White House Office of Social Innovation can take grassroots stories to the top

Posted by Catherine Stifter  April 15, 2010

Sonal Shah Visits BAVC

From The BAVC Blog by Jennifer Gilomen, BAVC's Director of Public Media Initiatives

On September 2, BAVC was honored to be visited by Sonal Shah, Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation, and President Obama's first appointee to the new office. With our colleagues from ZeroDivide, Shah visited BAVC to chat about social engagement through media, challenges we face in the media arts field, models for economic development, and metrics for assessing our relevance and impact....

...It is exciting to see not just Ms. Shah in such a role, but also the existence of the role itself, with the Office of Social Engagement working alongside the Office of Health Reform and the Homeland Security Council.  In some ways, our jobs as storytellers, community media facilitators, philanthropists, and innovators is to make the jobs of people like Sonal Shah easier.  We must build into our programs and projects not only goals for achieving real impact, but also public/private partnerships that help to achieve economic sustainability, and quantitative and qualitative methods of assessing our impact within the communities we hope to reach and serve.  In the new media and social engagement sphere, we're getting used to tracking hits, views, carriage and attendance, but we also recognize that the special sauce of "social engagement" is more than just numbers.  As we transition as a field from being not just story hunters and gatherers, but also story growers, new media nurturers, and often, community meeting places, it is important to plan for, incorporate, collect, and share the best practices, data -- and yes, stories -- that Sonal Shah can take straight to the top.

Read more of The BAVC Blog.

 

Tags: Office of Social Innovation, Sonal Shah
Topics: Arts, Building Community, Civic Life, Community Media, Economics, Media distribution, Media production, Partnerships, Policy, Social networking, Storytelling, Technology, Web 2.0