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Insights from the First Edition of the Asfari Challenge for Social Innovation Program

As Bloom’s program manager during the the Asfari Challenge for Social Innovation (ACSI) program, we faced unprecedented challenges including a global pandemic, economic crisis, political instability, and the devastating Beirut Port explosion. I thought I’d share this report on why we believe the program participants persevered and how it also fostered resilience and post-traumatic growth (PTG). Our findings suggest that structured social support and deliberate reflection can significantly enhance resilience in social entrepreneurs, even amid extreme adversity.

Introduction

2020 was a year of extraordinary challenges globally, with Lebanon facing particularly severe hardships. As we ran the ACSI program with teams across Lebanon, we encountered a perfect storm of crises:

• Global COVID-19 pandemic
• Severe economic downturn
• Political instability
• Resource shortages
• Rising unemployment
• The catastrophic Beirut Port explosion

These events profoundly impacted our participants, with some team members directly affected by the port explosion. Despite these challenges, the ACSI program continued, adapting to provide crucial support during this tumultuous period.

Social Entrepreneurship support organizations, like Bloom, are working in an environment and an age of seemingly accelerating incidences of social, political, and environmental challenges. Thus, identifying the factors that promote post-traumatic growth (PTG) is critical. 

Program Approach

The ACSI program employed several key strategies:

1. Principles-based training: We focused on core principles of social innovation rather than rigid methodologies, allowing for flexibility in application.
2. Quantitative/Qualitative data and reflection: Using the Values In Action Character Profile(VIA) – a psychometrically validated tool – helped us assess and support participants’ character strengths.
3. Regular convening circles: We maintained consistent check-ins, even in the immediate aftermath of the port explosion, fostering a supportive community.

Research Findings

Our research compared ACSI participants with a control group of individuals who were assessed but unable to participate in the program. Key findings include:

1. Enhanced resilience: ACSI participants demonstrated greater resilience in the face of acute challenges.
2. Positive impact of social support: Regular check-ins and a supportive community correlated with improved coping mechanisms.
3. Importance of deliberate rumination: Structured reflection on experiences contributed to personal growth.
4. Character strength development: Participants showed increases in traits associated with PTG, such as Hope, Persistence, and Gratitude.

The Values In Action (VIA) assessment offers a unique perspective in psychological measurement. While traditionally Psychological measures measure what goes wrong, the VIA identifies what is working well in a flourishing life. We used this psychometrically validated instrument to assess teams before the ACSI accelerator program and after the program’s completion.

Additionally, we assessed a control group of teams who were unable to participate in the program. Our findings revealed a difference: teams who participated in the ACSI program demonstrated greater resilience when facing acute challenges. This observation led us to a crucial question: What specific aspects of the ACSI program contributed to this enhanced resilience?

Diving into the literature, we found connections between social support, asking meaningful questions, and PTG. 

Implications for Social Entrepreneurship Support

While traumatic events can destabilize the status quo by disrupting our worldview, how we reconstruct those narratives is critically important. The ACSI program’s structure appears to have provided a framework for positive narrative reconstruction, even in the face of severe challenges. 

The originators of the concept of PTG, Tedeschi, and Calhoun, identify Deliberate Rumination and Positive Social Support as important factors in promoting the possibility of growth after a difficulty. We believe one of the reasons teams in the ACSI program fared better is that we developed a “pre-resilience” habit of holding a space where important questions are raised in a socially supportive setting, our check-in circles.

Limitations and Future Research

It’s important to note that while many people experience PTG after difficulty, it’s not universal or expected from everyone. Factors such as prior life experiences, personal schemas, and individual differences play significant roles.

Our study’s limitations include:

• Small sample size
• Focus on a specific geographic and cultural context
• Relatively short timeframe for observing long-term effects

Future research could explore:

• Larger-scale studies across diverse contexts
• Longitudinal studies to assess long-term impacts
• Comparative studies of different support methodologies

We welcome collaboration opportunities with other organizations to expand this research.

Recommendations for Organizations

Based on our findings, we recommend the following actions for social impact accelerators, educational institutions, and businesses:

1. Implement Regular Check-ins:
   • Establish consistent times for team or community gatherings.
   • Example: Establish regular check-in sessions where participants share challenges and successes.
2. Foster Deliberate Reflection:
   • Incorporate structured reflection activities into programs.
3. Develop Personal and Professional Strengths
   • Use assessments and activities to help people identify personal and professional strengths. 
   • Example: Consider using the VIA assessment to identify and nurture key traits and measure flourishing.
4. Create Supportive Communities:
   • Facilitate peer support networks within and beyond formal program structures.

Conclusion and Call to Action

The ACSI program’s experience during 2020 demonstrates the potential for entrepreneurship training programs to go beyond business skills, fostering resilience and personal growth. By implementing the recommendations outlined in this report, organizations can create more supportive, resilient, and growth-oriented environments for social entrepreneurs.

We invite other organizations to join us in this important work. By fostering resilience and PTG, we can build a community of social entrepreneurs better equipped to drive positive change, taking care of themselves, others, and their mission – even in the face of significant adversity.

For more detailed information and data, please download our full research report: “Character Strengths and Fostering PTG” Character Strengths And Fostering PTG (draft to publish)

To discuss collaboration opportunities or learn more about implementing these recommendations, please contact us at [Insert contact information].

Together, we can unlock human potential for positive change and ensure our teams thrive while creating lasting social impact.

In our last post we discussed the idea that LLMs are not entirely black boxes and contain high-level representations of concepts that we can identify. Through these concepts, it’s also possible to steer the conversation. The research around monosemanticity and understanding the patterns of neuronal firings inside LLMs focus on harm reduction, although the approaches the researchers developed open a whole set of other important considerations. For instance, should we guide LLMs to promote certain qualities and demote specific responses? Constitutional AI’s principles focus on what not to do rather than what would be great to do.

My sense is that the idea of LLMs reducing agency and human skill, sort of like cellphones reduced my ability to navigate a city without google maps, is a harm – and potentially a greater harm due to the meta-level it operates at. The approach to training our LLMs have led them to want to help us, and like an overly ambitious helper prevents us from the growth that comes in the process of doing. It’s this element that I’m attempting to identify as a real harm, not an imagined one, or a preference. And I hope this series of posts will help me clarify that for myself, and you, dear reader.

In the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, we find an insight into the importance of education, deep inside Article 26.2, we read:

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Article 26.2

Two goals jump out at me:

• Promoting and maintaining peace through understanding, tolerance, and friendship.
• The full development of the human personality.

This demonstrates the relationship between education, international cooperation, and peace. It’s through the developmental approach we go through levels of understanding the self, identifying with greater and more poetic views as experience shapes us. I believe that learning and growth can be seen as an end in itself, and if LLMs stifle human development by automating developmentally important tasks (writing your resignation letter for you), there is an invisible harm that LLMs can inflict that is hard to see.

What do you think?

It’s assumed that artificial intelligence and the magic of LLMs emerge from an impenetrable black box consisting of neural networks many layers deep. Some input comes in and an output comes out, yet we will never know what is happening “in there”. Well! Thanks to research from the team at Antrhopic we can perform an “MRI” on LLMs and peer into the neurons to identify monosemantic concepts.

We fear that which we don’t understand, especially if that which we don’t understand is very powerful. Much of the conversation on AI fears, especially about run-away intelligence, stems from the fact that as of today, most LLMs are black boxes that seem to perform miracles. This video does a great job of explaining why it is important to understand the ideas inside the AI’s head, and how researchers are have tackled the challenge.

Importantly the research from Anthropic demonstrates that not only can we know what neurons in the neural network are doing — we can also variably “clamp” outputs from the LLM to that concept. This means that we can direct how the LLM interacts with people increasing steerability and reducing risks.

How should LLMs respond to minimize potential harm? Anthropic’s list of principles it uses for its “Constitutional AI” is a good start deriving it’s principles from the Charter of Human Rights and a few other sourcs. My question is could “do no harm” be just a starting point?

Could the first tool that can think and decide respond in ways that improve life for individuals and humanity? And should it?

Do we have a Universal Set of Principles for The Good Life that an LLM is also trained on and how do we know what the “respond in ways to …” sentence will end in?

So I’m on day four in Gambia and the inspiration keeps coming. I feel like inspiration is like food. You can’t go too long without having some or you’ll die.

Today I’m reflecting on the idea that God will not test you with burdens you can’t handle. Most people interpret it as in you wont have too big a burden to carry and if God gives you a burden, it’s knowing that you have the capacity to manage it.

Now when we shared this thought in our cirlce yesterday people raised concerns about the fact that some people have burdens and it breaks their backs, or even kills them. The insight I had through someone else here was that another way to look at it is that God wont hold you accountable for when you break under the burden.

A few other things on my mind are about having cautiousness and God conciousness and the results of that in terms of being granted knowledge, openings from un expected places and more. And I must say, I’ve started testing this and it feels true. I realize for me faith feels like a bridge made of glass, you can take small and safe steps and not be too far above the ground yet feel vertigo and terror, you’re floating! Then you realize it’s glass and it’s fine you can walk. Then you get accustomed to the idea of faith because it has build credibility / validity and reliablility. Big words for an exhausted person. I’m going to sleep now ;D

What is Open Science. What is science? How is it related to the truth of what is and ethics? Here’s a little bit of thought for you:

Open Science seems to be a return to fundamental principles of forces and possibility, and in the human domain – ethics. A mote of dust in the breeze knows precisely every force acting on it and thus dances in the light coming from an open window. For humanity, knowledge increases the range of possibilities and leads to new options of action. The truth of reality constrains all possibilities; this is vast, limited access to knowledge of fundamental truths of possibility constrains our available actions. Our ethical systems determine what of these possible actions to take. By expanding options, we can respond with more of our ethics intact – a proxy for a sort of wisdom.
Science creates knowledge of the space of possibility of action. We derive this knowledge by taking an empirical view of the world or an experiment and concluding causation through a series of logical steps. This abbreviated version of the scientific method is cut off from the initiating force, the hypothesis. A hypothesis brings human motive to expand the realm of the true possibilities and may derive from self-satisfaction through closing gaps in knowledge or hypotheses that the hypothesizer believes will be “useful,” sometimes split into fundamental and applied sciences.
Adding to the knowledge space of humanity, we create a more significant number of options for action in our reality bounded universe. Now that we know the relationship between matter and energy, we have the option to build nuclear reactors to solve the energy needs of humanity. Once we observed that putting seeds into the earth and watering them caused them to grow we were enabled the deductive observation of farming.
Open Science is the process where these hypotheses, observations as data, the process to derive them (by code or by convention) is easily accessible to others to replicate, review the methodology and conclusions. Open science brings the ethics of beauty into our world. Like observing the dance of thousands of dust motes in a beam of light, or a balanced ecosystem with all the forces at play bringing about an orchestra of action and reaction. Open Science can bring a faster and more accurate mapping of truth for anyone willing to participate. This expanded realm of possibility means we can act on our ethics with more dimensions of freedom. We may have kept the benefits of increased food production, energy production, highrises, antibiotics for the elite. It seems logical that experiments are being conducted today that only benefit the elite. Closed access / secret science goes against the desire of truth. What does truth desire? If we accept things are, and that truth is, then truth is truth and truth “desires” to be known, to fill its total shape as it does everywhere else. Consciousness (that which conducts science) seems to be a rare force in the universe in its ability to hide and lie. Open Science is not an ethic; it is an enabler of ethical actions through access to knowledge and options for behaviors.
Open Science puts consciousness into the service of beauty by theorizing, exploring, deducing, and sharing – creating space for ethics – creating space to dance.

Seth Godin has been blogging every day for the last who knows how many years.

Derek Sivers has a (new) rule to write daily and to publish only when he believes that what he has written is worth the readers time.

Should I share the process and write daily, get to the point where I’m constantly putting myself out there? Or should I only post when I think what I have to say is worth your attention.

Right now this content is for me, it’s a chronicle, a blog, a log of my thinking (hardly my life). It has projects alongside ramblings like this.

I think that until I figure out what this space will be for, I will post daily. Not as personal as my morning pages, not as refined as an article. I do know I want to write more and to do it publicly.

See you soon.
+BG

What if I paid more attention to what I shared online

What if what we shared created knowledge and built connections between people?

What if I could decide if there will be any advertisements?

What if I could make my website look ugly, if I wanted?

What if this content wasn’t for sale?

What if influence was a matter of creating real value?

What if we could curate the weird and the wonderful without a top 10 list of amazing javascript visualizations you don’t want to miss post from fuzzdeed?

What if we hosted out own websites and created webrings?

What’s Tim Burners Lee up to these days anyway?

So that’s about it for today. Day zero. What if?

what if I could blink

Thanks for reading, if you want to comment, I’m sorry you cant. You can email me though by putting my initials before the url here. Hugs!

 

After hearing about the Iowa Gambling Task experiment in which subjects are given decks of cards and are asked to pick between them. Each choice either wins them money or loses them a certain amount depending on the value of the card. A healthy individual will begin picking the deck that offers him the highest running values after picking approximately 50 choices. But amazingly after 10 choices the individual’s galvanic skin response jumps. Here’s a Google Books link to the paper by Dr. Damásio: Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex.

It seemed likely that by getting closer insight into our emotional states we could make better decisions. So I made these glasses that tinted your peripheral vision depending on your galvanic skin response. Using a simple voltage divider circuit, an arduino, RGB LED’s, safety glasses and diffusers I was able to make glasses that related information from my subconcious and displayed it to a sense that I was very aware of… vision. Here’s a video me and a friend Anand Atreya going through some GSR tests and the goggles in action:

Coming back from PS1 in Chicago on the long drive back to Cambridge I’ve been doing some serious thinking. I believe that Michigan needs a hackerspace with a unique perspective, a job generating outlook. I’ll be back in Michigan – Ann Arbor – to start discussions on planning and organizing a new hackerspace next friday July 31st. Anyone who believes should be there.

_let’s go.

Jordan Bunker, Eric Michaud, Bilal Ghalib, and Amar Ghalib