Chuck Lief Social Innovation Hello. And welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I'm your host, David Devine. And itÕs a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions - Naropa is the birth place of the modern mindfulness movement. [MUSIC] Today we welcome Chuck Lief, the President of Naropa University, and a long time student of Naropa's founder Chšgyam Trungpa Rinpoche. President Lief thank you for joining us and could you please introduce yourself and share what you believe makes Naropa University such a unique higher education institution. [00:00:57.19] CHUCK: Thank you David. It's a pleasure to be with you today. Uh I am...President of Naropa as you mentioned. I have just completed a 5 year term and have uh - agreed to stay on for another 5 year period of time. ItÕs a real honor for me to have been asked to uh stay on as Naropa's president. As you noted uh I became a student of the Naropa's founder, Chšgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1970. Naropa was founded in 1974. So, I was involved in the early conversations that lead to the founding of this university. My role for the most part over the 44 years or so that Naropa has been working in uh Boulder and training students has been as a member of the Board of Trustees. I was also a lawyer for Naropa in the 1970s and 1980s and so I've had an engagement that way. But since 2012, I've been honored to serve as the President of Naropa kind of helping steer this university into the 21st century which is a very different set of challenges than we faced in 1974 when we first started. So, that's been my - my role. I have been uh connected for a long time. My wife was actually the president of Naropa from 1980 to 1985. And so, I've had the view from that perspective and probably most importantly we have 2 daughters - adult daughters both of whom are Naropa alums and so I have a very clear sense of what the student experience at Naropa is like from my children. So, I've experienced Naropa from all angles. [00:02:37.13] DAVID: Yeah, that's great. Wow, you're highly connected it sounds like. [00:02:41.02] CHUCK: A lot of connection. And I think so to your question about what makes what we're doing here unique I think really it goes to what you said at the very beginning is that mindfulness which today is talked about everywhere not always accurately I would say - but the sort of movement in bringing mindfulness into all sorts of sectors of uh - our society uh was really born here in the mid 70s and all of the primary practitioners of mindfulness and teachers of mindfulness from neuroscience to social scientists to arts and culture uh in one way or another were at Naropa uh in dialogue with each other in the 70s and 80s. And so, we're very proud that we were the platform where that work began. And uh so I think in terms of what makes us unique - we are the only university in North America that is built on a model of contemplative education. Where we are blending rigorous work in academic fields uh work in the experiential knowledge through such things as internships. And opportunities for students to be out into the community along with the sort of personal transformation that comes along working with an individual mindful or contemplative practice. And we bring all those together throughout the entire university. So, mindfulness here is not a class. Mindfulness is basically the under pinning of what we do in all of our classes. That said uh the flavor or the color of mindfulness from class to class is really completely up to the individual faculty member to kind of work on - on their own. And so, what happens in a poetry class is going to look very different from what happens in a research psychology class. But, one way or another the contemplative practices are brought into the mix. [00:04:34.00] DAVID: Yeah thank you for sharing. [00:04:35.05] CHUCK: You're welcome. [00:04:35.05] DAVID: And I'd also like to say, I've actually uh to - uh with this month is my 8 year anniversary of actually being with Naropa. So, I graduated 6 years ago and I went through the educational system and I actually found it extremely unique and very beautiful and life changing. And I am still here you know and I am now working for Naropa and just doing some good work. And, excited to have a conversation with you. [00:05:00.07] CHUCK: Thanks. Well we're glad we held onto you. [00:05:01.20] DAVID: Cool. So, thank you for all that and so - here we go. Here's uh President Chuck Lief with Social Innovation. [00:05:10.19] CHUCK: So, I appreciate this opportunity to offer a taste of an undergraduate seminar that I've had the privilege of co-teaching for the last couple of years called, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Uh, I come at it not because I've had a long career as a university professor but most of my professional work has been involved in both nonprofit and nonprofit social enterprise. Kind of finding ways in which to use business and business tools for uh significant social change and I've done that with small grass roots organizations and I've done it with larger more uh multi-national organizations and associations. And, with that experience I was asked a couple of years ago to consider uh offering some uh class on social innovation to undergraduate students who were interested in that field and so itÕs something that I've been having fun doing with a wonderful co-teacher of mine. Our class, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is actually housed in Naropa's Peace Studies program. Peace Studies department which may seem like an unusual place for a course that deals with business and entrepreneurship. But hopefully in the next few minutes as I describe what we do in the class that will make uh some sense to people that are listening. We are spending uh 15 weeks over the course of the semester uh looking at local and regional and worldwide examples of social entrepreneurship and the impact that social innovators can have on the issues that we're dealing with in the 21st century. Uh, itÕs a small seminar. So, its capped at about 15 people. We do a fair amount of looking at the field as a whole, but the kind of capstone of this class at the end each of the students develops a business plan. Either one that they want to execute or one that is more uh a classroom exercise, but basically for a mission driven enterprise that's addressing some social issue that's pass - they feel passionate about. Uh they prepare the business plan. And then present it actually to uh a panel of judges - very friendly judges, but judges who we invite in from the community uh from the university of Colorado's Leed School of business and other places uh and actually get feedback and comments from people that are in the field. And uh - we've been really delighted at the quality of these business plans and I can say that in some cases uh students that have graduated from here have taken those plans and are actually working with them as their careers. Their livelihood which is even more exciting. So, you know fundamentally we're looking at how do we develop our own bold vision for the future that we want to see? And how do we do that through deepening skill in creativity, in collaboration, in courage, in compassion. All of those are aspects of successful social entrepreneurs and social enterprises. And so, we're really excited to be working particularly with undergraduate students. So, this is not a graduate level business class. Students are not expected to come in understanding all the concepts around business. Uh, we work with that - it has much more to do in a sense with the kind of heart of what we're talking about. And to the extent that we've had graduates of this class that have gone off to law school and have gone to business school but have also gone into getting a master's degree in performance or in writing and poetics. And so, uh itÕs a launch pad for a creative future uh for undergraduates and that's been really exciting for me to be able to work with. So, what we do as part of our work is we survey sort of this emerging field of social enterprise uh you know resulting as a I said in the creation of a mission driven uh business plan that's looking at the social challenges that we're all facing in the world today. That could be in the area of education. In healthcare, human rights, food security, arts and culture - sort of the whole range. So, this is not just for people that have an interest in what we would consider to be a kind of conventional business expression but for the many therapists that are trained at Naropa for example who open a therapy practice. What we talk about is relevant I think in terms of how they establish their own practice. Same thing with writers and poets and performers uh who uh in order to have the biggest impact I think in the world with the work that they are doing - need to understand some of the ways in which they can innovate and some of the ways in which they can structure the work that they are doing. So, we think itÕs pretty broadly relevant and that's also exciting for us to be able to - to look at. So, fundamentally what we are doing is we are trying to work with students in order to help build capacity as visionary and pragmatic change agents and so that's a goal uh but it allows basically us to welcome people who approach uh social innovation from any number of directions and that makes for a very rich conversation. Uh, I will say since uh you know this is being called a sort of sample class is that this is actually a very unusual and probably the kind of class that nobody will experience if they attend Naropa because we never have lectures. I'm going to talk for 20 minutes. Nobody is going to talk back unless David you do and dialogue is the heart of almost everything that happens at Naropa. So, people have to imagine that the questions and comments that - that are in your mind are actually going to be spoken if you were actually in a Naropa classroom. And that's what makes it you know the most meaningful to all of our faculty is to be able to have that exchange, but for now itÕs a kind of one way street and uh hopefully we will welcome people here to be able to exchange with us going into the future. Let me talk a little bit about what we mean by uh social entrepreneurship. Traditionally our kind of economic and business uh society has been divided in silos. We've had very conventional businesses. We've had nonprofits that have been responsible to provide social services of all sorts. Whether that's uh you know dealing with uh - with veterans or seniors or mental healthcare or child care - there's a whole range of them, but the nonprofit sector mostly at least traditionally funded by the generosity of the community in which they work. And then, the other silo being the government and the government having a role supposedly or hopefully to support the work of a civil society through reasonably regulatory policy through some financial support of the work that's being done through basically creating the infrastructure uh that allows the work to happen. And for a long time really since the 19th century as kind of business and capitalism have merged more and more in - certainly in the United States these silos held pretty tight. So, you were either in business or in your nonprofit employee or you ran a nonprofit or you were involved in the government. And, they didn't really cross very often. Uh, they engaged with each other in conversation, but businesses were not especially responsible for being socially responsible. Nonprofits were not especially responsible for being self-sustaining and relied on charity for their support. And governments were very much in the background kind of providing uh hopefully some kind of a - of a reasonable infrastructure but not really engaging uh much beyond that. And I think as a social entrepreneurship movement evolved and it really started in the 80s I would say and there's a lot more to look at there, but one of the most important impacts I think of the development of this sector of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise was the dissolving of the boundaries between these various silos. And so, the idea was really to take a look at what provided the uh best positioning to influence the ways in which to improve and restructure our civil society. For example, could a nonprofit that itself became less reliant on philanthropy but also looked at the areas of earned revenue uh have a real impact on the economic development of a community. Could a business which was fundamentally involved in creating a profit for its owners or its shareholders also bring to the table some deep mission and values that were equally important to profitability. Those were conversations that only started in the last 25 years or so. Where socially responsible businesses could be a thing. Which you know 30 years ago that was really not even a conversation. Or that nonprofits could actually work with earned income and not be solely reliant on charity or philanthropy. And that that was not considered to be a sort of move away from the nonprofits mission or reason for existing. And so, as those silos started to break down there's a lot of opportunity now for people to kind of blend you know the sort of positive attributes of each of these sectors together to find the most impactful solution to whatever the issue that they're trying to address whatever social need or service need they're trying to influence. So that really become the definition of uh of entrepreneurship and of social entrepreneurship -- and you see social enterprises now involved in all of this sort of more traditional sectors of our economy. Retail, uh the service sector, manufacturing, consulting, research, community development, banking and financial institutions, areas that uh have not traditional been terribly connected to values and social mission, but are now becoming more and so. And there are big players that we talk about in this class - the big players like Patagonia, uh like Ben & Jerry's, like Etsy. These are huge uh multi-national companies that have incorporated uh social values into their very existence. Sort of into their DNA. And those are very important models because there's a lot of big platform that they have uh when they speak - its magnified in many ways. But, the reality is that most of the social entrepreneurship work that is going on in the world is very grass roots. And I think to some extent that's the most exciting thing for me is that it really does come from the grass roots. And there are multiple examples of that that we talk about in the class. Uh, I was involved as the president of one of those grass roots organizations called the Graceton Foundation which was in New York and did a lot of things. We built affordable housing and childcare centers and provided healthcare for people living with AIDS. All earning revenue while we were doing that and then sort of most known is we began a manufacturing bakery. Hiring chronically unemployed people, many of them were ex-offenders uh under an open hiring policy whereby anybody that asked for a job got it if it was available. There was no reference checking. There was no resume submitted. People basically have the opportunity to prove themselves uh on the spot. And, Graceton is known because about 20 years ago or so we contracted with Ben & Jerry's to provide a product -- brownies for their chocolate fudge brownie ice cream and yogurt. A little commercial here. Uh - and basically today 20 years later our manufacturing about 12 million pounds of brownies uh -- and shipping them off to Ben & Jerry's for their - for their product. And most importantly hiring people that were simply unable to get work in any other way. And so, itÕs become a kind of career launch pad for people. Closer to home uh there's a wonderful nonprofit social enterprise in Boulder called the Bridge House which supports homeless and formerly homeless folks and Naropa a year and a half ago was able to contract with Bridge House because they train in the commercial kitchen. They train caterers and cooks. We've now contracted with Bridge House to run the cafes on all of our campuses and to provide the catering services that we need for our business. So, another good example of how a social enterprise has both a strong mission in the case of Bridge House addressing the issues of homelessness uh as an opportunity for revenue generation in this case by running cafes and catering and how an institution like Naropa and its certainly not only Naropa that could do this can actually help meet that mission by uh voting with the dollars that we're spending anyway on those services. And that's the kind of thing that the students in our class actually look at. How can they create some enterprises that they can where they can partner with uh other institutions in their own community? I think that uh - what makes us different because there are a lot of social entrepreneurship classes in schools all over the country - undergraduate and graduate. Uh - and there are some very good ones. I think which is - which are important. Kind of looking at the new models of - of economic activity in the world. But I think that what makes our work on social innovation and social entrepreneurship inside of the university excuse me that's committed to a contemplative approach is what differentiates from the work that uh is happening in other universities. Because to us there's also a personal focus on who is the entrepreneur and who is the innovator. How do we make sure that we're bringing mindfulness and compassion into the workplace and into the uh activity that we're doing? So, in other words, is the uh innovator able to uh address the question of whether or not they're enterprise is being primarily driven by greed or whether itÕs being driven by a desire to be of the greatest help to uh the community in which they're living. What's the intention? The innovator takes a look at how are their employees treated. So often I think even in the nonprofit world the mission becomes so important that delivering that mission uh at all costs becomes uh a real challenge. And as a result, employees even in a nonprofit maybe be seen as uh expendable, employees are not treated as well as they could be. They're not given the opportunity to create a reasonable balance between their life and their work and you know if you're dealing and itÕs understandable - if you're dealing like an issue with uh like AIDS or homelessness or any of these serious uh - uh social issues you can understand the kind of drive to kind of do everything possible 24 / 7 to kind of focus on solving those - those issues. But the reality is that that's not on the backs of human beings that themselves are uh being taken advantage of or that themselves are struggling or suffering. There's a real question about whether or not that's the model that we want to develop. And we hope that with the work that we're doing here at Naropa and in our class, we're not just encouraging the kind of creative expression of entrepreneurship but we're also making sure that people are taking what they're learning uh throughout the Naropa classrooms around compassion and ethics and mindfulness and making sure that they're applying it to the businesses that they're uh developing as well. Sometimes these are called personal balance sheets where the entrepreneur is actually encouraged to make sure that they're taking a look at the human element in the development of their enterprise. You know making sure that qualities like humility and humor and confidence and fierceness are all kind of at play together, but in some kind of balance uh so that first of all people don't burn out which is a frequent problem with any mission driven uh activity. And secondly, that basically uh are treating each other well as human beings that are working together in whatever uh venture there is. And so, for us making sure that mindfulness practice or contemplative practice find its way into the enterprise is extremely important. And again, in whatever form that takes. We're not dictating in any way what mindfulness or contemplative practice needs to be because there are dozens and dozens of ways to express that, but ensuring that somehow it finds its way into the uh underpinning of the business we think is really an important part of the mission and I think coming back to where I started the reason that we developed our Social Innovation work within Peace Studies is for exactly that reason is that we're talking about you know how do we create a society that we feel that we want to live in, that we feel is supportive of everybody that addresses issues of power and diversity or lack of diversity in honest and open ways - and how can you do that in any sector of society. So, this not just the job of the nonprofit. ItÕs not just the job of the government but itÕs also the job and the opportunity uh for the business sector to be able to have that impact as well. So, that basically is a - a very brief taste of what we do over a 15 week class that meets for 3 hours once a week. So, itÕs a much more uh in depth opportunity. Its uh - it gets much more personal - people in the class get to know each other extremely well. We do a lot of work in - in groups and teams uh so that people actually can share their own insights and to raise their own questions with each other. But our view is that - while Naropa is well known for training in the professions - especially in counseling and psychology which is our biggest program and we've had you know significant impact in the mental healthcare of thousands and thousands of people because of the counselors and therapists that we've trained. We're known for our work in uh religious studies training, pastoral counselors, and - and uh - uh so people that work in prisons and hospices and hospitals and that sort of thing. And we're known for writing and poetry. We have a lot of people that are coming out of Naropa with the creative arts. This area of working with innovation and entrepreneurship and business rather than being seen as a kind of I don't know what a dirty word or something that doesn't fit within a contemplative education university - in fact fits beautifully. And that what we bring to the table is basically the kind of training and balance of innovation and compassion and rigor that serves that business community very well and that we think that uh - the graduates from Naropa that are often - we know that - because we know what's happening uh we have alumni that are engaged in enterprise around the world and -- credit the time that they spent in community at Naropa with this huge part of the reason that they're enterprises are successful. And so, we're very happy to be able to provide that opportunity to our students and to attract wonderful faculty who - who actually uh can guide those students during that journey. So, that is my taste of Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship and I appreciate the chance to be offering it to - uh people out there listening to this podcast. [00:25:38.01] DAVID: Awesome. Thank you so much. So, uh, I loved to ask you like a question or two. [00:25:42.22] CHUCK: Sure. [00:25:42.22] DAVID: If that's ok? So, you mentioned that uh your students in the class like present a uh - like a business plan or something like that, right? Uh and I was kind of curious what are some of the unique business plans that you've come across? Anything that has like sparked your interest because it sounds like some of these people you know spend time on this project. They write something really worth while and then they bring it out into the world and they actually follow through with it. So, itÕs less of a - paper that they write and more of like an action that they do and uh - I am just kind of curious what are some of the unique plans that you've come across? [00:26:17.03] CHUCK: Yeah, uh there's a couple that - that come to mind. That people have come up with which has been really fun. So, we have - we had a woman in the class - I guess it was two years ago that had been on a volunteer basis working in the Boulder County jail system. And she was working with men who were prisoners in the county jail in the area of nutrition interestingly because there is an increasing amount of research around how poor diet actually impacts behavior and that's a whole other conversation that we can't get into today, but itÕs an interesting one. And so, she's been trying to basically work with inmates who before they are released basically take a look at ways in which they can address nutrition in a different way. One of the ways that she did that was she created an idea to have a garden - a pretty significant garden at the jail. And it allowed the inmates at the jail an opportunity in many cases that had never had any experience or exposure to gardening or farming or anything like that. It allowed them to understand the sort of process by which food is - is uh - is created. And the enterprise side is that she came up with a business model where actually the products from that garden are being used to uh as part of the - purchasing that the kitchen is doing at the jail, saving money to the kitchen so therefore saving money to the taxpayer, which is a good thing. Improving the quality of the food because its coming from right out the door. Uh, and also teaching the inmates which will sort of - they'll be able to hold onto when they leave. So that's one kind of interesting model. Completely different but I think also fascinating is that we had a - a man in our class whoÕs from Zimbabwe uh so completely different. Whose family has several thousand acres in Zimbabwe and his mother operates a nursery for orphan elephants. So, itÕs totally cool uh so he grew up in this elephant nursery, but he came up with an entire plan to create an eco-tourism business that would actually be built around visiting the nursery but more - more beyond that. Bringing in some economic activity into a very low-income part of the world in Central Africa. Uh and having the profits available to support the ongoing protection of uh endangered species. So, his is a big model or prison garden is a small model. But both equally creative and both of them have an economic but even more important I think a very important social mission. [00:28:59.12] DAVID: Yeah wow, that's awesome. Great. So, here I got one more question for you too. So, if we look at Naropa as a business we're an educational facility and we're also a business as well uh what are - what are we doing for our social innovation because I know there's a couple cool things that we do. I'd just like to hear you speak about them and you did mention the Bridge House our cafeteria which is a really cool thing that we have just initiated so -- is there anything else? [00:29:25.23] CHUCK: Yes, I mean I think that you know like a lot of other small liberal arts colleges we're very reliant on tuition, which has all sorts of - of uh of issues. I mean it - it means that we have to be - itÕs a lot of work then to make sure that we're a diverse community because we need to be able to make Naropa affordable for lower income uh students. That's a tough thing to do when you're as reliant on tuition dollars as we are. So one of the areas that we've been looking at is other ways in which we can earn revenue by presenting what we're doing but presenting it through a different economic model and so for example especially in 2017 when its - so much easier than - than it was to be able to present what we do online or to a broader world audience and to do it in bite size pieces that we think people are open to paying for uh we're doing a lot more work in terms of extended studies and professional development and so for example uh we've taken the work that we've done for years in leadership training and we've created some online programming that we're now offering to companies and institutions around the world who uh - want to offer their own employees the opportunity to kind of learn mindfulness and leadership in the work place, but are not going to be able to send those employees to a place like Naropa. So, itÕs becoming an increasingly uh important uh direction. For a long time, Naropa was part of a program offered by our local utility so that we were actually sourcing all of our electricity through wind power and you know - I don't want to take - I don't want to make more of it than it is. I mean we basically just paid some money and as a result we're able to say that - which is true - that we were sourcing our electricity by paying a little bit of a supplement from wind power, but what we're doing then more on the ground is that we've got some expansion plans we need going to build some additional buildings for classroom and faculty space and in those plans we're doing a couple of things - one is we're paying close attention to the environmental impact of the buildings that we're building and so we're paying close attention to that and we're definitely making use of the fact that the 300 days a year of sunshine in Boulder make Boulder a perfect place uh to do much more direct work with uh solar power. [00:31:54.22] DAVID: Yeah, awesome. Wow. Sounds like uh some good things there on the horizon. [00:31:59.04] CHUCK: There's no end to good things to do. Uh -- [00:32:02.03] DAVID: Well, I really appreciate you joining us today. So, thank you very much Chuck and so you've just heard Chuck from Naropa University - the President - and we just discussed Social Innovation. So, thank you so much. [00:32:15.14] CHUCK: Thanks David. [MUSIC] On behalf of the Naropa community, thank you for listening to Mindful U. The official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu or follow us on social media for more updates. [MUSIC]