NONPROFITS

When it comes to big decisions about our world, historically and for the future, the place to look for answers and human success stories is in community-based, not-for-profit institutions. Laws and policy can often restrict positive impact, so nonproifts answer questions about how to make improvements by actually doing the thing they seek to reform. Looking at metrics and data-points, thriving model programs can be identified by the positive impact of their disobedience on the community they seek to serve.

Our private lives have inherently been protected by a constitution penned by the brightest minds, who became the leaders to define a nation focused on inalienable rights of privacy and decision making. While the foundational elements were coined by a problematic private citizenry, it is the public that we need to look to next for the proximal form of institutional change that will revolutionize our humanity.

Arguably, we've already revolutionized the concept of country, motivated predominantly by land ownership and access to food, mining the earth for incalculable resources that continue to serve the engine of commerce.Let us now mine our minds; with the idea of "collective" as a conversational driver.

The country we believe in is in our hearts, which is to say it is in our minds. It is the ground we walk on, but it is also the sky above our heads, our mental real estate. Let's unpack the space of nonprofit disobedience and entrepreneurship as we ponder the cultural, economic, political and social changes of the next free world.

“You don’t change the world by doing what you’re told," said Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab, on the nomination form for a new type of award: a prize for disobedience. Read more about the $250K prize at Fast Company.