OptionB.Org, and provides hard working college students with financial support and mentorship through the Dave Goldberg Scholars Program, which honors the legacy of my husband, said Sandberg in a statement to Forbes.

But based on an analysis of public documents, it looks like the majority of her charitable giving since 2015$230 million worth of donated Facebook shareshas gone to donor-advised funds, a controversial giving vehicle that is the equivalent of giving to a black box. Whats more: Very little of her giving to date has actually ended up in LeanIn and OptionB.

LeanIn focuses on female empowerment, which grew out of Sandbergs 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and The Will To Lead. LeanIn has helped create 45,000 LeanIn Circles in 172 countries around the world, which facilitate women coming together to exchange ideas and encourage one another. Sandberg started OptionB in 2017 after her second book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, in the wake of the unexpected death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, at age 47 in 2015. OptionB, which focuses on helping people build resilience, also hosts support groups and offers educational information and research for people dealing with personal hardships and loss.

From 2013 through 2017, LeanIn and OptionB received $12 million from Sandberg via The Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation. This family foundation is an operating foundation, meaning it exists only to fund the operations of LeanIn and OptionB. It does not donate to outside charities.

According to the foundations 2017 tax filings, the most recent year available, $3.3 million went to LeanIn and $3.5 million to OptionB. The foundation also spent another $1.2 million on communications and over $300,000 in consulting fees to Megan Rooney, a former speechwriter to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

It seems like a huge portion of the proceeds are used for essentially public relations, says Alan Cantor, a consultant to nonprofits. I guess I would question whether this whole thing is largely an exercise in positioning [Sheryl].

Beth Parker, chief communications officer for Sandbergs foundation, says that communications is a large part of LeanIns work because its main focus is to educate. Lean In was founded to change attitudes about gender bias, Parker explains. We arent a direct support organization like other nonprofits. We put a heavy emphasis on communication because educating others is central to our mission.

Still, that leaves hundreds of millions of Sandbergs charitable dollars that have gone unaccounted for. According to documents filed with the Securities Exchange Commission, Sandberg has given $230 million worth of Facebook shares to donor-advised funds since 2015. A spokesperson states Sandberg has given more than that in her lifetime and the figure is substantially higher, but Forbes was unable to independently verify. With only $12 million transferred to LeanIn and OptionB, however, that leaves at least another $218 million that we might never learn the details about. This lack of transparency about where the giving ends ups is one of the biggest critiques of donor-advised funds, also called DAFs.

The money can just sit there or it can go to controversial causes that [Sheryl] might not want her name associated with, says Cantor.

DAFs have also come under fire due to their very flexible requirements. There is no rule for when and how much donors have to give away assets in a DAF. But it still allows benefactors to claim a large tax break for what counts as a gift to a charitable foundation. Sandberg has transferred Facebook shares to a DAF every November in four out of the past five years.

Can you imagine if all this money went to organizations that actually did the work? poses Cantor.The people who run nonprofits, like the people who actually feed children, house families, conduct research, put on community theater they hate donor-advised funds. Because now, major donors are jumping into DAFs instead of giving them $10,000 or $100,000 a year.

Its possible that Sandberg is regularly giving money away from her DAFs but its equally possible that she is not. Parker, of Sandbergs foundation, declined to share how much the Facebook executive distributes to nonprofits from her DAF each year. And without more accountability and reporting around these kinds of charitable vehicles, the public will never know how much she gave and where shes given to.

That might change soon for the billionaire executive. In late 2018, Sandberg began diversifying her giving strategy when she announced the creation of the Sandberg Goldberg Charitable Support Fund. It is a grant-making foundationmeaning it is required to file financial information to the government and give away 5% of its assets to charities every year. Its been a little over a year since Sandberg announced the creation of this foundation, and it still doesnt have a website. Further, tax filings detailing the grants by the foundation likely wont be available until 2021.

According to Parker, the new foundation will further support Sheryls philanthropic mission. Her philanthropy has centered around causes related to womens issues/gender equality, poverty alleviation, hunger relief, and education. Sandberg donated $87 million in cash and securities in 2019 to this new foundation a gift which was only revealed after Forbes inquired about another gift of Sandbergs this year found in public filings: a $41 million transfer in Facebook shares to a DAF.

Donations outside of Sandbergs gifts to LeanIn and OptionB have been reported this year as well, including a $1 million gift to Planned Parenthood to support its advocacy work and a $2.5 million pledge to the Anti-Defamation League in October to combat hate and bias in the United States and in Europe.

Only time will tell where the money will ultimately go. But the creation of a new foundation that doesnt exist only to fund her two nonprofits, but other charities as well, will hopefully be a new chapter of giving for Sandberg.

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Where Has Facebook Billionaire Sheryl Sandbergs $320 Million In Philanthropic Giving Gone To? - Forbes

Objective, the development and personal growth – INDONEWYORK

Having talent is not only to have the people, but rather to ensure that they are well, so that they can develop their maximum potential. Therefore, the investment in talent should not only be in terms of training or development, but also in reconciliation, autonomy to decide how they want to work and in health.

So of blunt shows Santiago Insula, director of hr and Corporate Responsibility at Zurich in Spain, to argue the bet that makes the international insurer for the personal development of its employees. To enhance the talent, we need to give autonomy or space for the person to decide how you want to develop your activity, he adds.

In fact, one of the pillars of its CSR strategy is the commitment with their partners, to promote the reconciliation, satisfaction, and personal growth of the teams. To do this, as pointed out by Cristina Gomis, director of Corporate Responsibility, Zurich considers it essential to support the initiatives of interest headed by its employees and to promote a healthy lifestyle. And are not empty words. For example, the company gives the utmost importance to the volunteer as one of the best ways of development and personal growth. Hence that has, for years, with the Club Volunteering.

Active on the whole national territory, and chaired by Vicente Cancio, CEO of the insurance group in Spain, this club develops actions to provide value to the community, the person and the company, organizing its activities around four pillars: childhood, environment, people at risk of social exclusion and skills.

75% of the collaborators has welcomed the plan 'flexwork' to work 20 hours outside of the office.

Among the initiatives most striking include those directed to the training and empowerment of young people and adolescents, which is funded by the Z Zurich Foundation. It is the case of get Ready for the life400 children have already received training to deal with risks that are well on their way to maturity, the participation in the FP Dual specialty Insurance (85 students) and the programs of the Foundation Junior Achievement (2.231) that foster the entrepreneurial spirit and professional orientation. In addition, the company is promoting company's Corporate Scholarship Program of ESADE and member of the management Committee of Zurich collaborate with the Foundation Princess of Girona as mentors to young people.

Emphasizes the participation of volunteers of Zurich in other activities such as the walk of solidarity in favour of people in vulnerable situation, organized by the Obra Social San Juan de Dios; in the collection and organization of toys donated in the Christmas campaign of daydreaming or in the collection of school supplies led by the Fundaci Pere Tarrs. Another example is their involvement in a project of the Foundation I Want to Work, who seeks to advise on styling and confidence to women in long-term unemployment, with a job interview imminent.

there Are 50 initiatives in which they participated, by 2018, more than 550 people, which they developed in total 8.844 volunteer hours, 500 more than the previous year.

a Good part of that dedication took place during the time of work that Zurich gives to its employees. And is that all the members of the company have the ability to allocate one day per year to any charitable cause.

The growth of the employees also promote an environment that facilitates that they give the best of themselves. Starting with the reconciliation of the personal and professional life that, according to the opinion from the organization, allows you to improve the performance and makes us an organization more productive. Hence the implementation of what is referred to as flexwork, which makes it possible to work up to 20 hours a week outside of the office. There are already more than 1,200 people work from anywhere and with freedom time, 75% of the total number of collaborators.

With the aim of promoting the culture of wellness in the work, the company also provides instruments and knowledge that contribute to improving the physical and emotional health of the people. On the one hand the staff receive training in health, nutrition and financial future, and on the other, have facilities for physical activities (yoga classes or pilates in working hours) and have a sports club, the Zurich Sports Club, which is scheduled annually in different careers. The employees ask for their participation in, a lot of solidarity, as the Magic Line-Sant Joan de Du or the Trailwalker of the Intermon Oxfam, and the company subsidizes the registration. In 2018, more than 1,300 employees benefited from these initiatives.

As indicated in the Santiago Island, in the insurer also boosts the development of talent. How? Applying the philosophy You are the CEO of your career, which is the responsibility of each professional and will be encouraged to identify their interests and to actively their professional development. It is also key to the program is The talent matter, in which managers and employees talk several times a year on setting goals, career, evolution and balance of the finished development, all in an environment that encourages the recognition.

In short, initiatives to the welfare of the people as a goal, a satisfaction that the company measured with surveys: help Us to identify the areas in which the employee does not feel comfortable, and in order to improve the effectiveness of our actions, concludes the director of Human Resources

To the development in Spain of some of the CSR activities is essential to the support of the Z Zurich Foundation. Is in charge of finance, for example, programs of corporate volunteering to empower young people, for which there is engaged an investment on the part of the institution, of 1.6 million between 2018 and 2021. In fact, according to remember Vicente Cancio in the Sustainability report 2018, the initiatives that promote the support of the youth would not be possible without your financial help. The CEO of the company in Spain refers to programmes to promote employability, such as Junior Achievement or the FP Dual insurance, and to get Ready for life, "a training for teens that delves into the causes of the youth unemployment through education in the prevention of risks at an early age".

in Addition, as a strategy to encourage the involvement of the template, the Z Zurich Foundation matches all contributions that employees make to charitable causes, which last year accounted for 32,000. Also, it translates into money the hours that workers spend annually to activactivities of volunteering, an amount that is donated to social causes that will be chosen among all. In 2018 the contribution exceeded the 26,000 euros, corresponding to 8.844 hours of volunteer work.

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Objective, the development and personal growth - INDONEWYORK

From The Big Short to Normal People: the books that defined the decade – The Guardian

2010The Big Short by Michael Lewis

We entered a new decade in largely gloomy fashion, still suffering from the ramifications of the global financial crisis two years before. No surprise then that Michael Lewiss The Big Short, which explained how Americas subprime mortgage crisis made a few people very rich and everyone else a lot poorer, struck a chord. Lewis is a literary whistleblower: a former Salomon Brothers employee who dished the dirt on his brash colleagues in 1989s Liars Poker and then went on to make a career as an explainer of complex economics and organisations to mass audiences who couldnt believe people got away with this stuff.

Were we feeling trapped, and in need of information and expertise to liberate ourselves? Other notable non-fiction of the year suggests so: Siddhartha Mukherjees biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies; Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristofs Half the Sky, a rallying cry against the global oppression of women. And in fiction, too, writers were grappling with constraints: those of marriage and convention in Jonathan Franzens Freedom; of literal incarceration in Emma Donoghues enormously successful Room, the story of the imprisonment and release of a boy and his mother; and of form itself in Jennifer Egans dizzying A Visit from the Goon Squad. Its final two chapters, one of which takes the shape of a PowerPoint presentation, are set in a time about 15 years from the books present day; in other words, not too far from now, which makes it ripe for rereading.

Further on in the decade, a certain cadre of people questioned our need for and tolerance of experts; but at its beginning, one expert trusted the general population to absorb and make sense of the complicated story of their own origins and social systems. An unpretentious distillation of human history that mixed anthropology, sociology, politics and geography, Yuval Noah Hararis doorstopper, Sapiens, found favour with readers keen for a digestible long view. First published in Hebrew this year and in Engish in 2014, it explained human cooperation and conflict, industry, farming, science, among much else, just at the moment that the sum of the worlds knowledge seemed too impossibly various and atomised to take in. Naturally, the book got up the noses of parts of the academic community, who criticised its reliance on synthesis over original research the very thing readers loved about it.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgrd was rejecting the easily digestible (and, critics might say, the unpretentious). Readers in English would have to wait awhile, but his six-volume My Struggle was finally complete. By the end of the decade, this style of writing generally called autofiction, and not invented by Knausgrd or any of his contemporaries but undeniably expanded by them would be a hot topic, blurring the line between the writer as creator and the writer as constructed character, the voice we are never sure whether to trust.

Fiction has never been short of psychopaths, and Gillian Flynn was certainly not the first writer to conceive of one who invents a crime in order to throw suspicion on an enemy. But there was something about her protagonists a glossy New York couple who hit the financial buffers and relocate to the midwest that smacked up against the anxiety zeitgeist by revealing the hatred and neurosis behind an apparently enviable marriage. And why have one unreliable narrator when you can have two? Gone Girls dual perspective thrilled readers just as it did director David Fincher, who filmed it before he disappeared into the TV world of House of Cards (New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman suggested that the film travels all the way down to the id just as Finchers Fight Club had done).

After Gone Girl, it was boom time for fractured narratives with fractured women at their centre, as publishers sought to ride the wave of psychological thrillers described as grip lit. But in the same year, we were also knocked sideways by sex: oodles of it, courtesy of a former TV studio manager turned ringmistress of sadomasochism. EL James, having devoured Stephenie Meyers Twilight vampire series, tried her hand at fan fiction and, before she knew it, had written Fifty Shades of Grey, making her one of Time magazines 100 most influential people in the world.

In one of those retrospective peculiarities that will delight PhD students of tomorrow, the year in which vengeful wives and submissive girlfriends laughed all the way to the bank also witnessed Hilary Mantel dispatching Anne Boleyn to her fate in Bring Up the Bodies, adding another Booker to Wolf Halls and thereby making Mantel the first female writer to win twice; next years The Mirror and the Light will complete the trilogy and may even bring her the hat-trick. And the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante arrived in English translation to weave her spell of Neapolitan girlhood and the depths of female friendship in My Brilliant Friend, sparking an interest in translated fiction and setting off a wave of Ferrante fever. Ferrante too returns next year with a new book, intriguingly entitled The Lying Life of Adults.

Eimear McBride, wrote Anne Enright in this newspaper, is that old-fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read. It was the quite hard to read part that ensured it took almost a decade after finishing her story of a pain-scorched childhood and adolescence for McBride to find a publisher willing to take it on. But the power of Girls stream-of-consciousness narrative overcame the difficulty, and A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won both the Goldsmiths prize, which rewards experimentalism, and the Baileys womens prize for fiction, which ranges more widely between styles and genres.

McBride exemplifies the breadth and depth of a group of Irish writers that includes Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, Paul Murray and Lisa McInerney; they have emerged in the last decade, each of them playing with form, and reflecting both Irish literary heritage and contemporary concerns.

Also published this year were Richard Flanagans Man Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Australian writers account of life as a Japanese prisoner of war that drew on his fathers experiences; Donna Tartts vast, madcap art heist story, The Goldfinch; and, for those who like a bit of corporate-focused self-empowerment, Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In.

Has everything changed? In fact, has anything changed? In terms of our grasping of the scale of climate crisis, maybe; five years ago, it might not have been possible to imagine a schoolgirl sailing across the Atlantic to address the United Nations and publishing her own book, Greta Thunbergs No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. In terms of the action taken to address the issues, the jury hasnt yet heard closing arguments, let alone filed out.

But This Changes Everything set out Naomi Kleins thinking in the years since Shock Doctrine, her attack on neoliberalism; in particular it focused on the impossibility of confronting ecological catastrophe without assessing the need to dismantle the economic systems that make it seemingly inevitable, a condition of argument that now seems strikingly obvious.

Another call to action came in the form of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies We Should All Be Feminists, in which the Nigerian-born novelist expanded on a wildly popular speech to consider the need for an inclusive and intersectional feminism.

This was not Maggie Nelsons first book she had also written about the murder of her aunt, a meditation on the colour blue and several volumes of poetry but it was the first to introduce her to a wider audience in the UK. Why did a book that played so fast and loose with the concept of memoir inspire such intense admiration? It was, perhaps, a question of exposure and openness: Nelsons voyage into the heart of her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge, who is transgender, her interrogation of the arrival of sudden, unexpected romantic and maternal love into her life, and the realities of living freely amid the constrictions of governments, society and art.

It is a book that travels through the mind, but refuses to divorce itself from the painful demands of the body and it stood as a prime example of a new wave of writing, much of it coming from American writers including Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus, that incorporated the personal and political struggles of previous eras into a startlingly modern and often queer register.

The biggest literary story of the year was the publication of Harper Lees Go Set a Watchman, a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that had been submitted to a publisher in the 1950s and returned to Lee with instructions for how to make it better. Watchman introduced us to a grown-up Scout, returning to visit her father Atticus and being appalled to discover his attitudes towards race; publication, therefore, had the effect of challenging warm feelings towards the character the world essentially knows as Gregory Peck. The circumstances of its appearance the year before Lees death, with conflicting stories over her ability to grant consent to its publication only deepened the confusion.

It was an odd symmetry that 2015s Booker was won by Paul Beatty, the first ever American victor, with The Sellout, a trenchant satire on racial segregation and identity in contemporary America.

A character named Elisabeth Demand has her passport application rejected on the grounds that her head, as it appears in her photograph, is too large. She is sent back into the labyrinth of obscure processes, with no reason to believe she will emerge successful. Three years later, and those applications and rejections have taken on an increased charge for us, Smiths readers; not merely a tedious administrative task, but a question of who is ruled in and out of membership of the country, and how the state defines what constitutes settled.

Ali Smith, who with Autumn launched her seasonal quartet of novels to be written each year against the clock, knew this: the book is shot through with references to division, to the disappearance of empathy between people, to surveillance and control. It was, as it turns out, a terrifying taste of things to come.

Elsewhere in the years fiction, history was the order of the day: in Colson Whiteheads magisterial blending of fact and fantasy The Underground Railroad, a narrative of enslavement and escape; in Sebastian Barrys Days Without End, which pictured Irishmen abroad and at war in 19th-century America; Francis Spuffords bravura piece of New York picaresque, Golden Hill; and Sarah Perrys The Essex Serpent, which conjured a gothic resurgence in a Victorian coastal town.

We tell ourselves that good people cant be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power. Writing in this paper, Reni Eddo-Lodge explained how the response to a blogpost she had written three years earlier had led her to expand her analysis of structural racism, its operation and its effects, into a full-length book that went on to win the Jhalak prize and a British book award for non-fiction. The book claimed space for the increasingly pressing conversations writers of colour wanted to start; and argued that the centring of white voices and concerns not least in the publishing industry that decided what would and wouldnt appear on shelves had to end. Nikesh Shuklas anthology The Good Immigrant had appeared the year before, as had David Olusogas Black and British; Afua Hirschs Brit(ish) would follow in 2018. With these books, there began to be a sense that accounts of lived experience and marginalised histories could blend or sit alongside each other, articulate both the past and the present, and bridge a gap between writing and activism. And that people would buy them, in their droves.

Elsewhere, there was a sort-of surprise at the Man Booker; not that Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunderss critically acclaimed novel, should be thought worthy of winning, but that a writer should conceive of creating a multi-vocal narrative about Abraham Lincolns dead son set in purgatory. One of the most surprising literary successes of the decade, it strengthened the reputation of the ever inventive Saunders even more.

On 26 May 2018, the Republic of Ireland woke to the news that the previous days referendum had resulted in an overwhelming mandate to repeal the constitutions 8th Amendment; in other words, to give women the right to terminate pregnancy. The campaign had been intergenerational and countrywide; but while the response was jubilant, there was also a sense of relief and the emergence from trauma. For Sally Rooney, whose second novel seemed at one point during that summer to be all anyone was reading, the issue was hard to talk about. All that suffering was so pointless, she told me in an interview at the time. Why did we do that? Why did we do any of that? Thirty years. All this anger and sadness, and all the horrible things that have happened to people ... Rooneys cool appraisals of Irish life the giving way of a pastoral, church-led society to a more layered and divergent world underpin fiction that appears to concern itself with a narrower world of young Dubliners (Trinity College Dubliners at that). And her apprehension of the surging emotional currents between her characters in Normal Peoples case Marianne and Connell, who move to the capital from small-town Sligo broadened her appeal.

Rooney, however, was not to win that years Man Booker it went, instead, to Anna Burns, whose dystopian evocation of the Troubles, Milkman, written while the author battled ill health and subsisted on benefits, created a troubling and riveting picture of male coercion and female resistance during conflict.

The first black woman to win the Booker prize, Bernardine Evaristo is also a writer who incorporates poetic and dramatic techniques into her novels, and who has persisted in that endeavour over the course of decades. Her work has been praised by critics and enjoyed by readers for a long time, but her high-profile victory accompanied by controversy because the award was given to both her book and Margaret Atwoods The Testaments has brought Evaristo before a vastly increased audience and intensified discussion of representation in contemporary British literature, and of how artists are recognised and their work promoted.

Evaristos success, which brings to the fore not only her eight novels but her determination, in her words, to put presence into absence and make visible in fiction the lives of black women, arrived in a country riven by frenzied discord. The issue of who gets to tell their story in the midst of that division, how fiction can present our complex selves and fractured communities and who is allowed the agency of self-definition has risen again to the top of the cultural agenda.

When, a few weeks after the Booker prize, a BBC journalist said that it had been shared between Atwood and another writer a hasty ad-lib, it was later explained the sense of angry disappointment was palpable, perhaps because change, so often heralded, equally often seems to recede. But the past decade suggests that a tipping point has been reached in the opening up of the literary world to hitherto marginalised voices; the next decade will reveal whether that is indeed the case.

To buy these titles go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0203 176 3837.

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From The Big Short to Normal People: the books that defined the decade - The Guardian

Emergency shelter is not prison, but there are overlapping human rights concerns – Generocity

Shelter is not prison technically speaking. Yet as I wrote in a previous article, the traditional power structure in emergency shelter closely resembles the power structure in prison.

Individuals residing in these institutions are expected to be obedient, docile, and submissive to staff at all times and in all circumstances. Each institution is also similarly defined by the experience of social rejection, sexual frustration, loss of autonomy, material scarcity, chronic stress, disturbed sleep, and emasculation.

Meanwhile, the prevailing social dynamic in male prisons what sociologists call the convict code is nearly identical to the prevailing social dynamic amongst homeless men the code of the streets.Both are behavioral and cultural norms premised on hyper-masculinity, exploitation of weakness, dominance, and violence.

They are two sides of the same coin.

There is also significant overlap between prison and shelter populations with people experiencing homelessness significantly more likely than the general population to have a criminal record, and nearly 20% of city shelter users entering shelter directly after incarceration according to one study.

This overlap means elements of prison culture regularly find their way into emergency shelters. In fact, in my experience, it is not uncommon to hear shelter guests reflexively and matter-of-factly refer to each other as inmates, refer to staff as guards, refer to the shelter itself as the prison, or refer to the curfew as lock up. When enough of our guests have this kind of prison mentality, we reach a tipping point and the shelter culture virtually becomes a prison culture. Yet even if we dont, it remains the case that for many men residing in shelter in Philadelphia, shelter and prison arent all that different.

In that sense, we can say that shelter and prison are experientially alike, but categorically distinct. After all, there is an explicit and meaningful difference between me saying I work for Bethesda Projects Church Shelter Program as opposed to Bethesda Projects Church Prison Program.

This helps explain why, for example, the United Nations has separate international standards for emergency shelters and for prisons namely, because shelter is not prison. Simply experiencing homelessness having no home or housing is not a crime, just as being a refugee, internally displaced person, or stateless person is not a crime. Nor is the act of residing in a homeless shelter a legal form of punishment in the way that being sentenced to prison is.

Because shelter is not prison, we should reasonably expect that a person residing in shelter experiences more liberty, rights, and privileges than a person residing in prison. This is another way of saying we should reasonably expect shelters to meet and exceed the minimum standards for prisons.

So lets take a closer look at whether or not they do.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were first adopted in 1955 and then revised in 2015, at which point they were renamed the Nelson Mandela Rules (in honor of the former President of South Africa). In total, the United Nations lists 122 rules, although the term rules can be misleading. They are meant to describe general principles of practice for prison operation, rather than mandating a specific prison model.

The rules concern matters that range from personal hygiene and exercise to filing systems and instruments of restraint. Together, they affirm that incarceration does not mean anything goes. When a person is incarcerated, their change in social status does not diminish or negate their humanity. In prison as in shelter people retain their human rights.

Unfortunately, when we look closely at the Nelson Mandela Rules, it appears that the experience of residing in shelter in Philadelphia fails to meet at least three of these baseline standards.

First, Rule 5 of the Nelson Mandela Rules states: The prison regime should seek to minimize any differences between prison life and life at liberty that tend to lessen the responsibility of the prisoners or the respect due to their dignity as human beings. When emergency shelters institute arbitrary rules that confine, monitor, and control the lives of shelter guests, their property, their activities, and their movements, we are not respecting the liberty due to them as human beings.

Instead, we are incarcerating them on our terms and incarceration on our terms is still incarceration. Even if our approach to incarceration is less restrictive than prison, we should be asking ourselves whether it is more restrictive than life outside both prison and shelter. If it is, then we are in violation of Rule 5 and depriving people of their liberty when they have not been convicted of a crime.

Relatedly, in a previous article I described how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Emergency Handbook articulates a standard of self-determination and empowerment for people residing in shelter. This standard reappears in the Nelson Mandela Rules, specifically in Rule 40, which states: No prisoner shall be employed, in the service of the prison, in any disciplinary capacity. This rule shall not, however, impede the proper functioning of systems based on self-government.

This rule serves as an indirect affirmation that self-determination, empowerment, and self-governance are appropriate in prisons. As I see it, if the worlds leading human rights organization has legitimized their use in prisons, then surely we can consider them legitimate in emergency shelters.

The standards articulated in Rules 5 and 40 actually intertwine. For example, the notion of life at liberty means you have freedom of movement and freedom from arbitrary detention, while self-governance means you get to participate in deciding the rules that you have to live by and which may impact your liberty. Taken together, they imply that shelter staff should remove all curfews and restrictions on movement (i.e. Once you enter the shelter, you are not permitted to leave until the next morning) unless the guests themselves decide otherwise.

In that sense, compliance with Rules 5 and 40 in emergency shelters also involves democratizing management procedures. Typically, staff members claim a monopoly over establishing curfews, budgeting, managing cleaning supplies, organizing laundry schedules, resolving disputes, etc. However, these are also things that shelter guests will do when they exit shelter into housing, and things that many of them are capable of doing now. As it turns out, according to the Nelson Mandela Rules, it is reasonable to say that they also have a right to do these things now.

The third area where it can be said emergency shelters fail to meet the United Nations standards for prisons involves disciplinary standards. Rule 39 of the Nelson Mandela Rules states that: Before imposing disciplinary sanctions, prison administrations shall consider whether and how a prisoners mental illness or developmental disability may have contributed to his or her conduct and the commission of the offence or act underlying the disciplinary charge. Prison administrations shall not sanction any conduct of a prisoner that is considered to be the direct result of his or her mental illness or intellectual disability. Although the word sanction can mean both penalize and permit, in the context of disciplinary sanctions (as it is used here) it means penalize.

In my experience, I have encountered no clear or explicit restrictions on my ability as a shelter staff member to sanction or discipline a shelter guest for behavior that is a direct result of his mental illness or intellectual disability. On the contrary, the expectation has always seemed to be that I will sanction or discipline any shelter guest for any behavior that is threatening, violent, or which otherwise seriously disrupts the shelter community regardless of what prompted the behavior.

In Philadelphia, given the high percentage of people experiencing homelessness who also live with serious mental illness or intellectual/developmental disabilities, the suggestion that we not discipline problematic behavior resulting from them almost seems to suggest an anything goes attitude.

But thats not what the United Nations is saying.

Rule 39 specifically prohibits sanctioning and disciplining certain kinds of behavior but it does not prohibit responding to it, resolving it, or transforming it. Nor does it prohibit restoring safety, trust, dignity, and community after harm or wrongdoing has occurred. In that sense, the Nelson Mandela Rules are not prohibiting justice. They are, however, prohibiting punitive responses to incidents where a mental health diagnosis or intellectual disability is a key variable.

What Philadelphia homeless services can learn from Rule 39 is that non-punitive, restorative justice practices in shelter settings arent just innovative theyre actually the standard. With that in mind, I encourage emergency shelters to begin reformulating their disciplinary protocols to align with restorative justice practices, as weve begun to do in Bethesda Projects Church Shelter Program.

This kind of transformation may not be easy, but it is necessary because shelter is not prison, nor should it be. If we take that distinction seriously, and I certainly hope that we do, then emergency shelters have an obligation to meet and exceed the minimum human rights standards for prisons.

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Emergency shelter is not prison, but there are overlapping human rights concerns - Generocity

In The 2010s, Celebrity Feminism Got Trendy. Then Women Got Angry. – HuffPost

Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

Farewell To ... is an end-of-decade series that explores some of the biggest cultural trends of the last 10 years. HuffPosts culture team says bye to the era of one queen of hip-hop, so long to lily white and mostly male literary institutions, R.I.P. to the movie star and more.

In October 2010, Taylor Swift was profiled byThe New York Times in advance of the release of her new album, Speak Now. The piece homes in on her anger, the way that Swifts musical genius seems directly correlated to how incensed she is at the time. As an aside, journalist Jon Caramanica asked Swift whether she was a feminist.

I have never really thought about that, she said.

Over the following decade, Swift and a whole cohort of famous women spent a lot of time contemplating that very question. Between 2010 and 2015, the question dogged everyone from pop stars (Beyonc, Lorde, Katy Perry, Carrie Underwood, Kelly Clarkson), to actresses (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kaley Cuoco, Shailene Woodley, Susan Sarandon), to reality TV personalities (Patti Stanger), to CEOs (Marissa Mayer), to Martha Stewart. Each time a famous woman was asked whether or not she was a feminist, her one-to-three sentence answer would become national news. The more misguided Feminists hate men! Feminists have a chip on their shoulder! But Im a humanist! the more newsworthy.

But when 2016 presidential election rolled around, the churn of Are-You-A-Feminist-Check-Yes-Or-No celebrity news headlines had slowed to a crawl, only cropping up when a famous person said something more substantive about the political movement.

The rise and fall of the celebrity feminist litmus test provides a helpful lens to consider the decade in feminism at large. When the decade opened, feminist was a label that was still considered unpalatable to the masses. It was a word female celebrities would probably be advised to sidestep, allowing them to capitalize on the amorphous concept of female empowerment without actually having to get political. As we look toward the decades close, the political and cultural climate has shifted dramatically. Feminism is both mainstream and expansive, an essential and explicitly political project in a world in which virulent online misogyny has become de rigeur, and in which celebrities (and others who choose to publicly claim the feminist label) are being asked to do the work of feminism, rather than simply pay it lip service.

I think into the decade, there was this rising popularity of feminism that started off as a slow burn and then increased toward the middle of the decade, said Caitlin Lawson, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of communication and media at the University of Michigan, whose research largely focuses on celebrity feminism. She pointed to Girls, which premiered in 2012, as well as other female-fronted TV shows like Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, as cultural products that helped usher in a feminist pop culture moment.

These white feminist celebrities [like Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey] were incorporating [feminism], particularly into the television content that they were creating, Lawson said, Girls, I think being a particularly spectacular moment where Lena was out there talking about feminism and was this young cool face of what feminism might be.

2012 was also the year that Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a viral TED Talk, aptly titled We Should All Be Feminists. In that talk, Adichie uses the dictionary definition of feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.

Her words would go viral, prompting a book of the same name, and perhaps most significantly, leading Beyonc to sample her talk in her December 2013 anthem, ***Flawless.

There was a growing, nobly intentioned movement to make feminism more accessible and inclusive, and to combat the decades of misinformation and negative stereotypes that had surrounded the movement.

Kaley Cuoco apologized for offending people and said that her comments were taken out of context. Katy Perry admitted that she used to not really understand what that word meant.Swift also claimed prior ignorance, saying that she had thought that feminism was akin to hating men, not just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. And Swift notably credited her burgeoning friendship with Dunham with helping to usher in her feminist awakening.

When Beyonc performed in front of a giant projection of FEMINIST at the 2014 Video Music Awards and received widespread and overwhelmingly positive media attention it was indicative of a cultural sea change, one which had been building in the years prior.

Jason LaVeris via Getty ImagesBeyonc performs onstage at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards at The Forum in Inglewood, California.

This feminist pop culture moment also coincided with a rise in visible, internet-fueled misogyny, much of which was centered on and directed at prominent women. (Perhaps in part a reaction to the increased acceptance of feminism.)

Gamergate, the online harassment campaign targeting women in the video game industry, began in August 2014. About a week later, a hacker posted more than 500 private photographs from the iCloud accounts of celebrities, primarily women, to 4Chan. The leak, which would be termed The Fappening, included intimate photographs of women like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Jill Scott, Cuoco and Kirsten Dunst. The images were then widely circulated through 4Chan, Reddit and imgur. Both Gamergate and the celebrity nude photo leak kicked off an extended dialogue about institutional sexism, slut-shaming and harassment.

More and more we had these examples to point to that showed us that we were not past the need for feminism, Lawson said. I wouldnt say that its necessarily causal but that summer of 2014 was a huge shift.

As Hollywood began to increasingly embrace feminism, at least in word, so too did the culture as a whole. (After all, celebrity culture does not operate in a vacuum.) During the mid-2010s, feminism got ... cool. Feminism became trendy, simple and nonthreatening. No killjoys or feminazis in sight.

The New Do: Calling Yourself A Feminist, declared Glamour Magazine in October 2013. The movement was used to sell shampoo and body wash and menstrual pads, and even ended up on the Chanel runway. A simple Google search for feminist gift guide pulls up pages upon pages of links. (One that we published on HuffPost Women in 2015 includes a Michelle Obama tote bag, a GRL PWR tee, feminist as fuck fine jewelry, and a $250 Queen Queen Queen denim jacket.)

Celebrities started throwing out the f-word casually in interviews. Lorde criticized Selena Gomezs hit Come & Get It for not being feminist, and then Gomez responded by turning feminism back on Lorde. Thats not feminism, she said. [Lorde is] not supporting other women. Miley Cyrus invoked the term to express the freedom of being a single woman: It has a lot to do with being a feminist, but Im finally O.K. with being alone. Katy Perry, newly enlightened feminist, declared that feminism just means that I love myself as a female and I also love men.

Yes, feminism is ultimately about equality for people of gender identities. But, perhaps more importantly, its about defining what that vision of equality will look like and what pathways are required to get there. Its about legislation and the courts and elections and knocking on doors and protesting in the streets and joining a union and protecting the most vulnerable among us, even if you are not a member of that group.

It is not, however, a selfish proposition of inward acceptance. When it comes to feminism, loving yourself is not enough.

After years of watching famous women get grilled about feminism and answer with varying degrees of ignorance some feminist journalists began to wonder whether the question itself was contributing to the movements hollowing out in the public discourse.

As more and more female celebrities have flipped to a default yes, the question has yielded diminishing returns, wrote Amanda Hess in a 2015 piece for Slate, pointing to Cyrus, Cuoco and Twilight author Stephanie Meyer. While stepping up to claim oneself as a feminist used to be somewhat meaningful, the word has now been flattened into a press tour sound bite. And for many celebrities who take it on, the word itself has been reduced to its most benign interpretation the idea that men and women ought to be equal.

Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

And then Donald Trump was elected.

Not only had an eminently qualified woman been defeated by an eminently unqualified (and emphatically racist and sexist!) man, but many white women had assisted in that outcome. Overnight, it became abundantly clear to even the most privileged feminists that a backlash prompted by the fears of voters threatened by the increased influence of women and people of color, as Rebecca Traister put it was upon us.

In this more widely exposed reality, repeatedly asking famous women whether or not they were feminists became even more obviously useless.

With Donald Trumps explicitly racist and misogynistic rhetoric, this was another moment where it became clear that the stakes were higher, Lawson said. There were serious problems that we needed feminism to address, and it was not going to be addressed through Kaley Cuoco being asked seven times if shes a feminist and then finally saying, Yes, I guess I am.

So many women were angry after the election. And that anger simmered, burned and burst out over the latter half of the decade. Combine this rage with the ease of giving celebrities instantaneous feedback via social media, and you have a perfect recipe for pushback if a famous person who has claimed to be a feminist in the media doesnt back that assertion up with action.

You cant get away with a stupid, pithy definition of feminism and expect to get a cookie for it [anymore], Lawson said. You have to be able to speak about it in a more educated, thoughtful, action-based way, or everyone is going to come for you.

This feedback loop can be used to shame celebrities into more responsible engagement with political issues, and can also be a means of education itself.

Just look at Kim Kardashian West, whose political awakening in the latter half of the decade began because she was scrolling through Twitter and came upon the story of Alice Marie Johnsons fight for clemency. For years, Kardashian West has been the subject of is-she-a-feminist debate. And while there are certainly many things to criticize about Kardashian Wests personal brand (especially with regards to her familys blindspots about race), she has become an interesting example of a celebrity who has not just talked, but done.

Kardashian West started the decade seen as a famous for nothing reality star, and ends it as a bonafide business mogul and a surprisingly effective advocate for prison reform. She is even in the process of getting a law degree, with plans of taking the bar in 2022.

I just felt like the system could be so different, and I wanted to fight to fix it, and if I knew more, I could do more, Kardashian West told Vogue earlier this year when explaining her decision to begin a four-year apprenticeship.

And then theres Swift, who had spent years hyping her feminist awakening and her growing girl squad, but had remained resistant to being overtly political, even when the stakes were high. After she posted an Instagram urging people to vote in November 2016 without endorsing a candidate, she was roundly criticized. The same happened when she tacitly endorsed the January 2017 Womens March in a tweet without attending.

As a fan of yours, this is some bullshit, tweeted one young woman. You do not get to pick and choose when feminism benefits you.

Before the 2018 midterm elections, Swift course corrected, openly endorsing a Democratic Senate candidate in her home state of Tennessee. She acknowledged that she had been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now, citing her commitment to fighting for LGBTQ rights and against gender discrimination and systemic racism. She also called on her fans to educate themselves and register to vote.

Whether fans align themselves with her political leanings or not, Swifts statement helps rectify one of her biggest contradictions as a star, wrote Maeve McDermott over at USA Today at the time, that shes advocated for feminism, the LGBTQ community and the #MeToo movement, making progressive ideals central to her public persona, while declining to share her party affiliation or endorse specific candidates.

And that brings us to Me Too. First coined by Tarana Burke and then popularized as a hashtag by Alyssa Milano in the wake of mounting allegations against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, the Me Too movement is probably the single most potent force in moving celebrity feminism out of the realm of one-liners and into the realm of action.

Since the movement initially centered on the entertainment industry, with A-List actresses like Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale, Mira Sorvino and Salma Hayek all speaking out, the battle against sexual harassment in the workplace became inextricably linked to celebrity.

Roy Rochlin via Getty ImagesChristy Haubegger, Marisa Tomei, Tarana Burke, Mira Sorvino, Fatima Goss Graves and Amber Tamblyn pose onstage at "Time's Up" during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

Blessedly, the Me Too movement has also moved beyond just the famous in the entertainment industry, and spread to the workplaces of many non-famous women and people of all genders, from McDonalds employees to domestic workers to farm workers. But this initial and enduring tie of Hollywood and Me Too further pushed an elevation of the dialogue surrounding celebrity culture and feminism.

Were in a very different place than we were in, say, 2013, in terms of the level of conversation thats going on ... about celebrity culture related to feminism, Lawson said. I think Me Too had a part to play in that.

So, what comes next? Lawson says in an ideal world, the future of celebrity feminism would be based on collective action and substance, rather than soundbites.

And theres hope for that future to materialize. This year, Jane Fonda moved to D.C. to dedicate her Fridays to protesting inaction on climate change. Sam Waterston, Ted Danson, Sally Field, Diane Lane and Catherine Keener have all joined her and gotten arrested with her. And Lawson also pointed to Times Up and its Legal Defense Fund as a really excellent example of what the hope of celebrity feminism might be.

It might not make for as catchy a headline as Taylor Swift Is Totally Still A Feminist, but its far more impactful.

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In The 2010s, Celebrity Feminism Got Trendy. Then Women Got Angry. - HuffPost

Empowering Myself to Stake ‘Empowerment Feminism’ Right Through the Heart – Jezebel

Graphic: Jezebel, Photo: Joan Summers

Heres why Empowerment Feminism should be canceled. Follow Jezebels Cancel Tournament to see what ultimately gets canceled

At some point this decade, every advertising executive has leaned out of their Fifth Avenue windows to scream at passing women: Sorry bitch, but youre empowered now! Random SHE-E-Os have had capes thrust upon them by underpaid and overworked social media managers, while others of the #GIRLBOSS ilk found publishers crawling over each other for a chance to secure lucrative book deals with them. Im a Girl, and a Boss! by CEO Bosswoman topped the New York Times best-seller list about a million times, while elsewhere, Sheryl Sandberg did everything she could to empower celebrities the world over to Lean In and away from their phones, where they were reading about Facebooks many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many failures.

Earlier this year, NastyGal founder and preeminent Girl Boss Sophia Amoruso launched girlboss.com, a platform designed to account for what Amoruso saw as a lack of outlets for women in business to connect. As she told Business Insider prior to its grand debut, she saw the girlboss.com member as someone who does or doesnt have a traditional career, who may not have this C-level title, but may be on her way up. The site, she claimed, would help this imaginary Girl Boss because there are very few places for her to go to represent her resume or life today.

In the press, interest in the site fizzled out almost immediately, and as I reported at the time, the launch was peppered by numerous crashes, a laggy interface, and a dubious moderation system. That reporting got me permanently banned from the site and blocked by Amoruso, however, so I will never know how just how empowered its users are today. (I am still looking forward to somehow sneaking in to the next Create+Cultivate in Partnership with AERIE Real Models Present: AERIE Real-treat! fireside chat, though!)

If anything, girlboss.coms middling performance and lack of impact is indicative of the waning interest in the ethos it represents: Powerful, affluent white women dictating business edicts to other, college educated Everlane influencer-types. There are more pressing concerns for working-class women, like the rising costs of childcare, a failing healthcare system, an increase in pregnancy-related death for black and Native American women, a judicial system that largely favors sexual abusers, a looming economic collapse, soaring police brutality, concentration camps at the border, an ever growing list of murdered Black trans womenthis list could probably go on for another million words. So I ask: Who was really empowered this decade by the girl bosses marching single file to the bank, while a growing chasm between them and working class women threatened to swallow everyone in this country whole?

Corporations claimed they were interested in empowering women through their spending habits , but those same companies are now (or were) under investigation for horrific working conditions, false advertising, and racism. In the meantime, they lined their pockets with the millennial-pink money made on cleverly marketed tampons, shoes, subscription boxes, and Instagram likes. They bought and sold personal datawhich they collected through their empowerment messaging and SEO wizardryso that other companies could market even more products, products they claimed would heal mysterious ailments, or revolutionize workout routines, or or change the way women dressed. The data this generated was fed back into the machine, and the same empowerment ethos was recycled over and over and over again.

Meanwhile, legitimate revolutions for women were underway, most notably Me Too, and the renewed focus on sexual harassment, rape, and its prevalence in American society. History is still too close to itself for any legitimate analysis of its longterm impact, but for a time things felt like they were genuinely changing. Industry titans toppled. Long-held rumors finally found platforms to stand on And women silenced by money, power, and violence refused to keep silent any longer. But a few years on, its increasingly likely that Harvey Weinstein, Me Toos first domino, will never have to apologize or face the consequences of his decades spent sexually assaulting women across the world.

Empowerment is a selfish concept. When wielded by women like Sophia Amoruso, or Jill Sandberg, or Gwyneth Paltrow, or Kylie Jenneror, some might say, Hilary Clintonits end goals are enrichment, success, and the fortitude of a personal brand, all to be spun into more lucrative endeavors. The success of Me Too was that thousands of women were empowered to act up together. Social movements across history have prevailed and will continue to do so, because there is an unparalleled strength in unity, in togetherness, in camaraderie. Meanwhile, Girl Bosses will find their empowerment regimes interrupted by class wars and home renovations threatened by rising sea levels. Quicktake those selfies at the next Raytheon and Blackstone Investments, in Partnership With EverlyWell and Peloton Presents: Firesides Chats With Gwyneth Paltrow and Jameela Jamil while you still can!

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Empowering Myself to Stake 'Empowerment Feminism' Right Through the Heart - Jezebel

Spirited Bodies at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts – Redbrick

On a slightly foggy November evening, I wandered through the tall doors of the Barber Institute in search of a life drawing session that promised to be different from the ones Id been to before. I was offered a beer (nice touch) and encouraged to chat with fellow life-drawing enthusiasts before we were whisked up to the galleries for a quick tour of the works on show. As we entered the third gallery, we were greeted by the enthusiastic, rainbow toe-sock sporting Esther Bunting, who showed us a selection of materials to choose from, before leading us all to a large ring of chairs. The models for the evening, Lanie and Geeta von Tease, were perched on bean bags in the middle of it all, smiling in their robes. Once we had all sat down, and assumed our best artist postures, Esther welcomed us all officially, telling us a little bit about Spirited Bodies and encouraging us to ask questions at any time. She explained that in this organisation, one which champions body positivity, feminism and personal empowerment through the practices of life modelling and life drawing, we would have a chance to speak with our models and learn about their experience.

The thought of active participation was a nervous one for me

Immediately, the thought of active participation was a nervous one for me, but as we began sketching our first pose, it became apparent to me that the reality was rather different. The models introduced themselves and began to tell us their stories: when, how and why they started modelling; what friends and family had thought about it, and right away I began to loosen up. The atmosphere was cosy and relaxed, with bits of laughter here and there as amusing questions were asked. Its a surreal experience chatting away to someone who is completely naked, but with the barrier of silence broken, it wasnt awkward or embarrassing. Rather, it filled the room with a sense of creativity I have experienced very few times. Both women shared their own experiences with issues such as negative body image, one of the key problems Spirited Bodies aims to tackle with their sessions. Hearing them both talk so freely, all whilst in such a vulnerable position was not only fascinating, but really quite inspiring. Geeta said something that stuck with me: Its nice, as a life model, to be heard as well as seen. Its easy to forget that the models we draw in art classes are real people, but having the chance to interact with them in a way that wasnt simply one sided was an incredibly refreshing experience.

My time with Spirited Bodies made me wonder why this isnt more common, why life models continue to be silent objects in art schools across the world. I think we could all benefit from this kind of interaction, and thats exactly why Spirited Bodies do what they do. The implications of body and self-image on our minds are huge and I could see the implementation of these kinds of sessions in schools and communities being incredibly helpful in allowing people to forge a kinder and healthier relationship with their bodies. We are all living in a society which increasingly places importance on the outward expression of beauty, so taking time to experience and take in the wonder of the human form, whether it be alone or in sessions like these, is something we all should be doing.

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Spirited Bodies at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts - Redbrick

Yemeni women demand equality in the midst of war – The National

Applause rang out in a conference hall in the Yemeni city of Al Mukalla on Tuesday as a university professor revealed the number of female teaching assistants at a local government university had exceeded their male peers for the first time.

For gender activists and experts who attended the womens conference in the south-eastern province of Hadramawt, the news is an indication that their decades-long efforts towards achieving gender balance in Yemen are bearing fruit.

But the fight for womens rights in Yemen is far from over. A January 2019 survey by the World Economic Forum ranked Yemen last on a list of 146 countries on womens rights.

Activists say gender equality issues have been put on the back burner as the internationally recognised Yemeni government, backed by the Arab Coalition, battles Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The five-year war has claimed the lives of thousands of people, but conference organisers say the time is right to remind decision-makers and society about issues of inequality.

Funded by the Germans international development agency Giz, the two-day Womens Conference brought together 300 gender advocates, experts, university professors, government officials, NGOs representatives, businessmen and preachers.

It was the first conference of his kind in the area since 1990.

They discussed the challenges women face in Yemen, including access to education, lack of empowerment in politics, battling corruption, medical care and their role in achieving a lasting peace.

Seventy-six per cent of internally displaced people in Yemen are women and children, and an estimated 3 million women and girls are at risk of gender-based violence, the UN Population Fund estimates.

After two days of discussion and workshops, those attending produced a conference paper with 21 recommendations for improving the lives of women in Yemen.

These included expanding technical and vocational education for women, establishing a database for unemployed female graduates, improving reproductive health care, and increasing womens participation in the country's politics and judicial system.

Fayza Bamatraf, the conferences chief organiser and gender activist, told The National that she was delighted by ideas and proposals for empowering women proposed at the conference.

There is an increasing number of women in the public sector," Ms Bamatraf said.

"The number of female managers of government bodies in the province of Hadramawt has increased from three several years ago to 10 in 2019.

She insisted on sending invitations to male directors of Hadramawts remote mountainous and desert districts where child marriage and a lack of female education is rampant.

Ms Bamatraf wanted women from these districts to personally describe their suffering and find a listening ear among attendees.

Those are decision-makers in their districts and we want them to take part in implementation of the conferences outcomes, she said.

Men were welcomed at the event in which talks were given on female empowerment, before those attending split into groups to discuss practical solutions to raising the status of women in the country.

Issues such as harassment, rooted customs and traditions and men who refuse to marry educated women were discussed animatedly.

Elsewhere at circular tables, male religious figures shared ideas with gender activists, moderated by a university lecturer.

Government officials also listened attentively to women sharing their personal stories and ideas, promising more jobs for women and establishing training centres for women in villages.

Only 6 per cent of women are in employment in Yemen, International Labour Organisation figures show.

Khaloud Abdul Aziz, a government employee who came from the city of Seiyun, told The National that she pushed for giving women higher positions in the province.

There are male deputy governors. Why do we not we have female deputy governors too? she asked.

On the second day, four papers about empowering women economically, fighting corruption, peaceful coexistence and health were presented to the gathering.

Fatima Mahfoud, a member of the General Peoples Congress, said the conference was the first time she had taken part in such a large gathering for women.

Ms Mahfoud suggested future conferences be expanded to at least seven days and have more women invited.

The ideas that were highlighted during the conference were great and I am sure they would bring about changes if they were implemented, she said.

The conference did more than make recommendations, though.

Ms Bamatraf said a group of participants were selected to oversee the implementation of the recommendations.

We will keep assessing performance of womens participation in all sections, she said. The conference comes out with a strategic version for empowering women."

Updated: December 19, 2019 05:12 AM

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Yemeni women demand equality in the midst of war - The National

40% Indian women fear online trolls as they access Internet: Nielson report – Business Standard

While education and career development are top priorities for women Internet users in India, 40 per cent of them fear irrelevant comments, being trolled and followed on smartphones which has become a preferred choice for them to remain online, a new report said on Tuesday.

While 44 per cent of women in Indian metros access online content in English to improve their soft skills and stay "job-ready," this focus is sharper among younger women between the 18-23 age group, said the the Verizon Media survey conducted by Nielsen with 1,300 respondents in 12 cities.

Women users spend time online between 3 pm and 9 pm -- a signal for brands on when to reach and engage with women audiences, according to the survey.

Across locations, younger women were found to access more content related to education, career growth and skill development, while older women between 29-35 years of age accessed more online video content related to personal well-being.

"The internet is empowering a new breed of Indian women who are coming online and preparing to take their place in the workforce. The right platform and support as a community will enable greater inclusion, boosting participation of Indian women at the workplace," said Nikhil Rungta, Country Manager, India, Verizon Media.

Smartphones are the device of choice for women users in India, with 60 per cent of women accessing the Internet only on these devices. This number spikes to over 75 per cent of women in Tier 1 cities.

According to the survey, women in India spend an average time of 145 minutes on their smartphones every day. Interestingly, women in Tier 1 cities spend about 25 minutes more on Internet compared to women in metros.

Of the total women surveyed, nearly 80 per cent users access online content in English as well as local languages.

Given the popularity of video and OTT content in the country, there is a clear preference towards watching videos over reading content online among women Internet users.

More than two-third of women surveyed had watched videos related to career development or social causes or personal well-being in the last one month.

Health and fitness are priority areas for them, especially for women in the 35 and over age group.

"Environmental conservation and child abuse-related content were rated as high affinity content apart from education, women empowerment and career development," said the survey.

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40% Indian women fear online trolls as they access Internet: Nielson report - Business Standard

Kellogg features personal stories and efforts of employees at the coalface of its Diversity & Inclusion commitment – BakeryAndSnacks.com

According to Steve Cahillane, Kelloggs chairman and CEO, it was the companys founder, WK Kellogg who instilled the company mantra that doing good for society is a critical part of running a good business.

Thats why weve always worked hard to make sure that our company and business practices deliver benefits to people, our communities and the planet, said Cahillane.

Today, the company has been recognised as a Top 50 Company for Diversity by Diversity Inc, and has achieved a 100% score on the Human Rights Campaigns Corporate Equality Index.

Fostering a diverse workforce and supplier base creates a real competitive advantage, he added.

Being able to give other women someone they can look up to is what makes me do what I do every day. Belinda Tumbers, MD, Kellogg AMEA.

The report entitled Features contains a raft of personal stories from Kellogg employees from around the world, as well as many case studies of how it is connecting people to drive its Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) strategy.

For example, this year, Kellogg participated for the first time in the Womens Business Enterprise National Councils Student Entrepreneur Programme, which matches mentors from Fortune 500 companies with student entrepreneurs to grow the next generation of women-owned businesses.

It also was one of the first companies to join the Mexican governments Youth Building the Future programme to help disadvantaged youths; commemorated Ramadan values with its Sadaqah Ready Pack; and extended its partnership with Fundacin Ginac, a local non-profit in Spain, to provide employment for local people with physical and mental disabilities at its Valls plant.

D&I challenges the organisation to ideate, respond and execute differently to meet the needs of the diverse customers and consumers we serve.- Carey H, senior director of sales, North American region.

Features celebrates the many ways our inclusive culture is nourishing the world, in every way possible, said Priscilla Koranteng, VP of global talent and chief diversity officer.

When people feel a sense of belonging and empowerment, we can better meet our business goals and serve the needs of our consumers with fresh thinking, product innovations and quality brands.

I know we have a long way to go. But, as a millennial, I think by living the values of integrity and respect, we will naturally become more inclusive and more diverse. Celia R, corporate affairs supervisor, Latin American region.

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Kellogg features personal stories and efforts of employees at the coalface of its Diversity & Inclusion commitment - BakeryAndSnacks.com

How Employed To Serve’s Eternal Forward Motion Took Metal Forward In 2019 – Kerrang!

Time waits for no slave. In 2019, every passing moment feels like a slide further down the slope of oblivion. It only seems to be accelerating, too. There are no brakes on the human experience, no pause button to recalculate or indulgently self-commiserate. There is, however, a steering-wheel, and its up to this generation to stiffen their grip on it, twist back on track and reclaim control of our own ever-unspooling narrative. There is no fate but what we make.

In 2017, Employed To Serve were already keenly aware of these facts. Crashing out of the underground and into the wider rock consciousness with blistering second LP The Warmth Of A Dying Sun, they channelled the sound of a generational quarter-life crisis. With the gravitational force of an imploding star, those 10 tracks felt like the thrilling distillation of the frustration, fury and existential doubt of a youth enduring todays socioeconomic shitstorm of someone elses making. Honest, relevant and delivered with a serrated cutting-edge, it set the bar for a whole generation of fast-rising contemporaries and deservedly claimed Kerrang!s Album Of TheYear.

Following up was always going to be a daunting ask. Continuing a campaign of relentless live showings and signing with major-label subsidiary Spinefarm, expectations only spiralled upwards. A new tact would have to be found a new energy harnessed to maintain momentum. Fittingly, Eternal Forward Motion managed to actually escalate the attack. Rather than raging against the what? and why? of our current societal ills, there is more purpose and strength to be tapped in the how? of setting them right. Empowerment and honest self-appraisal would be required; hearts and minds set totask.

Vocalist Justine Jones came to her personal epiphany while processing personal issues away from the spotlight. I had the worst year Id ever had, she would reveal in our March cover story prior to the records release. [But] thats no-ones business. It got me thinking about Instagram, and how you dont see everything just the best bits of someones life. Theres always stuff going on behind the scenes that nobody knowsabout.

Its not good to be comparing yourself to other people all the time, people you dont know. It makes people more worried about what they arent and what they dont have than actually focussing on and being happy about where they are and what theyre actuallydoing.

READ THIS: Employed To Serves track-by-track guide to Eternal ForwardMotion

There is an ever-increasing disconnect between perception and reality. In personal life, the performative nature of digital presence and social media that ever-more artificial keeping-up-with-the-Joneses focus has loosened peoples grip on hard realities of their personal situation and undercut self-worth. On a broader societal scale, it has undermined that crucial interpersonal connection of everyday living and lowered barriers against mass-media bias and fakenews.

More than ever I feel that theres an unobtainable PMA attitude thrown at you, guitarist Sammy Urwin hammered the point. Ill tell you what: it doesntwork.

Its about leaning [instead] into the pain and leaning into the struggle and letting that churn out something real inside you, drummer Robbie Back would expand. And in that there is growth and overcoming things. Were not old, but were not childish. We have some mid ground for understanding going through dark times can build some real thickskin.

I want the album to give people a senseofself-empowerment

Sammy Urwin

Accordingly, Eternal Forward Motion isnt a wallow. Its a war-cry. Maintaining so much of their trademark uncompromising severity, the sound (rounded out by guitarist Richard Jacobs and then-bassist Marcus Gooda, who would depart following the albums release) is swollen with elements of the grinding alt and nu-metal bombast on which these players were raised. The rawness, aggression and sheer overwhelming violence of early Slipknot has been a common point of comparison, but there are shades of the groovy insidiousness of Korn and even Deftones textural dexterity,too.

There is enough blunt-force quality for ETS to hold their own with transatlantic contemporaries like Code Orange, Knocked Loose and Vein, but also enough undiluted British humility for them to stand apart. Crucially, there is a broad streak of positivity running through the albums core: acknowledgement and empathy for those going through dark times, but encouragement, too, that the power to make them better is never out ofreach.

We wanted to make music that wasnt just focusing solely on the negatives, Sammy continued. Its acknowledging the negative stuff, but saying channel that into something more positive. Im not saying thats an easy thing to do, but its a worthwhile thing todo.

I want people to get from it the same thing as I get when I listen to Strength Beyond Strength by Pantera I want it to give people a sense of self-empowerment. I want it to get people pumped up and to make them feel good. I want to be that angry, aggressive record you put on that makes people want to do something positive, rather than wallowing in dirge andmisery.

Aggression, intelligence and compassion for Employed To Serve have never been mutually-exclusive qualities. Their rage is not a destructive force, but an empowering one. Their indignation isnt clouded by red mist, but drawn with righteous lucidity. Their darkness is not there to be drowned in but to reflect back the common struggle of beingalive.

Amongst the sheer savagery of the title-track, there is encouragement for the directionless to reach out for a guiding hand. The pit-rending brutality of Force Fed instructs listeners not just to throw down but to think for themselves. Harsh Truth fearlessly grasps the everyday actuality of depression (Well Im not going to draw my curtains today / No Im not going to force a grin today) but entreats listeners to find their way through. Brilliantly, album-closer Bare Bones On A Blue Sky drops curtain with the buoyant promise that Theres hope fortomorrow

READ THIS: Never Mind The Bollocks: British rock isthriving

Indeed, that brighter future hinges only on good people putting their weight behind good things. Having already put so many modern wrongs in their stranglehold, Eternal Forward Motion is, ultimately, the sound of Employed To Serve deploying a warmer albeit no less impassioned embrace.

Were that friend thats supposed to make you feel good and energised and worthy, Justine concludes. There are other albums to make you feel sad and embrace that, and thats great, but were here to make you feel good. Were the friend to give you that goodadvice.

Wed be all the poorer withoutthem.

Posted on December 18th 2019, 12:00pm

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How Employed To Serve's Eternal Forward Motion Took Metal Forward In 2019 - Kerrang!

January Workshops Offered through RCSJs People in Transition – Patch.com

The Center for People in Transition, located on Rowan College of South Jersey's (RCSJ) Gloucester campus, hosts a number of empowerment, health and financial workshops during the month of January. Unless otherwise noted, all workshops are free and open to the public. Registration is mandatory. Call 856-415-2222 or email peopleintransition@rcsj.edu to register. You must be 18 years or older to attend.

"Health and Wellness" Your physical and mental health have a direct relationship - both need to be cared for to ensure you remain happy and heathy - making sure to put yourself first, give yourself the time you deserve and build your self-love are all important steps in maintaining that. Kayleigh Kenniff, Beach Body Coach, will guide you through a quick workout followed by helpful tips on nutrition information, ways to find balance, and ways that you can put yourself first. This workshop will be held on Wednesday, January 8, from 6 8 p.m.

"Intermediate Computers" Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point are programs that can be accessed and used with necessary basic computer skills, but maneuvering through these programs to maximize their full potential requires a higher level of skill and knowledge. Amy Charlesworth, Case Manager at the Center for People in Transition, will guide you through intermediate-level computer training in various programs available from Microsoft Office. This 40-hour course is available for free to displaced homemakers and $100 for non-displaced homemakers. This workshop will be held on Fridays, January 10 February 28, from 9:30 am 2:30 p.m.

"Divorce Laws" Divorce is never an easy or clean process, especially when you have to navigate through the laws and defend yourself when you may not be entirely educated on the process. Marquis D. Jones, Esquire and Former Superior Court Judge will teach you the stages of divorce, how to best defend yourself against bad decisions, how to protect your children and related laws. This workshop will be held on Wednesday, January 15, from 6 8 p.m.

"Do I REALLY Need a Personal Budget?" To achieve any goal you're working towards you need to develop a personal budget, but, many people may not know how to effectively do so. Join Vicky Hills, a retired Wealth Management Professional, to learn how to work towards achieving your goals by identifying income sources and prioritizing essential and discretionary expenses to create a budget that you can stick to. This workshop will be held on Wednesday, January 22, from 6 8 p.m.

Rowan College of South Jersey is a comprehensive, two-year regional college serving more than 10,000 full- and part-time students with degree and workforce development programs, on campuses in Gloucester and Cumberland Counties. Rowan College of South Jersey is fully accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

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January Workshops Offered through RCSJs People in Transition - Patch.com

A recent study reveals young Indian women spend an average of 145 minutes on their smartphones every day – Times of India

As Internet usage becomes more inclusive and gender-balanced in India, the internet is fast emerging as an empowering force for Indian women online. A new Verizon Media study, which surveyed the habits of women internet users across India, has found that education, career development, womens empowerment, health and fitness are key areas of interest for online women users in India.The survey, Spotlight on online habits of young Indian women conducted in 12 cities across India in July 2019, included college students, young working women and women mentors between 18-35 years of age. Insights from the survey reveal that Indian women are honing their skills to get ahead professionally every time they go online. 44% of users across Tier 1 cities access online content only in English to improve their soft skills and become job ready. This focus is sharper among younger women between the age group of 18-23 years. Across locations, younger women were found to access more content related to education, career growth and skill development, while older women between 29-35 years of age accessed more online video content related to personal well-being. As this survey showed us, the internet is empowering a new breed of Indian women who are coming online and preparing to take their place in the workforce. The right platform and support as a community will enable greater inclusion, boosting participation of Indian women at the workplace, said Nikhil Rungta, Country Manager, India, Verizon Media.

According to a recent study by IAMAI, women make up a sizeable audience in Indias rapidly growing internet user base, comprising 40% of the internet users in India. But beyond greater representation, women have an active presence online too. The study found that 96% of the women who were surveyed across age groups and locations, use the internet daily.

Not surprisingly, given the popularity of video and OTT content in the country, there is a clear preference towards watching videos over reading content online. More than 2/3rd of women surveyed had watched videos related to career development or social causes or personal well-being in the last one month.

Also, in line with the larger trend, smartphones are the device of choice for women users in India, with 60% of women accessing the Internet only on their smartphones. This number spikes to over 75% of women in Tier 1 cities. According to the study, women in India spend an average time of 145 minutes on their smartphones, every day. Interestingly, women in Tier 1 cities spend about 25 minutes more on the internet, compared to women in metros.

Top insights on usage patterns and trends from the survey:

- A nod to Indias language diversity, of the total women surveyed, ~80% of women users access online content in Indic languages (English + local language-Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali). Only 1/5th of the women users access online content, only in English

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A recent study reveals young Indian women spend an average of 145 minutes on their smartphones every day - Times of India

Unleashing Charitable Impact by and for Women (SSIR) – Stanford Social Innovation Review

In this episode of Giving With Impact, an original podcast series fromStanford Social Innovation Reviewdeveloped with the support of Schwab Charitable, host andSSIRpublisher Michael Gordon Voss speaks about the philanthropic implications of the distinct characteristics of giving by women withAndrea Pactor, author and interim director of the Womens Philanthropy Institute at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, and Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, author, board chair and president of the Charles Schwab Foundation, and board chair of Schwab Charitable. The full transcript of the episode can be read below.

[MICHAEL VOSS] Welcome to Giving With Impact, an original podcast series from Stanford Social Innovation Review, developed with the support of Schwab Charitable. Im your host, Michael Gordon Voss, publisher of SSIR. In this series, we hope to create a collaborative space for leading voices from across the philanthropic ecosystem, to engage in both aspirational and practical conversations around relevant topics at the heart of achieving more effective philanthropy.

Traditional beliefs about philanthropy, including who gives, how, and with what effect, can lead to misunderstandings, and actually stand in the way of achieving social impact.

One area in which misperceptions persist is the subject of womens charitable giving. While a superficial glance at the data would make it appear that women give less in total dollars, and give to fewer organizations than men, the reality is very different, and far more nuanced. Are there differences in womens and mens approaches to philanthropy? Do women apply a different set of criteria than men when making philanthropic decisions, and if so, what does this mean for philanthropy writ large?

To begin to unpack these questions, were very fortunate today to be joined by two prolific authors, both of whom have unique perspective on the subject of philanthropy and gender. In addition to being a co-author of several works on philanthropy, and a contributor to the seminal From Donor to Philanthropist: The Value of Donor Education in Creating Confident, Joyful Donors, Andrea Pactor is the interim director of the Womens Philanthropy Institute at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Known for several books, including the recent The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After Fifty, and her popular syndicated weekly personal finance column, Ask Carrie, Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz is board chair and president of the Charles Schwab Foundation, as well as board chair of Schwab Charitable.

Andrea, Carrie, thank you, both, for joining me today as we explore the relationship between giving and gender, and whether and how this relates to impact.

[CARRIE SCHWAB-POMERANTZ] Thanks for having us, Michael.

[ANDREA PACTOR] Yes, thank you.

[MV] Well, lets get started. The cover article from the fall 2019 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, co-authored by a team of researchers from the Lilly School, of which you are a part, Andrea, exploded eight of the common myths of US philanthropy, including the idea that women are less philanthropic than men. Andrea, can you share with us some of the data that shows the actual picture of women and philanthropy, and the predictors of philanthropy that youve identified?

[AP] Sure, Michael. Thats a great place to start. And the first thing that people should understand is that women have always been philanthropic, but their stories have been mentioned less often than the stories of men, particularly in this country. In some ways, were living in a golden age of womens philanthropy, and part of that is because the two key predictors of giving are education and income. And as most people know, today, women have more of both. The other piece of this is that women are more predisposed to use the wealth that they accumulate to improve the communities around them.

[MV] Research also identified any notable differences in approaches to philanthropy between women and men, with regards to their strategies? How do those differ, if at all?

[AP] Absolutely. The bottom line is that gender matters in philanthropy, that men and women have different motivations for giving, and different patterns of giving. One trend that were seeing now is that more women are leveraging all of their resourcesincome, assets, their familiesto make the change that they want to see. And my partner in this program, Carrie, is a really good example of this trend.

[MV] Well, I couldnt ask for a better segue. So, with that, Carrie, people are probably familiar with your writing and your leadership roles with both Schwab Charitable and the Schwab Foundation, but would you mind sharing with us a little bit about your personal philanthropic journey, as well as some insights into the causes that you care about most?

[CSP] I admit I fell into philanthropy. I was in my early 30s. I was living in Atlanta, and I was working for Schwab. You know, I had little children, and that was my focus. And a friend of mine who was in banking invited eight women, all of us in finance, to come meet the executive director of the Atlanta Womens Foundation. And at this dinner the executive director talked about their work, all about womens issues. And the ask of all of us was would we come together as women in finance and raise money for womens economic parity.

And I still remember that night so vividly, because I went home that night, went to bed, and I tossed and I turned, because what what they were asking for was to raise $50,000 a year for three years, that was the commitment. And I had never asked anybody for money, so I was terrified at the thought. But at the same time, what I discovered, it was like I had this little light in my belly that just needed a little match. And thats exactly what happened. I was so excited that there was philanthropy, that I could actually do something to help women. And so I did sign up for the commitment of three years, and not everybody did. I think some were probably a little bit intimidated. But I did it, and I ended up being the number one fundraiser all three years, and then I became the chair of the group, you know, and then that really launched my philanthropy.

And so what I found in that experience is that when you have passion ... its really passion about anything, but in particular around philanthropy, that nothing can get in the way. And any time I was asking for money from different organizations or individuals, and I was scared, I would remind myself, Why am I doing this? And thats what gave me the courage to go forward.

[MV] Its funny, because in another conversation I recently had with Trisha Raikes, she also talked about the importance of that passion, too.

And what about some of the causes? So, obviously womens issues are important to you, Carrie. What are some of the other causes?

[CSP] Throughout most of my career has been a big focus on women, and getting them more engaged and educated around finances. But then, you know, later, I was asked to run the Charles Schwab Foundation, and I restructured it so that it focused also on our collective passion among the employees, our heritage around financial literacy. And could I have maybe made it around women economic parity, or, you know, financial literacy? I think I was going to get more out of it, more out of the company, more social impact, by bringing the whole company behind this.

So I would say that my personal philanthropy has continued to evolve. Its really, financial literacy, financial empowerment for all populations, from women, to underserved teens, to low income 50-year-olds, to everyday Americans, because lack of financial literacy in this country cuts across Americans from all walks of life.

[MV] Andrea, let me switch back to you for a second. Among other things, Carrie spoke about her experience with the Atlanta Womens Foundation, and it reminded me of something from your research about the ways women make decisions about charitable giving. Can you share some of those ideas?

[AP] Yes, thank you. First of all, Carrie, thank you so much for your support of the Atlanta Womens Foundation. Its really important. We have lots of conversation these days about economic independence and opportunities for women. And so its been talked about a lot, but we released this study not too long ago the Women and Girls Index, which find that womens and girls causes, like what you supported, received 1.6 percent of total charitable contributions.

Theres a gap between what the conversation is in culture and across society and the actual giving. The work that you are doing is really important. And your personal experience, I just love it because it dovetails with what we find in the research, and its always nice when we can find that.

In terms of decision-making, this is a significant trend of research in gender and philanthropy, and we have found in a number of studies that at least 50 percent of households make their charitable decisions jointly. But theres a different pattern in high-net-worth households where more women are making their decisions independently. So this is perhaps a result of the financial independence that more women are achieving in todays society.

And then the other part is that passion that you talked about. When women make decisions about how to allocate their resources, they often choose to support causes for which they or someone in their family has a personal connection, or they do it for political or philosophical belief. One of the values of the research in this whole area is that it enables individual donors, women and men, to connect their experiences to the broader research landscape, and your story is its a perfect example of how all of this plays out.

I think thats great, I have to say in our household, definitely, my husband and I do our philanthropy individually, as well. And I do notice that a lot of my friends, professional friends, are focusing on womens causes but, also, fueling women entrepreneurs, as well.

[MV] So, Carrie, Andrea shared some of the Lilly Schools research, but I also know that the Schwab Foundation recently undertook some research of its own around women in financial planning. Can you share some of those findings with us?

[CSP] Yes. Ive been working on women investors or, you know, women as consumers for many years, and I like to say that weve come a distance from, say, 20, 30 years ago when I was still looking at this, but I was a little bit disappointed by this research, to be honest with you, and let me explain.

We conducted the survey on young people, 16 to 25 years old. Remember, these young people, you know, grew up in the Great Recession, and we did a gender cut of these young people and by the way, we did this among this group is because they are on the cusp of independence from, parents and so forth. And what we found is that these young women in the survey were doing all the right things, had the right attitude when it came to money, but they were still falling behind in savings and investing, indicating a gender inequality starting right out of the gate at home. So let me share some of the details.

These young women were likely to have a second job. They spent less than men, 30 percent in this survey, yet they had 40 percent less in savings than the young men. So the math doesnt work out, right? It doesnt work out. And to fuel what I call the financial insecurity fire, is that half of the young women had investment accounts versus the men. Ive obviously in my work done a lot of research on this, and what we do know from our own and from third-party research is that parents talk differently to their sons than their daughters when it comes to money. With their daughters, they talk about household expenditures, saving and budgeting, but with their sons they talk about the stock market, investing, and debt management. All are important, but utilizing debt smartly and investing starting at an early age is critical for financial independence.

And then on top of that, this is another survey, not ours, that parents are paying more to their boys for the same chores than girls.

[MV] Sort of the wage gap is starting in the home, basically.

[CSP] Thats exactly right. And so I think parents do it unconsciously, you know, or subconsciously. They dont mean to do it. So Im on a crusade to talk about this survey on and on, so that all of us who have young women in our lives make sure that they come along and are confident investors in their future.

[MV] You know, as someone who has dedicated so much time and energy to philanthropy, both personally and to the field, Carrie, what advice would you give to people, especially women who are beginning their philanthropic journey?

[CSP] First of all, I would just say dig in. You know, for me, I just did it, and you will find your way. But as I talked about my own journey what struck me most in terms of helping women, its, again, all about finding your passion. And I think about when you are reading materials or talking to friends, what kind of gets you jazzed? And its funny, when I was focusing on my philanthropy on women years ago, one of my college best friends said, Carrie, you always had that passion. And to be honest with you, I had kind of forgotten it, and this was a wonderful way for me to capture to work on it, right, to do something with that passion. And as I mentioned, the Charles Schwab Foundation is around financial literacy because we built this company on creating accessibility for people to build wealth and financial security. So its a passion that we all carry.

I have to give a plug to Schwab Charitable, since I am the chair of the board. But I always talk about, especially for people who are investors, that if you want to get more bang out of your buck on behalf of philanthropy, a donor-advised fund is a wonderful way to do it because it does allow you to give 100 percent, say, of appreciated stock directly to the nonprofit. And so its a win-win situation. And I know Ive been an avid supporter of it and user of it, and because of it, I give a lot more to philanthropy than I otherwise would because its so easy for me.

[MV] Great. Thank you for sharing that. So, Andrea, let me switch back to you for a second. From the data youve studied at IU, are there any insights on the future of philanthropy that your research points towards that you can share?

[AP] Id like to share two. The first is that were living in an era where theres concern about a decline in giving by individuals. My answer to this and my argument is that nonprofits should engage more women in ways that appeal to them. And the ripple effect of engaging women is palpable, and Carrie shared an example of that with the Atlanta Womens Foundation earlier in our session. Women bring their family, they bring their friends, and they bring their network along with them. So I think that the answer to this decline really rests with finding creative ways to reach the women.

The second point is about the impact, and it ties in with the theme of this podcast series. So were beginning to see that the model of the engagement matters, particularly for women. For women donors in giving circles and women donors to womens funds and foundations are more interested than general donors in measuring the impact of their giving. And in both of these models, these very specific models, the deep engagement leads to donors who are more knowledgeable about community needs, theyre more strategic in their giving, and ultimately they give more. So this has been a very interesting finding over a couple of research studies and I hope that we can delve more deeply into it in the coming years.

[MV] And, Andrea, with the first point you made about creative ways to reach women, that mirrors perfectly with something one of your fellow colleagues from IU talked about at the recent SSIR Nonprofit Management Institute, Tyrone McKinley Freeman hit upon many of the same points. And its interesting what you all said about the importance of impact for women. So, Carrie, as you know, the focus of this podcast series is the idea of giving with impact. Can you tell us how in your roles as president of the Charles Schwab Foundation and the chair of the board of Schwab Charitable, youre helping to make an impact?

[CSP] So, Michael, I have the best job at Schwab because I get to combine my business skills with philanthropy and having a great impact, not only for my colleagues and their sense of pride of working for Schwab, but also for the communities in which we work. So I have so many things to be proud of, but one of my greatest source of pride is the national partnership with Boys & Girls Club that weve had for 15, 16 years. We co-created a financial education program, you know, five modules and we will have one million teens have gone through that program. And what we do know is that teens that do go through it, financial education, are more likely to go to college and seek how to pay for it. So that to me is all about economic mobility and making a difference in these kids who, are unfortunately in not the greatest circumstances.

And then Schwab Charitable, our clients will have given $3 billion to charity this year. And what makes me excited is that weve made it so easy for individuals to give that we only see this number just continuing to rise, and it all goes to all our communities across the United States. So that, to me, is about impact.

[MV] We could easily keep this conversation going on and on, but, unfortunately, I think were nearing the end of our time for today. So, Carrie, Andrea, let me thank you both for your time. Ive hoped weve helped give our listeners some insights into gender and giving. And, again, all I can say is this has been a great conversation.

[CSP] Thanks, Michael.

[AP] Thank you very much.

[MV] Thank you for listening. We hope youve enjoyed this episode. Please consider leaving us a review on Apple podcast or your favorite listening app, as it helps others discover the show. We encourage you to listen to other episodes in this series, as well as other podcasts from SSIR. This podcast series is made possible with the support of Schwab Charitable, who played an important role in the selection of topics and speakers. For important disclosures and a transcript of this episode, visit ssir.org/GivingPodcast.

Go here for a disclosure from Schwab Charitable.

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Unleashing Charitable Impact by and for Women (SSIR) - Stanford Social Innovation Review