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Good morning! If you missed yesterday’s newsletter, you can find it here.
We’re really excited about Tomorrow’s first sold-out community event later this evening! We’ll be joined by Anjali Chandrashekar and Karen Mac, two of our favorite unconventional activists, to share their stories with the Tomorrow family over some delicious food. Check out their bios below, and stay tuned for a recap and pictures on Friday’s Community Newsletter. We’re excited to see you at the next one!
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Let’s get into it!
Public-Private Path to Better Education
Let’s take a little trip down to Spartanburg, South Carolina. You may not have heard of it before — frankly, we hadn’t — but it’s time we all start paying attention. Why? Because Spartanburg is one of the most innovative cities in the US.
The background. A quarter-century ago, Spartanburg launched a public-private partnership with BMW to create 11,000 new jobs at its new facility. This move has since transformed the region from textiles, tobacco, and tourism into “a magnet for the automotive and aerospace industries.”
Focus on education. Spartanburg is now looking to connect public and private sector actors to provide quality education and community support to all its students through the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM).
What is SAM? It is a non-profit organization that connects Spartanburg’s government, business, community, and education leaders to pursue academic success for all its students. Their goal is to serve as a “guardian angel for each student” by paying attention the student is performing — if any student falls short of expectations, SAM will be aware and jump in to support.
It’s very comprehensive. This might be one of the best mentorship programs we’ve seen. SAM sticks with students from “cradle to career, and it looks at the student’s life in full — the support extends beyond just academic performance to look at the student’s diet, home life, and more.
The ecosystem is critical. Delivering on SAM’s promises would not be possible with just community support and financing. The role of the private sector is critical because of both the unique expertise that mentors can offer and access to additional financing. Plus, the private sector can benefit tremendously — a better-educated city will jumpstart any economy and drive more innovation.
It’s not just Spartanburg. Cincinnati is experimenting with another interesting model here too. The city noticed that children from private pre-schools were outperforming those from public pre-schools. So, the city’s public schools allocated money to create more private schools to offer universal, quality pre-schooling.
Carbon Credits May Not Work
This is a continuation of our conversation about COP25
Delegates from around the world are meeting in Madrid for the UN’s COP25 climate change conference to figure out how to address the climate crisis. A major focus of the conversation will be on ramping up carbon offsets — the practice of governments and companies buying “carbon credits” to offset their own emissions.
These should work, right? It sounds pretty great. Industrialized countries and emission-heavy industries can buy carbon credits, and the money from these can help reduce deforestation around the world.
They’re actually pretty controversial. Some experts think that carbon offsets simply “tempt high-emitting countries and companies to keep burning fossil fuels” because they know they can just buy more credits. There’s also an issue with double-counting — “if, say, Germany bought five units of carbon credits for tree-planting in Brazil, both Germany and Brazil would be able to count those saved emissions in their carbon budgets.
What about the trees? Proponents of the offset markets still believe that the capital can be beneficial by funding anti-deforestation and tree-planting projects in the places around the world that need it most. Forests have the ability to store a lot of carbon and these credits allow a polluting country far from a tropical forest (like Norway) to reach their climate goals by paying to protect forests in the Amazon basin.
There are still problems here. There is uncertainty about whether or not these newly planted trees are harvested later. For example, planting eucalyptus or oil palm trees can be counted as “reforestation, but these trees are either cut down in 10 years or have a terrible impact on the environment. Plus, even if trees are saved in one town, nobody is watching if they are getting cut down in another! This simply doesn’t work.
Plus, there’s always politics. The election of Brazillian president Jair Bolsonaro has destroyed its carbon offset program. Prior to his presidency, Brazil was doing an amazing job in figuring out how to halt deforestation and was actually successful in reducing tree loss. Unfortunately, as we’ve covered before, 2019 has been a year of massive destruction for the Brazillian Amazon and Gran Chaco.
Short Takes
168 million people worldwide will need assistance in 2020, the highest figure in decades, requiring $28.8 billion to respond
Nationwide strikes and protests have kicked off in France against President Macron’s plans to overhaul the retirement system
The Trump administration is eliminating food stamps for nearly 700,000 adults by tightening work requirements
Interest rates and bank regulations have a significant role to play with issues like inequality and the climate crisis
Tomorrow Today: Intro to Unconventional Activism
🎟️ Thursday, December 5
SOLD OUT
Change cannot be achieved alone, only together. In that spirit, we are kicking off community events at our space in New York City. Eat some food, learn from some seasoned, unconventional activists, and meet others aspiring to change the world!
Our speakers:
Anjali Chandrashekar: Anjali is the founder of Picture It, a global social project that uses artivism to raise funds and awareness for various health, humanitarian, and environmental causes. Her projects have been featured by the UN, and she had the opportunity to present her work at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2011. Anjali also works as an innovation strategy consultant at Doblin.
Karen Mac: Karen is a Business Development Associate at Acumen, an impact investment fund that invests in social enterprises that serve low-income communities in developing countries around the world. Before Acumen, Karen worked at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship and has also spent time supporting female artisans in Bolivia and improving sanitation usage in India.
Why are we hosting this?
For us, community is the center of everything. In an age of prolific digitization, there's a great need for greater human connection. It's almost necessary to carve out time and space to purposefully engage in person. While it's amazing to be able to discuss and interact with multiple people online and exchange stories and insights, we don't think anything beats the experience of sharing a meal.
Igniting Tomorrow
💰 $100k-$250k Pre-Seed Funding
UPDATE: We’ve already had multiple people reach out and share their ideas. It gets us super excited to learn more about the projects and companies everyone is working on. Please keep reaching out. We’ll be releasing more information around this in the upcoming year.
Many of you are either already working on a number of world-changing things or have ideas bursting out of you every day. Our goal is to see unconventional activists like you succeed. Let us help connect you into the space and access the financing you need to get started. If you’d like to share your ideas (or know a friend working on something exciting), please reply to this email!
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