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Fast Company
2 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
How nonprofits should (and shouldn't) be using tech
Businesses have long leaned on cutting-edge technology to maximize profits, while the nonprofit sector has traditionally been slower to incorporate innovations such as AI. But if we want to tackle the world's most pressing social problems, that must change, says philanthropist and MacArthur Genius grant recipient Jim Fruchterman in a new book. In Technology for Good: How Nonprofit Leaders Are Using Software and Data to Solve Our Most Pressing Social Problems, out September 2nd, Fruchterman highlights social good organizations that are using technology to solve real-world problems—homelessness, mental illness, climate change, child abuse, and more. Fruchterman is a tech-for-good leader and the founder of the nonprofit Benetech, which created Bookshare, an online library for people who are blind or visually impaired. He spoke with Fast Company about some of the ways technology is being used to make the world a better place and what he hopes readers glean from his book. It's refreshing to talk to a business leader about how to use technology for social good instead of how to use it to drive profits. [Laughs.] I call it moving from money to meaning. What are the challenges that nonprofits and social-good organizations face when it comes to technology? One is a lack of money. Funding is tight. And while tech is often cost-effective, if you have a hard time coming up with the money to buy the tech, it's hard to use. There are also often low levels of tech capacity among the staff. People are used to using the telephone as opposed to going on a Zoom call. The social sector also prioritizes different things than the for-profit sector. It's not just about efficiency. People are still pretty important in the social change sector. Saying, 'Hey, you can get rid of a bunch of people' (by implementing a new technology) may not be the best sales pitch for a charity that is trying to help people. What are some social problems that technology could help solve? I spotlight in my book TalkingPoints, which helps teachers communicate with kids' parents who don't speak English. If you can get the parents more engaged, kids are a lot more successful in school. That's a great example of a technology that fills a need for immigrant parents. Community Solutions' Built for Zero initiative is trying to end homelessness. For years, we treated the symptoms: Let's build temporary housing, get people food and clothing. They're asking, 'Can we say that everyone who was homeless three months ago is now housed?' The key tech innovation is a by-name list keeping track of everyone across community places that these people go into. When shelters say, 'Our beds have been 80% used this month,' that measures output, but it doesn't say anything about whether we're solving the homelessness problem. So much of what the social sector does is move information around—well, that's what information technology is for. What would you say to a nonprofit leader who feels overwhelmed by or unqualified to make decisions around technology? Find people in your field who are ahead of you on the technology journey and learn from them. Talk to your peers. If they're saying, 'We're writing a third more grants with the same amount of staff' using ChatGPT or Claude, then that's worth paying attention to, because it's not their business to sell you things. In your book, you highlight some bad ideas in tech-for-good efforts. Which do you see repeated the most? The cult of the custom. It's the idea that 'my nonprofit is such a unique snowflake that I need custom software built to solve my organization's problem.' And businesses stopped writing custom software 20 years ago because no golf course, no restaurant, no dentist needs to be writing software to run their company. When you write your own software, you're the only customer. It means that every bug that needs to be fixed, you're the only one paying for it. You should look for a product that can be adapted to your needs. Also: I see lots of people building an app that no one will download. Or people following whatever the latest fad is—five or eight years ago, that was blockchain. That didn't work out. Three to five years ago, it was the metaverse. That didn't work out. Right now, it's generative AI. I'm glad you brought up AI. What's your take on where AI should and shouldn't be used in social impact work? I think you shouldn't replace human empathy and understanding with AI that doesn't understand what it's saying and have any empathy whatsoever. People in the nonprofit sector turn to human beings to help them. The best applications of AI in social good are around making the people on the frontlines of social change more effective. Let's say I'm trying to automate a mental health counselor. Do I want to replace the counselor with a chatbot? Right now, it's not a great idea. But if we can instead cut their amount of data entry time or paperwork time in half, then that's time they can spend with another person who needs their help.
CBC
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Ocean Vuong finds beauty and companionship in a fast-food shift
Social Sharing Before Ocean Vuong became the notable name in literature he is today, he worked a typical 9-to-5 at a fast food restaurant. It was there, among the hustle and bustle of serving customers from all walks of life, and his interactions with his co-workers, that Vuong found inspiration for his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness, which is a coming of age story about Hai, a 19-year-old fast food worker in America. In the story, Hai forms a found family with his co-workers and an elderly woman. They're considered to be on the margins of society, but find comfort in each other through their shared sense of ostracization by the world around them, and their desire for companionship. "My work is always interested in power dynamics ... in class dynamics and identity, all of these things that are discrete borders that either are real or imagined," said Vuong on Bookends with Mattea Roach. Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist and novelist. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, raised in Hartford, Conn., and currently lives between Northampton, Mass. and New York City. His previous works include On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother. He joined Roach to discuss The Emperor of Gladness and the inspirations behind the characters' unexpected bonds. I know that you have had experience working as a fast food server. Can you set the scene for us? What is it [like] to work in that kind of space where you're just grinding it out, trying to make a living and keep that roof over your head? I worked at a place called Boston Market and Panera. It was a microcosm of America itself. We often talk about the nuclear family in the American values, and the antithesis of that might be the found family. I think what we don't always talk about is the circumstantial family, the family wherein we are cobbled together in a shift at a workforce. The family that you have no choice in, and yet you must work together amongst these strangers to get through a shift. I worked at a place called Boston Market and Panera. It was a microcosm of America itself. You are heavily dependent on them, and my experience working in those places is one of the most insightful and tender moments of my life. So much of America and modern life is actually made by these intimacies that the corporation doesn't really make room for, but people establish it in spite of that. That subversion is something that I'm really interested in. It's fascinating because not only do you have people coming together in terms of it as a place of employment, [these] are also places that people come to you for comfort. Customers have these stories, and we see a little bit in your novel [about] what's going on in the lives of [them]. Are there customers that you remember from your days working in food service? Absolutely, customers and coworkers. I think the customers are interesting because the corporation doesn't see them. They never see the individual — they see them as a number, as a cash flow. The corporation also doesn't see the employee as beyond their function. We're kind of like a pair of hands. And yet, because we are human beings and not robots, we start to see the stories and the identities in our customers. A lot of the customers that I had were sex workers on the highways in Connecticut that we worked on, and they would come in right before their shifts — very dangerous work, [and] you just watch a sex worker eat an entire rotisserie chicken with all of her nails on. It's just this symbol and vignette of beauty and perseverance. It's the oldest profession in our species, eating at a fast food restaurant to sustain herself, to raise her family. Also the people who work there — they're not supposed to say certain things beyond, 'Can I help you?' 'What can I get you?' 'I'm so, so sorry.' I think the customers are interesting because the corporation doesn't see them. They never see the individual — they see them as a number, as a cash flow. But they start to tell each other stories in the back, in the smoke was one moment when I was 17 working at Boston Mark. I was cleaning this freezer with my mentor at the time, who was this man in his fifties. He was giving me all this advice about how to work efficiently, but then it would bleed into life advice. He said, "You know, you're young now, but when you grow up, you're gonna start realizing some strange things. I wanna tell you something, it's something I haven't even told my wife." And he says to me, "I have three sons, but I only love one of them." I don't know what to say, I'm a child. He said, "Yeah, I know, it sounds weird. Jake and I have no real bond, there's no reason for it, but that just happens. God chooses who we love. Even though we're supposed to love certain people, we don't always meet up to it." There's so much about these circumstantial communities and families in this novel. We see it form in the workplace across generations and we see it formed between Hai and Grazina. [She's] a Lithuanian woman, she's in her 80s and she's living with dementia. When she can't remember where she is or what's going on, she remembers her past living through the occupation of the Baltic states during the second world war. This is a different refugee story than the sort of refugee story you've told in your other work. What drew you to this particular refugee story? The book at the end is dedicated to a woman named Georgina. She was a woman I lived with when I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, and I lost my housing, and a friend [was like] my grandmother's alone with dementia, let me talk to my mother, and maybe you can stay there, take care of her and have a home. I ended up living there for three years, and on one hand, our geopolitical histories are very different, and yet it is absolutely the same. She had the same traumas that my grandmother had, she had the same night terrors, she was describing bombs in the same way my grandmother described them. And here I am, a Vietnamese refugee living with a Lithuanian refugee from two different American wars, 30 years apart, two different continents and we're meeting in one rail house. It was actually Zadie Smith, when I met her in 2014 in Paris. We were just sharing stories about how we came to writing and I was telling her the story, I was living with this woman who had dementia and I was making up stories to ameliorate her anxieties. In a joking way, Zadie said, "If you don't write this novel, I will." I was like, "Oh my God, one of the greatest novelists of our time thinks this is worthwhile to tell, I should figure out a way to turn it into fiction and tell that story." It's been seated in me for a long time, but it was an honour of this friendship that I end up having with this elderly woman who in many ways survives so much and was also just cast out of society.
